[adruss85]

So I've been a long time user of XBMC and a long time lurker of the forums. For the last couple of years my media consumption has been streaming content from a Buffalo LinkStation to a couple of ATV2s in the lounge and bedroom with the occasional streamed footie match.

I've become increasingly frustrated with the limitations of the ATVs (especially when the LOF plugin stopped working!) and the lack of upgradability of my NAS. Also, I'm a huge PC geek at heart and not having a desktop to play with for the last 3 years has finally got to me. When i saw the current price ATV2s are fetching on eBay it was decision made - out with the NAS, external drives, and Apple TVs, and in with a HTPC/Fileserver in the lounge and mITX VESA mounted HTPC for the bedroom.

I've taken some inspiration from the A6-pack build, thanks to Beer40oz, and gone with Fusion for both systems:

HTPC/Fileserver
AMD A6-3500
Gigabyte A75-UD2H
4GB Corsair XMS3 Classic
Silverstone ML03 Case
Novatech 430w modular PSU
120GB WD 2.5" drive (lying around)
2TB Seagate 3.5" drive (harvested from external)
1TB WD 3.5" drive (as above)
DVD/CDRW (lying around)

All in this has cost around £200 which is roughly what I got for one of my ATVs, and provide daily backups for 2 laptops, and an Android tablet as well as media serving/recording duties

Vesa Mount
Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3
Corsair XMS3 2GB
M350 Mini ITX Case
90w PicoPSU
XBMC Live USB

Again this should come in at around £200.

N.B. The drives for these are what I've had lying around - the boot drives I will hopefully upgrade to SSD after selling my NAS.

The bits for the FS are on their way so I'll try to update this thread as I get building. I'm after a recommendation for a low profile Freeview HD tuner card with remote (preferably compatible with XBMC PVR as I've found many cards but have no idea what to buy!

Hopefully this thread will give some people ideas but mainly it's just so I can get all my geek out instead of peeing off my girlfriend!

Cheers

[Mick1152]

Your HTPC/Fileserver is similar to my build. I have an A8-3870K in mine and a 3TB Movies hard drive and a 2TB TV Show and other media hard drive. I highly recommend the upgrade to the SSD for the boot drive. Your library data will be stored on there and makes browsing the library smooth and lag free. My A6-3500 bedroom system was initially setup with a 7200 rpm hard drive I had laying around but there was a big difference in boot time and more importantly with the library browsing.

I'm not sure about fitting a DVD/CD drive in that case with that many drives. I have a slim blu ray drive I was going to put in the 5.25 spot with a bracket to use that and a 3.5" hard drive but the high capacity hard drives are a little too thick to make that work. There is room, if you get creative, for all those hard drives and the DVD drive, but you won't be using the provided mounting spots. Can't wait to see what you do with it!

Great move with the modular power supply! My setup with that case and same number of drives is a little tight with the extra, unused power supply cords. That is the one thing I wish I did different. You will love this system!

[adruss85]

Yeah I realise space is going to be a little tight - I've got the DVD solely because the case I'm getting is 2nd hand and doesn't have the cover for the 5.25" bay! Initially I was going to mount the Boot drive behind the PSU, one 3.5" under the DVD and another on the far right over by the fan inlets, however I've got access to a pretty handy workshop through my job so I may be able to twist their arm into building me a custom solution.

My priority with these builds was to keep costs to similar to what I will be getting from the ATVs hence reusing old drives etc. Which SSD are you using? Am i likely to see an improvement with any old SSD or would it be better to just go all out and get 500MB/s ones?

[Mick1152]

I have two systems, both with SSDs. One is using a 64GB Crucial M4, the other has a 32GB Patriot Torx. I see a bit of a difference when copying large files to the Crucial (slower than the Torx) but the read speed is more important to me, and they both rock in that area.

Both of these have 500 mbs read speeds. I don't know enough about the SSDs to tell you which are best but I've seen both of these recommended on these forums a bunch so I snatched them up when I saw them on sale.

[adruss85]

IT'S ARRIVED!!



Unfortunately I just had to make a 80 mile round trip to SCAN to swap the Coolermaster PSU i bought as it was too long. Plumped with a modular SilverStone unit so hopefully fitting won't be an issue (watch this space)!

Will update later once the build is complete.

[adruss85]

Before I go into this build I should mention that I had high hopes of customising the case, fitting extra drives, etc. It turns out that SilverStone did an amazing job when they designed this case. There is pretty much no space left in there now the build is complete, and when you look at the size of the case, to get all that stuff in there is testament to their case design.

The original Coolermaster PSU I bought was 150mm which i should've checked before but is actually 10mm too long for the case. Turns out most PSUs are too long for the case, except this SilverStone unit. It was £15 more expensive but I've just written that off!



The PSU has a nice blue fan that i'll never see again and had modular connectors for everything. I'm so glad I chose a modular PSU and you'll see why in the following photos.



The case isolates the PSU airflow from everything which can only be good for temps. The filter on the bottom is removable but you have to unscrew it. The black caddy on the bottom right is going to hold a 3.5" drive.



I've decided that i'm going with positive air pressure in this case to try and reduce dust build up so i'll probably end up filling up all 4 80mm fan slots on the right. For now I just have one at the front to try and get some airflow over the drives.



PSU, motherboard and fan installed. You can see how tight it's going to be by the mounts for the 2.5" drive just down from the PSU.



I'm using grey foam to try and damp the drive vibrations a little (although this won't be necessary once I upgrade to an SSD). The 3.5" drive is mounted on the yellow rubber grommets you can see on the previous picture. I've only noticed 3 real problems with this case. 1. It has lots of sharp edges! 2. There's alot of flex once you remove the brace so you need to be a little careful when installing stuff. 3. You have to screw the drives in from underneath which can be precarious.

---

All hopes I had of making this a clean tidy build disappeared once I started plugging in SATA and power cables. I could really do with some shorter SATA cables. The drive on the bottom right is mounted on the black stand you can see in the other photos. The stand lets you tidy away the front panel connectors.



Alot more pins than last time I built a PC!



I was shocked at how small the stock cooler is - this could be the first point of call for upgrades depending on how loud it is. Currently the CPU is idling at 38C but once i've got the system up and stable I'm going to look at undervolting to try help this. The big Shuriken would be the obvious choice. You can see from this photo how tight the RAM and ATX cables are under the HDD.



With everything in it's pretty tight. Due to having 4 drives I've had to run 2 SATA lines which has added to the mess.



This is why modular is the way forward.

I'm currently sorting out my storage but will report back temps/loudness on Sunday once i've had some time to play. Any comments/questions welcome i'm delighted with the outcome.

[adruss85]

Update

Now in place it looks quite tidy. Current temps are around 38C for CPU and system with only CPU fan and one case fan running at 30% (800rpm). They're inaudible at that speed and it's only the PSU fan and drives that can be heard if you get close up to it.





TV card arriving in a couple of days so another update then once i've got MePo working as a backend.

[adruss85]

Another update. The picture below shows the system after I removed the DVD drive and installed the TBS Sat card....



... shortly before I fried both my boot and media drives.

I cannot stress enough the importance of NOT using cheap SATA splitter cables as I've now lost 2 drives and over a TB of media!

Also I cannot get the TBS card to work reliably with WMC (poor signal) or MediaPortal (sometimes just won't work, or won't download EPG).

[Beer40oz]

Looking great! So many nice builds this days!

[Mick1152]

Great build! I used the same case, motherboard and even the same number and types of drives! I'm insanely jealous of your modular power supply. I have a huge bundle of damn power cables I have to deal with in my case. Looks great!

[adruss85]

UPDATE

Thanks for the feedback guys. Just updating this as shortly after I got the Sat card working with MePo I had to go to Australia on business for a couple of weeks.

Finally got the Sat card working to my liking athough I was slow to tune and was having some difficulty sorting the channels and getting time shifting to work. I decided to send it back under amazons 30 day policy (i managed to get to watch the Euros in HD though!). I'm looking at getting a Black Gold TV card however other priorities have arisen, holidays etc, so I'm just sticking with it as a streaming box at the moment.

Audibility wise I can certainly tell when it's on - this is down to the PSU fan and unfortunately I can't control it, but when i'm watching anything it disappears into the background provided it's not a deathly silent scene. Currently it's working really well, delighted with its functionality and sleep/wakes when I want. Overall a much more flexible system than NAS/ATV2 and I love everything being silky smooth. One problem I am having is getting my ATV2 in the bedroom to talk to the MySQL server properly - had no problems with the NAS so have disabled that feature for now and may revert to using a Raspberry Pi when RASBMC has matured.