WIP First HTPC build - impressions
#1
Dear All interested readers,

I made myself a nice X-mas present and bought some parts to build up my new shiny HTPC for my living room. I am happy with my decision and wanted to share my impressions with the community and I have a couple of thoughts and questions maybe people here have ideas to.

My intention was to have a HTPC which is wife accepted easy to use and looks good in my (future) living room. Additionally I wanted the device be upgradeable for the future but not too overpriced or too oversized (in the means of performance). Another issue I wanted to solve was that all my media is currently located on 3.5 inch USB HDDs with own power supplies so I have really a lot of cables around. Goal was to put all drives in it (4 in sum), fast enough for HD (1080) and so on ... all what you (or myself) could imagine with XBMC!

The following parts were on my wish list to the Christ Child (yes not santa claus - I am in Austria Angel)

Case: Fractal Design Node 605 schwarz
PSU: Corsair RM Series RM450 ATX 2.4 aktiv PF
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H GL/SATA600/R/USB3.0
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 2x3.4GHz 3MB-L3 Intel
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Kingston HyperX Blue DDR3-16
HDD: Kingston SSDNow KC300 60GB MLC SATA600


some impressions:
watch gallery


what I really like is the case as its very clean and looks good in the living room and my wife also liked it. Its more or less also child proof as there is only one button visible when the front lid is closed. Unfortunately I took a full ATX board so the cabling and all equipment in the case - even its very big - is extremely crowded! The full modular PSU helped as the cables are reduced to a minimum. That is the reason I did not take images from the final build as this looks not very nice.

The case features two drive cages which are able to hold 4 HDDs. So the plan was to mount all my (now) external drives in the case - having installed XBMC on the SSD and all media files on the four HDDs (in sum 9TB).

I figured out that when having both cages mounted the airflow is pretty bad and the cabling is very narrow and awkward. So this is in my opinion a negative point of the case - but probably better when installing a mATX board.

The CPU I bought in the boxed version (so with including cooler) and this works as expected. I figured out that the fan of the CPU cooler was the only noise I heard (having the fans of the case turned off) - so I plan to buy a better silent CPU cooler. Blush

The PSU I love the most as this is completely silent - it only turns on the fan if the load is raising - which did not happen so far.
The motherboard I selected by accident because I wanted an Intel based machine. The board features everything needed from my side as 6 SATA connectors and uncountable (Nod - not really I have 6 USB3 and 2 USB2 outside and some internal where I used the 2 of the USB3 for the case front connectors and the USB2 for the front card reader) USB connections.

Now I have some uncertainties after a talk to a friend who meant the installing 4 HDDs might require a lot of power and it would be more effective to have the drives somewhere external to access them also from other devices which I would like to do. So I planned to have the new machine running most of the time as I also (will) have Live TV running on the device. I discarded the idea to buy an external HDD cage as the RaidSonic Icy Box IB-RD3640SU3E2 - anyone having experience with this?

This was just a quick post for having a start - if wished I will do a detailed component review later on when I have some more time (starting with the fabulous case).

Is the solution I am doing right now a good choice? Any ideas or any comments - everything is welcome.
Feel free to ask/comment.
I am curious what other think ...

thanks,
/krijeck
rebuilding ....
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#2
looks great i'm building a htpc with the antec isk 600 and a i3 3220. and most hdd's won't take more then 20w. but lets make it extra and say it uses 50w. thats will 200w for hdd's and maybe 10 for the ssd. and 55w for the cpu. tha brings you to 265 so thats still plenty of power left. and having a NaS is nice since it has a central place where all your data is. and the noise can be placed in a other room. and have a look at http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=104489. there not the best but there cheap.
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