Here's my mediacenter worklog. It's up and running, but not finished. Some soundproofing and improved cooling is still needed. Anyway, thought I'd post some pics of my progress.
Specs:
Case: Silverstone LC17
Motherboard: Asus P5K, P35, Socket 775
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2,66GHz, Boxed
Disk: Samsung SpinPoint 500GB 3.5" SATA2
Graphics: Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MB Heatsink (Fanless)
RAM: OCZ Platinum XTC 2048MB DDR2 PC6400 KIT
PSU: OCZ 500W StealthXStream
Tuner: Digital Everywhere Floppy DVB-T
I/O: Logitech diNovo Edge
This spec was chosen after a lot of reading, but also from a limited budget. The CPU is built with the 45nm technology, which allows it to run quite cool. RAM is cheap nowadays, so I chose 2 Gigs of pretty decent RAM. The Samsung disk is known to be somewhat quiet from what I've read. The ATI gfx card should have enough grunt to process 1080p material, and also has builtin support for audio via HDMI. I'm using an old DVD player at the moment, while waiting for the BlueRay players to become cheaper.
Anyways, here are a couple of pics of the case, while I resize more pics from the build.
Ok, over to the build itself.
I pretty much disassembled the case to begin with. No thumbscrews here, so tools are needed. The front I/O panel is still mounted in this picture (top left). As you can see, the case comes with 2 rear mounted 80mm fans. There's also room for 2 fans in the front.
So here's the motherboard. Nothing special really. Got onboard digital coax output, and fairly much room around the cpu, in case I'll be using a larger cooler later. It has also got passive chipset cooling.
Trial-mounting the motherboard. Notice how it sits close to the front panel mounting brackets (top right).
Specs:
Case: Silverstone LC17
Motherboard: Asus P5K, P35, Socket 775
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2,66GHz, Boxed
Disk: Samsung SpinPoint 500GB 3.5" SATA2
Graphics: Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MB Heatsink (Fanless)
RAM: OCZ Platinum XTC 2048MB DDR2 PC6400 KIT
PSU: OCZ 500W StealthXStream
Tuner: Digital Everywhere Floppy DVB-T
I/O: Logitech diNovo Edge
This spec was chosen after a lot of reading, but also from a limited budget. The CPU is built with the 45nm technology, which allows it to run quite cool. RAM is cheap nowadays, so I chose 2 Gigs of pretty decent RAM. The Samsung disk is known to be somewhat quiet from what I've read. The ATI gfx card should have enough grunt to process 1080p material, and also has builtin support for audio via HDMI. I'm using an old DVD player at the moment, while waiting for the BlueRay players to become cheaper.
Anyways, here are a couple of pics of the case, while I resize more pics from the build.
Ok, over to the build itself.
I pretty much disassembled the case to begin with. No thumbscrews here, so tools are needed. The front I/O panel is still mounted in this picture (top left). As you can see, the case comes with 2 rear mounted 80mm fans. There's also room for 2 fans in the front.
So here's the motherboard. Nothing special really. Got onboard digital coax output, and fairly much room around the cpu, in case I'll be using a larger cooler later. It has also got passive chipset cooling.
Trial-mounting the motherboard. Notice how it sits close to the front panel mounting brackets (top right).