{"id":983,"date":"2007-03-01T00:41:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-01T08:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/?p=983"},"modified":"2007-02-28T00:54:04","modified_gmt":"2007-02-28T08:54:04","slug":"my-new-htpc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/01\/my-new-htpc\/","title":{"rendered":"My New HTPC"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally got my hard drive replacement yesterday and reinstalled Vista and now my living room setup is semi-complete. I’m still missing a few key items which I’ll be getting along the way which include a small coffee table, a better TV stand, a HDTV tuner card, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse set, and a surround sound system.<\/p>\n

Anyways, let’s talk about my HTPC. It’s made up of the following components:<\/p>\n

\n
Motherboard<\/dt>\n
Abit IL9 Pro Motherboard<\/a> – $85<\/dd>\n
CPU<\/dt>\n
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU<\/a> – $204<\/dd>\n
Case<\/dt>\n
Lian Li PC-C30A Case<\/a> – $130<\/dd>\n
Graphics Card<\/dt>\n
Asus EAX1600PRO SILENT Radeon X1600PRO 256MB<\/a> – $93<\/dd>\n
Memory<\/dt>\n
2x Kingston 1GB DDR2 DDR2 667 RAM<\/a> – $136<\/dd>\n
Hard Drive<\/dt>\n
Western Digital 500GB SATA<\/a> – $140<\/dd>\n
Optical Drive<\/dt>\n
NEC ND-3550A 16X DVD Burner – $29*<\/dd>\n
Power Supply<\/dt>\n
Ultra V Series 500W<\/a> – $0<\/dd>\n
Input Devices<\/dt>\n
Remote Control and Receiver for Media Center<\/a> – $25<\/dd>\n
Remote Keyboard for Media Center<\/a> – $45<\/dd>\n
Cables<\/dt>\n
HDMI DVI Cable – 10ft<\/a> – $5.74<\/dd>\n
3.5mm Stereo Plug\/2 RCA Plug cable – 6ft<\/a> – $1.25<\/dd>\n
UPS<\/dt>\n
APC BX 1500 Battery Back-UPS<\/a> – $100<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

The final total comes up to be $994<\/strong>. Most of these items were purchased out of state (via Newegg), so there wasn’t any sales tax and most of them had free shipping.<\/p>\n

I originally had purchased a Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA hard drive<\/a> with perpendicular recording, but the drive was rather noisy, especially when writing, so I swapped it out and replaced it with the Western Digital 500GB SATA drive which people have commented on to be quiet, and indeed is.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>I also swapped DVD burners between my main machine which had the NEC ND-3550A (or 3540A) which is very quiet, but no longer carried by Newegg. I had gotten the NEC 7170A-0B 18X DVD Burner<\/a>, hoping that since it’s still NEC, it’d be nice and quiet like their previous models, but boy was I wrong. Apparently this drive is actually manufactured by Optiarc, a joint company formed by Sony and NEC. I’ve tried tools like CD Bremse<\/a> and Nero CD-DVD Speed<\/a> as recommended by those at CDFreaks.com<\/a>, but neither worked. Someone also suggested AnyDVD<\/a>, but I have yet to try it. What these tools are suppose to do is set the drive to run at a slower speed, so it can never goes into high speed mode (i.e. 18X), because who really needs 18X when watching a DVD. I’ve tried flashing the drive, but the tools don’t seem to be able to control it. On the contrary, both were able to control my ancient NEC ND-3550A.<\/p>\n

Here are some pictures of while I was building the HTPC:
\n\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a>\"building<\/a><\/p>\n

Installing Vista was a breeze, a lot easier than I had expected after hearing “horror” stories. Though then again, I was installing it on a clean machine and had been warned what hardware was compatible and what were causing problems (apparently nVidia Vista drivers are still iffy). After updating drivers and running the performance test, I hit 4.3 and the limiting factor was my graphics card. 4.3’s already an really good score, so I wasn’t too worried.<\/p>\n

My next problem as I realized was there wasn’t a easy way for me to connect my HTPC to the existing network and internet. Derek and I had spent something walking up and down my stairs trying to figure out the best way. At first I thought I would just get a wireless bridge and use 802.11g to talk wirelessly. However, with all the HD content that I’ll soon be accumulating, having gigabit would be nice. So I ended up pulling a long cable from my switch to my new HTPC. I purchased a bunch of these cable hooks from Lowes and hammered them around my stair frame. I also didn’t have a ladder, so I used my plastic table as a platform to stand on.<\/p>\n

\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a>\"network<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve also rearranged the couches so that I have more living room space to actually put something in between the couch and the TV. The main reason being that I was setting up StepMania<\/a> with my USB dance pads and they didn’t really fit in the old configuration. Now that I pushed the sofas back, I have a lot more space and can actually fit a coffee table or maybe even an exercise bike<\/a>. What’s neat is also there’s 2 front USB ports on my Lian Li case and that’s perfect for 2 DDR dance mats.<\/p>\n

Our company store today just announced that the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000<\/a> was available. Derek and I have been looking at the Logitech diNovo Edge<\/a>. However, I wonder when the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000<\/a> will be released.<\/p>\n

Here’s some pictures of my semi-final TV setup with my so pretty Vizio 47″ 1080p LCD HDTV:
\n\"final<\/a>\"final<\/a>\"final<\/a>\"final<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember, each picture also has a FULL SIZE<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally got my hard drive replacement yesterday and reinstalled Vista and now my living room setup is semi-complete. I’m still missing a few key items which I’ll be getting along the way which include a small coffee table, a better TV stand, a HDTV tuner card, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse set, and a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “My New HTPC”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,12,8,7,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}