HTPC tease (1 Viewer)

[Stéphane Lenclud]

Been a long night:

 

[edterbak]

Wow. nice case.
I think you did a MoBo + CPU + mem upgrade?

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

CPU heatsink + VFD + IR + Blu ray drive and moved the CI reader inside the case with front access. Until now it was taped on top of the case. I did a GPU upgrade last month too.

Mobo, CPU and RAM were just fine Though since I had to remove the mobo and clean the CPU to replace the heatsink the work involved was much the same.
I'll try add more details in the coming days.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

Back in the living room:


New heatsink SilverStone NT06 Pro fitted with a couple of 12cm Be Quiet! PWM fans.
There is also a 14cm case fan just on top of that block creating an air duct that goes from the CPU at the mobo level all the way to the outside world. That's 38cm of fans span venting that CPU, I may have slightly over did it I'll be keeping an eye on those temps.


Futaba GP1212A01A VFD next to the now retired OrigenAE VF310 which is basically a larger SoundGraph iMON.
Both devices can be made to fit in a 5.25 bay:


Details of that new VFD once fitted. Below is the Bluray disk slot-in and CI reader:


PCI cards laying around while the work is in progress:

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

Those are good idle temps alright!
Guess I did apply that dirty thermal grease properlly.

 

[edterbak]

Yep, thats good.

GPU, is that a Asus STRIX-GTX750TI-OC-2GD5 ?
How is that doing for you? Im thinkin on putting the same in my antac fusion case. (*if it fits)
Why did you choose that card, besides the 0db fan's ?

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

That's the one. That card is totally worth it. Cheap, low power, no PCIe power cable needed, cool, silent and packs some serious triangles crunching guts. The outputs made sense for me too. It's a standard GPU PWM fan connector so you should be able to upgrade the fans. Not sure if aftermarket heatsink will fit on it. It looks like the fans could be easily separated from the heatsink.

Fans can get noisy when playing AAA games for instance or if your temps go too high for some reason but that's not that bad and they usually don't spin.

Note that not all GTX750 are equals. I did try some EVGA that was awfully noisy even when idle, many still need extra power connections for some reason.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

There are also low profile versions of that GPU you may want to consider if ever you think the full size variant won't fit.

Good job at guessing the card's model btw

 

[edterbak]

Ghehe.. I was just looking at that card this morning thinking this could be the one. So I recognized it from the picture... pure luck.

Thanks. Wanted to know if there are other reasons for you to take this one. Like the vp6 for 4k decoding.. or other super fantastic technical stuff I had missed

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

Not really, for me the killer feature of the GTX750 is the low power consumption.

Like most sane people am not planning to go 4k before 2030