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Home theater media servers - Page 2

post #16 of 25
3/19/08 at 12:25am
I should note that the heatsink on my Athlon has no fan on it --- it is passively cooled. However, it's sitting near the case fan.

--Andre
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post #17 of 25
3/19/08 at 9:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim View Post
I am currently using a Ahanix D Vine HTPC case, with a VFD display in the front.

Its the black (of course) version of this case.



Running a 90nm Athlon64 3000+ socket 939 which seems to run pretty darn cool (usually around 26-30C) with minimal cooling & stock fans compared to a lot of people. Maybe its just the airflow and cable routing genius I have though. It could be a little quieter. When I sit within two feet of my computer I can vaguely hear some slight fan noise. I'm pretty convinced its my graphics card though, I'm seriously thinking about getting updating and passively cooling a new one.

They almost got it right but the ugly thing covering up the drive bay annoys me. It's got no symmetry. It's hard to find a htpc case that is both aesthetically pleasing and offers good airflow and interior layout with the possibility of using your own psu.
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post #18 of 25
3/19/08 at 10:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by GQgeek View Post
They almost got it right but the ugly thing covering up the drive bay annoys me. It's got no symmetry. It's hard to find a htpc case that is both aesthetically pleasing and offers good airflow and interior layout with the possibility of using your own psu.

Can't really see the drive bay cover on the black one... and they have one with more elegant bezels available... I just got a really good price on this one.
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post #19 of 25
3/19/08 at 10:09pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim View Post
Can't really see the drive bay cover on the black one... and they have one with more elegant bezels available... I just got a really good price on this one.

Ya, i haven't looked in a while. i really liked the one with the drive bay in the center, but it used some sort of non-standard psu iirc. I need to be able to put my seasonic in it. Since switching, i can't stand the noise of other PSUs. Seasonic really makes a kickass product.
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post #20 of 25
3/21/08 at 4:12pm
Ordered my Omaura TF11 about a week and some change ago when they first went up; it's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for stylistically and they may have the airflow spot on - we shall see.
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post #21 of 25
3/21/08 at 5:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by kronik View Post
Ordered my Omaura TF11 about a week and some change ago when they first went up; it's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for stylistically and they may have the airflow spot on - we shall see.

That's not bad. It's non-descript so as not to offend. It's good to see that it's got room for 80mm fans. It's also got tons of drive bays, which is nice for people that don't want to run network cable to their tv room. How much?

My favorite aesthetically are still the d.vine cases. I just wish they'd get rid of the stupid 60mm fans.
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post #22 of 25
3/22/08 at 2:29pm
I've been planning my next media PC now that I have a 1080p screen and I think I'm going to switch to mini-itx. It's small and fanless but has the expansion room I need to additional drives and a blue-ray DVD drive (once the prices drop a bit more)

I'm thinking of this Jetway Eden C7 series for motherboards

I plan on hiding the case behind a speaker so it doesn't have to look pretty, it just has to be small. That means that there won't be enough room for a 5.25 optical drive so I'll have to go slimline (slimline blue-ray drives cost a fortune now so I'll use one of my spare DVD-drives until the prices drop). I don't indent on using for HD TV recording at the moment but I needed a case that can fit at least 1 PCI card for a tuner card in the future. Plus it has a power brick rather than an internal PSU (no fans)

For the sake of size, noise and heat I'll probably go with a solid-state storage option. All the video and audio is being stored on a fileserver in another room so I don't need much more than 8GB anyway - especially if I go with a flavor of linux over WinXP.

No wifi for this box - we already have a gigabit network at home with cat6 run to the living room.

So yah, I'm open to suggestions and comments from those with mini-itx experience. All my HTPCs I've built in the past have been ATX based so it was a constant fight of noise over functionality.
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post #23 of 25
3/22/08 at 3:31pm
My Via computer is a mini-ITX, and it's a pretty straightfoward build. You may want to think about right-angle SATA connectors as things are pretty tight, but you'll get a good idea once you start building it.

Also, if you're going to decode Blu Ray, make sure you have some kind of hardware acceleration.

--Andre
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post #24 of 25
3/31/08 at 5:45pm
If you intend to run 2 PCI cards in that Mini-ITX board in the future, be aware that this sometimes leads to problems with the riser cards used for this. I had bad experiences with VIA risers especially designed for their mini-itx boards and Linux, which did not work for all the PCI cards I tried. So be aware of this if you intend to ever run more than 1 card in this system.

Regarding the solid state storage, your best option is a brand name (probably SanDisk) CompactFlash card, as these better cards have internal controllers doing intelligent wear-leveling which gives you many more write-cycles than using cheap cards.
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post #25 of 25
4/4/08 at 9:53pm
built one. it's much cheaper and you actaully know what you get inside. Check AVS Forums for HTPC builds.
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