evil red htpc

since i "finished" the blue oyster, i can now turn my attention to something i actually need, an htpc. i have one connected to my main tv, but i feel the need to have one connected in my bedroom as well.

so my hardware plans are:

msi e350 mobo
4-8g ram
slot load slim dvd burner
used laptop hard drive

eventually i'll add in a nice fat harddrive for media storage and this will then serve a dual role of htpc and media server.

anyway, here's the case i started with

i don't have any of the internal hardware yet other than the slim drive and the laptop drive. both of which are in my carputer that was never finished right now.

obviously, the first thing i had to do was rip the whole thing apart.

i don't like front panels that have an extra flip down piece that covers the optical drive, so i took that off and carved out the front panel so i can flush mount the optical drive.
the front panel come apart in two pieces, so both had to be modified.

there is a lip around the edge of the front part of the panel and i thought it would be neat if there was a red glow coming around the edge. so i had to carve off the lip that runs on either side of it.

i will place two led boards between the front and rear portions of the front panel to provide the red glow from the sides.

here are the parts i got today. there are two 4 led boards and two 9 led boards. the 9 led boards will be mounted on either side of the frame inside the case to provide a red glow through the holes in the sides of the case.

the small wireless touchpad is an ipazzport. $25 from amazon. it has got to be the flimsiest, cheapest made piece of hardware i have ever touched. but it does work perfectly without a single issue. i didn't even have to install any drivers fro it. it just worked. oh and the battery was charged too.

next up is the leds soldered to the 9 led boards. i still have to calculate what resistors to install on the boards.

once i decide how i want to mount the 4 led boards, i will solder them up and mount them in the front panel.

next piece to buy is a lian-li slim drive adapter to mount the slim dvd drive and the laptop hardrive in the 5.25" bay.

Nice start. Looks good.

thanks.

i'm thinking i might paint the frame black and put uv leds inside with red uv sleeving. i figure this time, unlike with the blue oyster, i probably will follow through with that idea since i don't have a mobo yet anyway so i have plenty of time to just mess with the case itself.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xr4man

the small wireless touchpad is an ipazzport. $25 from amazon.

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Well.

Played.

Sir.


Never would have thought of that for an HTPC remote. Brilliant.

thanks. i stumbled across it when i was actually looking for a small palm size wireless touchpad i had seen reviewed in maximumpc and this popped up. since it actually incorporated a keyboard too and was cheaper than what i was looking for, how could i go wrong?

Given how expensive MCE remotes can be, and how many issues one can have setting them up (especially on non-windows systems) you made a good find. I might actually snag one of those for my main HTPC.

My HTPC keyboard?


A bit older, but....

Yours probably could be used as a carputer keyboard.

got some stuff done this weekend.

here's some supplies i got on saturday at my favorite electronics store.

heat shrink, wire strippers, resistors for the led boards, and a switch that i am probably not going to use.

here's what i got done.

the chassis is painted now.

the led board are completed. i decided to use only 2 leds on the small boards instead of 4.

the power supply is painted black.

and the power supply and front panel connectors are mounted.

looking at how long the cable runs are going to be, i decided that sleeving is pretty much pointless. the wires will only be 1 to 3 inches long and after the heat shrink for the sleeving would be put on, there would be at most an inch of sleeving on only some wires and others would be nothing but heat shrink. so no sleeving on this one after all. that means no internal uv leds either.

i have to sand and repaint the front panels since they got some gunk in the paint when i painted them today.

finally got some stuff done.

i got the side leds mounted and wired up.

here's a shot in the dark.

here they are with the cover on.

and in the dark

i also just ordered the switch, sleeving, heat shrink, connectors, and the drive adapter.

once i get the switch mounted, then i can mount the front panel leds. then get crackin' on the sleeving.

Lookin' evil.

I try very hard not to do this but I am busy at the moment so *tag*.. looks like this is gonna be a good build.

i got some stuff last night.

red uv sleeving
red uv heat shrink
black sleeving
black heat shrink
red led 40mm fan
lian li drive adapter
black psu connectors
16mm red ring led vandal switch
and a pin removal tool

i mounted the slot load slim dvd burner and hard drive to the drive adapter. then i found out i have a tiny bit more filing to do on the front panel before it will actually fit.

test fitted the vandal switch. it fit perfectly in the old power button hole, so i didn't have to make any mods there. however, i will have to drill out the area on the second piece of the front plate and probably same spot on the chassis as well. after fitting i took it back out and soldered the wires on for the switch and the led. no pics of that yet though.

there should be a bigger update on sunday.

ok, i got some new stuff done last night.

got the vandal switch all wired up and installed and the front leds are wired and installed.

got the front panel mounted and installed the dvd and hard drive assembly.

and an op test with the lights out.

got the sleeving done today. what a pain in the penis that is.

i guess the next step is to actually get a mobo and ram to install and it should all be done.

edit: i just remembered, it wasn't the sleeving that sucked so bad, it was removing the pins from the 24 pin atx connector to replace it with a black on that sucked donkey shlong. i'll not do that again. next time i'll just get the pins too and cut the connector off and put new pins and a new connector on.

I love a good red glow on anything, computers especially! I've got some plans for mine that are currently in the works :) awesome job on the sleeving too!

thanks. i think it turned out not too bad for a first attempt. there are some things i definitely learned though. such as the red uv nylon sleeving melts if the heat gun stays on too long, so it goes on after the black stuff is on. also to use the same brand of sleeving for all the wires. i ordered the red and the black in bulk from performance-pcs. both were 1/8" but the black was actually twice the size of the red. i ended up doubling up wires on the atx connector. good thing i did, because anymore sleeving and the wires would not fit back in the hole in the power supply.

np! I probly won't end up sleeving mine due to my budget, (unless the psu comes sleeved lol) but i love how it looks.

TBHTIJM, I haven't caught onto individually sleeved cables.

Sleeving sets of wires for cable management (and looks), however.......

that reminds me. i gotta give credit where credit is due. i actually had planned on scrapping the idea of sleeving the cables, but the more i looked at nutman's WIP, the more i liked the way it looked with all black sleeved cables and a few green cables mixed in.

woohoo! just checked my tracking number and my mobo and ram are "out for delivery". that means i get to play with new toys tonight.

so my new stuff arrived on thursday. a day ahead of schedule.

this was on the doorstep.

and what could be inside?

bow-chicka-wow-wow.

ba-dum-da-dum

my new msi e350 amd fusion mobo and 4G of ram on a black circuit card.

i had to promptly install

everything went smoothly except for the damn ground tabs on the i/o panel. first the one for the ethernet was hanging down, then the one for the hdmi port. so after installing and reinstalling a few times, it was time to hook to the tv and start installing windows.

and here's a picture in the dark.

the cover isn't on yet because i remembered i had another power supply that i could use that would make more room in the case. that mini update will come in a few minutes after i take a pic.

so after reading BIGGOOFY's post about the mini-box pico-itx power supplies, i remembered i had this laying around.

according to my calculations based on the current draw of the HDD, ODD, and leds i have installed and the power draw of the mobo that i have read on other sites, my system should only pull about 30 to 35W at full bore. that should give me plenty of headroom with this 80W power supply to be able to add in a couple of 60mm fans at the back of the case where the original power supply resides.

of course, using this will make the whole sleeving exercise on the original power supply a waste of time and money. oh well, it was a learning experience.

My brother had that exact model laptop.

Until it crapped out 4 years ago......

hey thats pretty cool all around, and the new psu should make things a little "cooler" :-D sweet deal!

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Originally Posted by AmEv

My brother had that exact model laptop.

Until it crapped out 4 years ago......

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yeah it was one of the wal-mart $400 specials the first year they had them on black friday. me and my roommate at the time got up at 4:00 to wait in line to get it. we got one for me and one for my dad. for that price i wasn't expecting too much, but both have been running strong for the past 6 or 7 years. hell, dad's is even running windows 7 now.


Mysteriphys - i'm hoping that it will help with heat. i think the psu fan and processor fan are fighting each other and that's causing my higher than wanted temps.

so i installed the new psu and it did bring the apu temps down a bit. that was a good thing.

problem i'm having is every few hours i get a blue screen. this happened a couple times with the old power supply, so i don't think it is a problem with the new psu. haven't had time to troubleshoot it yet as i had a stupid english paper ti write this weekend and i had major ass writer's block.

anyway, i'm going to run a mem test tonight. however, my suspicions are that the hard drive is giving me problems. it is an old ass laptop harddrive that i had pulled from an old broke gateway laptop. i'll run a checkdisk on that too.

i didn't take pics of the psu install because i just slapped together an adapter cable to get things working and it looks like ass. once i make a nice neat cable, i'll get some pics.

so i a mem test and ran chkdsk. only problem that came up was checkdisk said there were a few sectors that were labeled as empty in the file table, but had stuff in em. so checkdisk deleted them. it didn't crash last night, so maybe that was the problem.

Well thats good to hear! Everyone hates with something random happens to a brand new build.

finally time for an update.

first off, it crashed again after fixing the bad sectors. so i replaced the hard drive with a known good one and haven't had a problem since. that's a relief.

next, on with the new goodness.

i received a new 2 TB drive, some 6" red sata cables, a couple of ginormous northbridge coolers to use as a cpu cooler, and the sata power connectors.

first thing was to mount one of the northbridge coolers. the big all copper heatsink didn't fit due to the heat pipes sticking too far out, but the serpent cooler with fan fit great. only problem was i couldn't get the mobo back in the case with it mounted, so i had to take it off, install the mobo and then put it back on.

here is the original cooler with the 40mm fan.

and here is the the new cooler mounted.

this is going to provide much better cooling!

i started installing the sata power connectors and realized 2 problems. 1: i used too thick of wires to put the cap on and 2: the position of the connector for the 2 TB drive was too far over to one side, so the wires weren't long enough to reach. so i'll have to replace the wires with smaller gauge and make them longer so i can hook up the big drive. at least the computer is functional again though.

oh yeah. the cpu temp went from 56c at idle to 49c at idle with the new cooler. and it is soo much quieter now. i can actually hear the hard drive over the fan now. that makes it so much nicer watching movies late at night with the volume turned low.

next step will be to fix the power cables.

it's been too long since i updated this.

first thing, i remade the power cable from the psu because i screwed up the sata power connectors.

then put the mobo back in the case and replaced the screws with red anodized allenhead screws.

then i started building the rear intake fans and mounting them. i wanted as much air blowing on my cpu cooler as possible because according to the bios it was running at 50c just sitting there. i found out later by using HWmonitor, that the bios is reading about 20c high. so all this extra cooling i installed probably wasn't necessary at all.

and here they are installed where the original psu was.

next pictures will be the completed money shots.

hmm, i wonder what they would say if i showed up at "glamour shots" with my case asking to get pictures taken? hahahhaah

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xr4man

so all this extra cooling i installed probably wasn't necessary at all.

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You say that like overkill is a bad thing.

Seriously though really like the red screws. Adds a little extra detail. :up: