T800's HTPC (Large Pics)

My story thus far....

If my story bores you, the pics are below...
I started streaming media about 4 years ago with an iStar Mini HD (PopcornHour based device) and my collection and interest in such things just kept growing.
I got to the point where I wanted an attractive looking "skin" for my media so looked at YAMJ but at that point I only had an PPC based mac so I couldn't install the java needed blah blah blah, so I left it.

I got an old MacBook Pro to replace my old Mac PowerBook G4 which meant I could install java on it, I upgraded to the PCH C-200 and A-200 and ended up running UMC (of which I was a tester).

Last year I tried XBMC and (Plex) on a spare iMac that I had put in the Conservatory (it had motherboard issues but still worked). It played well and I liked the add on's but couldn't get it to scrape my files properly and rarely using the Conservatory I never found the time to get it working right.

When progression stopped on UMC and TOMY (OSX GUI for YAMJ) came out I moved to YAMJ. I had sickbeard working with YAMJ automatically updating and I was quite fairly happy with it. I briefly tried NMJ but that was just to early on for me to adopt.

I ordered an AppleTV (Gen 2) in December for my music collection mainly because I was iTunes based and there wasn't anything on the PCH that worked for me.

This is where I finally became a XBMC convert!
I jailbroke my ATV and toyed with XBMC, I liked the fact that it was small, had wireless N, it was cheap and didn't use much power.
I worked out why my collection never worked with XBMC......my TV Shows file structure was like this:
TV Shows/A/Alias/Season 1/Alias S01E01.mkv
XBMC was scanning the "A" folder as a TV Show and so on!

I changed my folders, reset all paths in Sickbeard (not fun for 150 shows) and it scanned like a dream!

After using it for a month or so I got another AppleTV for the bedroom and starting browsing this section of the forum looking for more speed and power, after all the AppleTV was never gonna play my Blu-ray rips with HD audio like my Popcorn Hours do.

I read random threads, knowing nothing about building PC's make it a little bit daunting
I decided to do the i3 build in Eskro's thread, my iMac at work is the same spec and it performs really well.
I was gonna get a Silverstone GD05 case but it was out of stock and I needed to build now all the parts had arrived.

This is the spec:
Intel Core I3-540 3.06GHz LGA-1156 Dual-Core 73W CPU
ASRock H55M-LE LGA-1156 Micro-ATX Motherboard
ASUS GeForce GT430 1GB DDR3 128-bit Low Profile Graphics Card
Kingston Hyper X 2x2GB DDR3 RAM
40GB Corsair Force Series SSD
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray/HD DVD drive
Antec EarthWatts 380W 80%+ Efficiency PSU
Lian-Li Black Aluminum PC-C37B Micro ATX Case
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
XBMC 10.1 with external MPC-HC player with ffdshow filter for .ts files with HD Audio.

Motherboard in awaiting CPU:


Graphics Card in:


RAM in:


Optical drive in cage:


Scary octopus like PSU and SSD semi installed:


continued...

...continued

Done:


Installed:


All my devices are hidden under the stairs so it's not on general show.

Setting up the software was a pain at first but once I got the hang of it it was OK.

It's running really well after starting the Windows install from scratch again after a few days of "learning".

Just need my HP USB reciever to show it's face from China and it's complete.
I'm using a Bluetooth Rii Mini at the moment and other than not being able to wake it up or use backslash to minimize the window it will do for now.

Reserved.

v.nice and also see your PCI-express issue.

yeah i see the PCI-express x1 slot getting invaded by the GPU's cooler....

so is it just my eyes or the PCI-express x1 slot cant be used at all now?

btw, amazing htpc u have

Nice