I went to Fry’s during my lunch break yesterday, but I was disappointed to find that they had absolutely nothing that I was looking for.  I’m so glad MicroCenter is just up the block.

I left there with an Antec Three Hundred case, a WD Caviar SE 160GB SATA HDD,a  Cooler Master Extreme Power 500W PSU and a 120mm Silverstone fan.  The PSU isn’t what I was looking for (they had ThermalTake 430W on sale for $31), but I’ve found the CM PSUs to be fine for standard duties (it will replace the temporary junk PSU in my bedroom HTPC).  The WD OEM drive will be added to my RAID-0 array, giving me three 160GB drives, when I move to the new board next week.  I don’t really need that much space, but I need the extra throughput with all the muxing/demuxing I have going on.  The fan will be for one of the intakes on the Three Hundred.  It’ll take two, but I don’t think I’ll need it.  Plus I can only imagine what this thing is going to sound like.

The board I’ve decided to go with is the Asus vanilla P5Q.  I don’t need all the bells and whistles of the various versions of it, but it looks like a good board and I should be able to do a little overclocking with it.  I’m going to grab a couple GB of G.SKILL DDR2 1066 memory and one of those 8-pin molex adapters to satisfy the 8-phase power plug.  I’ve heard too many conflicting reports that it will take a 4-pin and that it won’t, so for $5 - I’ll just play it safe.  I plan on ordering today, or tomorrow at the latest.  Hopefully, I’ll get to spend next weekend putting it all together.  I think the thing I’m looking most forward to is being able to put my bedroom HTPC in standby at night.  Neither of the Asus boards that I’ve used will do it - and I’ve tried everything.

I’ll post my progression, so check back often - even if I don’t post all that often :)

Recent Entries

• Colds suck.
• Happy Holidays!…and other stuff.
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• Media Browser (pre) beta release screenshots.
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• Open Media Library (OML).
• unRAID 4.4 Final Released
• Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” Released.
• Sorry, No HDPC-20 for DirecTV Hopefuls.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under HTPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.