The Case, For A Case..... HTPC Case That Is

Lets start here; the silver version of my main HTPC's case. Why the silver version, vs. the black that I actually own? It's easier for you to see what I'm talking about. It's very high end, but not well known. The style and execution completely mimics that of top notch audio gear. Machined, billet aluminum, and heavy duty. Really nice! What's the problem?

Notice anything about it.... other than the really nice finish? Notice the almost complete lack of ventilation!?! Fine for my old machine based on AMD's first generation APU. The Zacate core machine had a TDP of 18w. My replacement is from the Kavari generation and the draw is 45w. It's a whole lot more powerful, but that's still quite a bit more heat to get rid of! The interior of the D.Vine5 is large, but it doesn't flow much air. You can barely see the vents under the drive cage for intake and the exhaust are 2 60mm just above the I/O shield. Can you say "high-pitch whine"? Not very good situation. Oh yeah, the case only takes an SFX power supply! There's some nice ones out there now, but they are pricey!

So, the whole time that the build finishing and doing my OS load, I'm nervously watching the processor temps on Piriform's Speccy utility. .....and it's not looking very good. We're talking 78 to 80+ degrees. That Celsius!!! I try reapplying thermal grease, and even changing heatsink/fan. It's not getting much better.... a little bit, but not much. At this point, I'm trying everything from reading the forums, seeing about a returning of the APU to the seller and  different cases. 

In the end, it was more than one thing and a bit of luck. After reading a lot of forum traffic, I came across some discussing the fact that AMD's APUs often gave erroneous reading to monitoring utilities like Speccy, CPUID, etc. And that you need to use AMD's own software such as their Vision Engine Control to get a fully accurate readings, plus these APU can and often did have momentary spikes where the temps would jump from the 50s (c) to over 80, then back down seemingly at random. This and good old fashion experience showed me that there wasn't anything really wrong. ??? What I found was that even when the temps were showing to be very high (over 80c), I could hold my hand over the CPU fan and the air was cool, plus I could actually put my fingers on the heatsink which was only warm. 

Of course, paranoid me, what's my other reaction? Another case! OK, there have always some issues with the D.Vine case that have irritated me. So, I found this nMedia 7000b on Craigs List (more on this later) for $40. Note the 2 USBs on the front. Can't tell from this image, but that display actually connects to the motherboard and shows stuff! The guy also included his IR receiver as well. Now I have to find drivers for it. Funny story about this case. Like I said; I saw it on CL, but it was in WACO!!! That's an hour and a half south of here, but I contacted the guy anyway. Turns out that he needed the money quickly and was willing to drive it up here if I paid for the gas. I figure getting it immediately and not having to go get it was worth the $10 extra.. making the total $50.

Here's the main reason I switched though. See all the ventilation? And the two big (120mm) fans? And the full-sized power supply opening (ATX)? WooHoo!!! Can you say Goodbye to the molex-8pin EPS adapter!?! However; I can't emphasize enough..... it's all about the air-flow. How do all these extra features make their way into a case and not only is it NOT bigger, it's actually smaller? It only takes a micro-ATX or smaller MB, which conveniently I happen to have. There's also virtually no wasted space in it..... at all. I love efficiency! I sure feel a lot better now that I know that my processor isn't about to melt, plus it's be a lot easier to keep it cool.
 

HTPC Build-Log: Part 3..... It's been a good week!

It's been a good week......, no check that; it's been a GREAT week..... in the HTPC world that is! In the last build-log, I had said that the ID Cooling coolers were delivered, but there were other issues that delayed the update of my HTPC fleet. Anyway; "we have overcome"!

I got momentum when the delayed conversion of our bedroom HTPC went off without a hitch. In fact, the speed and ease of which this theoretically "out of date" A75/A6-3600 motherboard/CPU combo went about it's tasks was a surprise. My pride would like to attribute this to me applying these older (read cheaper) components to jobs that it does particularly well. I may be right, or I might be just lucky; who knows, who cares? The fact is that this combination of pretty prosaic parts are an excellent match for it's intended job of a HTPC. If you haven't been keeping score, here it is:

• $48 - ASRock A75m-ITX, AMD A6-3600 MB/APU combo (eBay)
• $12 - ID Cooling DK-03, Heatsink/120mm fan (Amazon)
• $0 - Silverstone SG08Lite case (old machine)
• $0 - Seasonic 500w PSU (old machine)
• $0 - Intel 80Gb SSD, Hitachi 500Gb HDD, Slot-loading DVD-RW (old machine)
• $60 - Total 

 

No; you are not looking at the inside of the SG-08. This is in fact, the inside of a Silverstone SG-05. ??? So, after the sucess of the "Viking" HTPC, I moved right on to the replacement to "Bronco" machine that fulfills the HTPC role in the downstairs den. Since it was a low-powered "thin" PC it uses a "wide-voltage" external power supply. The issue I had on Sunday was that it used a different adapter than what I was using. In the ensuing 2 days, I realized that there were several random adapters from dead laptops that I've accumulated. In the pile, I found HP one that worked. After a quick OS load-up; this machine was ready as well! Again I was a little surprised by the speed of this machine! At least this board should be fast, since it's LGA-1150 of the "Broadwell" generation. Anything else left to do on this?

• $39.68 - Gigabyte GA-B75TN motherboard (eBay)
• $34.28 - Intel Pentium 2030T CPU (eBay)
• $19.99 - Silverstone NT-07 HSF (Amazon)
• $12.54 - 4Gb DDR3 SO-DIMM (eBay)
• $0 - Other 4Gb DDR3 SO-DIMM (spare parts box)
• $0 - Crucial M4 mSATA 256Gb SSD (spare parts box)
• $0 - Power adapter (closet of doom)
• $106.49 - Total

Well.... yes. The SG05 is a temporary home. My ultimate evil plan is to pick up a Silverstone PT13. The reason is obvious: it's so small and cool! What about the 3rd HTPC?

I get to do this all day Saturday, and I do mean all day. I'm an academic competition coach and sponsor at school. While my debaters fell just short of advancing to state level competition, my top Social Studies kid is an alternate to the Regional Competition this year. So I get to drive him and all the others from both high schools in our district, 2 and a half hours East and South into the heart of the Piney Wood to Stephen F. Austin University at Nacogadoches. In order to get there on time, we'll be leaving at 5am, putting me getting up at 4am since I have to get the bus. We'll finish around 4pm. I'll be getting home somewhere around 9pm! Therefore, despite the arrival of the 8-pin EPS adapter, there'll be no finishing the HTPC in the main A/V system till Sunday. Here are the numbers for the last machine.

• $30.25 - Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-HD2 motherboard (eBay)
• $66.35 - AMD A8-7600 APU (eBay)
• $40 - Corsail Vengeance Pro 8Gb DDR3/1866 RAM (eBay)
• $5.81 - Creative Labs Soundblaster Live Soundcard (eBay)
• $0 - Ahanix D-Vine5 case (old machine)
• $0 - Intel 120Gb SSD (parts box)
• $0 - Hitachi DeskStar 500Gb HDD, Sony Blu-Ray optical drive (old machine)
• $106.35 - Total    

All of these totals include not only the cost of parts, but also the shipping costs as well, so I figure the grand total of $272.84 is pretty OK. That's about $90 per on 3 pretty up-to-date machines that do their jobs well. They are going to allow me to "cut the cord". The end of Netflix, and the end of Cable TV service. Those 2 things by themselves come to something like $80-90 per month! That puts this upgrade to paying off in 3 months! Do I wish, I was already done after all the planning and waiting? Sure I am, but I'm OK with the progress so far. I can see the end of the road from here!

Build-Log: Devil In The Details..... Part 2

 

Sorry about the angry rant the other day, but let me start here by saying that things got much better as the weekend went along. Saturday was a really good day for the mail people, when things got delivered exactly when they were supposed to. Even the CPU coolers being sent from China! 

So, I was envisioning a relaxing weekend with the exception of the frantic string-trimming to beat the week-long oncoming rainstorms that is. I even took a nap on Saturday and planned on getting my computer building groove on come Sunday afternoon. That was the last thing that went right!

It started off with a little "house-cleaning" done (so to speak). I have a co-worker whose little girl decided that their PS3 require coinage like an arcade machine. The penny was enough to cause the machine to constantly shut down as soon as it was powered up! Once I got a Torx security bit for it and got the machine apart, the coin extraction wasn't much of an issue. After that, it never would come up at all. It gave the constant "blinking red" light of a "general fault-state". So, it's going to go home tomorrow.... not working.

Then I moved on to the first of my 3 HTPCs that have been waiting to be updated. I had all the parts on hand and just needed to put the board into it's Silverstone SG-05 temporary home. How much trouble could this be? I didn't even need to plus in the PSU since it takes outboard DC power. Yeah....... that didn't go well at all since the jack was of a different type than any adapter I happen to own. So, one fully constructed computer with I can't power up!

So, I decided to move on to the main HTPC from my A/V rack. Now that the HSF had arrived from China, I was set to go, right!?! I pulled the machine, got the old motherboard and boot drive out and proceeded to do the install. My most difficult issue was trying to decide which SSD to use as the new boot drive. After settling on an 120Gb Intel instead of the 160Gb (it's got a 500Gb storage drive), I got it connected up. .....Black Screen...... That usually means bad or incompatible ram, As I pulled the 1st stick out, I realized that I hadn't connected the 12v EPS power.... OK, that explains it. This was followed by 1 minute of angry frustration and 15 minutes of digging through my boxes of stuff. Yes, this board takes the new 8-pin EPS power vs. the standard since P4 days, 4-pin! The quiet little SFX PSU in that case only has the 4! And; I found out that you can't just use a second 4-pin via adapter since I have one of those. So, that machine is 95% done waiting for the new adapter to show up from somewhere around Austin.

I was about ready to throw something through the window when my wife called me for dinner. While I was eating my breakfast burrito (we eat breakfast for dinner on Sundays), I calmed myself down thinking about doing the third machine. I was 100% sure that one would get completed since I had put it on a testbench and set it up. As I was walking up the stairs to get the machine out of our bedroom, my wife calls me over and says that she wants to watch episodes of Elementary that we missed last week! So, no computers (or PS3) got finished after an entire afternoon of working on stuff! Some days you win, other days you get your behind handed to you......

I Hate Junk!

It's a "love-hate" relationship..... me and old computers. On one hand, I love the benefits of being able to turn caste-off computer/computer parts into something useful and productive. On the other hand, just the thought of the mountains of this stuff piling up all over the world has me really concerned and just a bit angry! Oh; don't get me wrong! I still love my electronics, it's just the junky stuff out there that simply compounds the problem by dying long before they should that's the issue. What started this rant?

I was given a gift this morning. Why would a "gift" set me off? It's a pretty little laptop isn't it? It's a Gateway (really Acer) "M-Series", W650i. This and another machine were brought to be by one of my students who said that her parents wanted to throw them out and thought I might want them instead. This Gateway is the older of the 2, from the Core 2 Duo/ Windows Vista generation. I don't know yet whether it'll boot up, but it appears to have a few "salvageable" parts in it. Probably the screen (since it doesn't appear cracked), the DDR2 SO-DIMMs (1, 2Gb and 1, 1Gb) and a nice little Western Digital Scorpio series 250Gb SATA drive. Not too bad...... it's the other one that really pisses me off though.....

It's a nice, "no nonsense" Dell Inspiron 15 from a couple of years ago. It has a stick of 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM, and a 500Gb Seagate (yuck) hard drive; oh yeah, and the optical drive is even a SATA unit. So what's the problem? This computer is less than 2 years old! It not only doesn't boot. It doesn't even get power!

Here's the thing. You look out there on the Internet, go to Walmart or heaven forbid, go to Best Buy..... there are all these nice looking nicely spec'd machines and they cost a pretty reasonable price..... somewhere between $300 and $500. That's affordable and seems to make perfect sense to their target audience; right? So...... what's the problem? For those of you who know me, you know where I'm going with this right? 

• Give the current state of manufacturing technology and cost, it's as cheaply as a full-blown computer can go and the manufacturer still make a profit.
• Because they are affordable, aka cheap people don't worry about the abysmal build quality, so when they break in the next 1 to 3 years, they just buy a new one.
• The very fact of their price-point creates certain production realities of their design. They are cheap to make, but not cheap to fix. In actuality, those $1000+, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo ThinkPads, and Dell Latitudes are WAY easier (read cheaper) to work on than these machines. They are made to be fix, their made to be throw away. 
• There's nothing I can do for these machine. There very cheapness makes them cost more to fix then they are worth!

See that sneaky little work "cheap" hiding inside every bullet point? Hiding in plain sight! We've become a society so wasteful largely in pursuit of cheap. The Walmart-ization of America! I really hate cheap junk!!!

The Devil Is In The Details..... of PC Building

"WHAT THE....... !!!" .....as my brother-in-law would say. Yup; that my friends is a "Molex to 4-pin adapter".

 ...... and that is an "8-pin EPS extension".

This? A "24-pin PSU extension", of course. Is there a point to all this random wiring vocabulary lesson? Well, yes of course.... only if you want to get  your build off the ground! Oh it gets better! I promise!

This is an ID Cooling DK-03, heat-sink fan combo.... coming from China. Yup, my server/HTPC builds are in that excruciating stage of waiting for random parts to show up from random places, ranging from Katy, Texas to Shenzhen, China. This is the part that nobody talks about and the videos on Youtube never show. 

I'll have to admit it that some of it is my fault, in that I'm a bit of a stickler. Like the HSF issue. I actually do have perfectly adequate ones sitting around, but I'm not about adequate. I need a "low-profile" assembly, so solutions like the Cooler Master EVO 212 are out. Can't fit a "tower" style cooler in a HTPC, and the stock AMD models are notoriously noisy at least partially due to the small fans being used as is typical of virtually all low-profile systems. I could run out to Micro Center and pick up a Noctua or Silverstone HSF for about $35-40 a pop, but that's just too expensive for me. Did I mention that I'm stubborn too?!? Yes; I want my cake and eat it too! So I started to dig, and came up with the ID Cooling DK-03 which is not only low-profile, but uses a 120mm fan on top! That make for a slow rpm, which equal low noise..... MAGIC! The only fly in the ointment is that they are shipped out of China! So it'll be about 2 weeks before they get here. 

Some of the delay issues are kind of unforeseen. See where the power supply sits in this image of the Fractal Define XL R2 that I'm using? Yup, the PSU's cables won't reach the board's headers way up top. To exacerbate things, it's a full-on dual processor, eATX server board from Supermicro (which was the cause of the ginormous case to start with), which requires not only a 12 volt, 8-pin EPS cable, but a 4-pin one as well..... hence all the extensions. 

 

Then, there's all this. You'd think that I'd have enough memory laying around right? Well, here's the thing. These machine are a little different. The two AMD APU based board take faster RAM than is typical of this generation's machines. In general I use Intel based systems, so if you're talking PC3-1600 memory, I'm good. But 1866mhz.... not so much, so I had to order some. Again, my stubborness rears it's ugly head! I'm just not going to pay retail prices on anything! The SO-DIMM? Yeah, the B75 "Slim" Mini-ITX board...... yeah, it uses laptop RAM. I had one stick of 10,600 4Gb RAM (along with an mSATA SSD for it), but I want to run 8Gb as a minimum standard this generation, so I had the find another one. Hey; I got it for $12.54 though! 

So, here I am. Iiving in my own special purgatory of waiting for computer parts......

Upgrading My HTPC(s): Part 2

Just like the real S-3 "Viking", that the U.S. Navy retired in 2009, and Lockheed has recently been trying to resurrect; there wasn't supposed be a "Part 2". Then on the way to upgrading the rest of my HTPC fleet, a funny thing happened..... I know; you're probably already rolling your eyes, right? So, I'm going to go ahead and explain the "why" and then the "how" of it. ..... And NO, I'm not doing this to make myself feel better about spending another $50. So here goes:

Last week I came across a motherboard on eBay that was packaged with a processor and the HSF (heat-sink-fan) that ended up costing $48 with free shipping. From a purely economic standpoint; if you can upgrade something for less than $50.... you should do it! So, here are the "players". It's an ASRock A75M-ITX with an AMD A6-3600 APU. We can start with that the processor alone often sells for around $50. Granted, it's cheap, but so are any of the hundreds of the P4 boards out there. But that still doesn't answer the question of why?

The machine that I was planing on not upgrading was the "Viking" HTPC in our master bedroom. It's hard to believe that it was originally build in the later part of 2012. A couple of years ago it got rebuilt into a Silverstone case with a very low-powered "Ivy Bridge" generation Celeron which occasionally struggles, but is still pretty usable. However, while Intel processors of the "Core" generation wipe the floor with AMD, their integrated graphics aren't anything to "write home about". So....., if you want something that does a nice job with video, where processing power takes a "backseat"; your pretty much back with AMD's APUs. 

In this case the A75 chipset boards are from second generation AMD APUs. The A6-3600 chip I'll be using will not only have 4 CPU cores, but also an onboard Radeon HD 6430 D GPU which is a pretty good thing for an HTPC. So, it comes down to the fact that this board would be significantly more powerful than the Celeron 847 for a fairly minimal investment. If we were to continue on our current use case scenario where we occasionally get on to the internet for Youtube and catching up with a TV show on a network site, I probably wouldn't bother. However, our changeover to using Kodi (XMBC) on a regular basis changes the hardware demands.The machine now routinely has to process 1080p streams. This is just something that Intel's integrated graphics of that generation does well. Which takes us back to the $50 economic answer to the technical question of whether or not I can/should upgrade a system. And that translates to be: You Bet, if the benefit/need is there and the price is low enough!