evil red htpc

[xr4man]

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.

[xr4man]

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.

[xr4man]

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.

[AmEv]

My brother had that exact model laptop.

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

[Mysteriphys]

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

[xr4man]

My brother had that exact model laptop.

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

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.

[xr4man]

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.

[xr4man]

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.

[Fuganater]

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

[xr4man]

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.