Netherlands
- Thread starter
- #21
Hi there,
It's been a while, but as the motherboard broke down, I was forced into upgrading the HTPC's contents
As a case like this is hard to come by nowadays, I decided to stick with it. And I still like it very much.
New hardware:
Now the awesome thing is that I managed to fit the power brick inside the case! I carefully removed the old PSU and found out that I could then connect the power brick to the old power socket. The brick itself lies next to the mobo, at the front right side of the case. I think this much nicer than having the brick lying somewhere externally.
The result is a stable, low power, low noise HTPC! The only noise comes from the HDD, which is actually barely audible as it is a spinpoint. Might buy an SSD some day to make it completely silent. As it's brand new, I'm not completely sure yet of the stability of the system, but I've used it a couple of days now without any trouble.
Pictures can be made on demand
It's been a while, but as the motherboard broke down, I was forced into upgrading the HTPC's contents
As a case like this is hard to come by nowadays, I decided to stick with it. And I still like it very much.New hardware:
- Mobo: Asus E45M1-M Pro. Love this board. Small, easy to install, integrated A/V, passively cooled and most importantly it contains a firewire port for the floppyDTV!
- MiniBox PicoPSU 150W XT + 84W Adapter Power Kit. Removed the screaming Hiper PSU, which seemed to be dying as well. Works nicely, although I was a bit scared that the adapter wouldn't be able to provide enough power. You do need an extension cable though if you want to power the DVD drive as well. I really just fixed this the ugly way with some tape and a 4pin molex cable from an old PSU that was lying around. Ideally, you need a cable to extend the power cable coming from the pico that includes the molex cable as well. This is because the original cable is only just long enough to connect it to the HDD. I couldn't find a cable like this though.
- 50-pin laptop udma - SATA adapter. I wanted to use the old DVD drive I bought, but the mobo did not support IDE anymore. Therefore, I needed to buy this adapter. Took a while to arrive, but does the job. It wasn't easy to fit it in though (lack of space), it would have been better if the 50-pin port was on the other side of the card.
- 4GB RAM, it would be wrong to buy less, it's cheap!
Now the awesome thing is that I managed to fit the power brick inside the case! I carefully removed the old PSU and found out that I could then connect the power brick to the old power socket. The brick itself lies next to the mobo, at the front right side of the case. I think this much nicer than having the brick lying somewhere externally.
The result is a stable, low power, low noise HTPC! The only noise comes from the HDD, which is actually barely audible as it is a spinpoint. Might buy an SSD some day to make it completely silent. As it's brand new, I'm not completely sure yet of the stability of the system, but I've used it a couple of days now without any trouble.
Pictures can be made on demand