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Upgraded all three machines, one way or another, two days ago.
The most significant factor is that my main machine 'Shiny Beast' now has no IDE cables. In fact if it wasn't for me keeping a floppy drive in there, there would be no paralell signals flowing to and from the motherboard.
I keep the floppy drives in my machines for two reasons - RAID drivers and paragon disc manager, which boots from a floppy and enables me to format/delete/erase/fix any hard drive, almost regardless of it's state.
I guess I could load the Paragon program onto a bootable CD but I have yet to find a fix around loading RAID drivers onto a Windows installation. You'd think by now that Microsucks might realise computers are now being sold without floppy disk drives.
After 2.5 years my Samsung DVD-ROM drive on my main machine (Shiny Beast) bit the dust and the Philips DVDRW in there I was never happy with, it took too long to read disks.
So, I took them both out and ordered a Plextor 800A DVDRW (IDE) and an Asus DVD-ROM (SATA) drive.
Took out my SATA NEC DVDRW from my second machine and replaced that with the Plextor. I burn a lotta stuff on this machine so figured the Plextor was a good investment, dearer than most but I've heard good things. We shall see
I then installed the two SATA optical drives to main machine. This means I now have five of the six SATA ports on the motherboard used up and if I look inside the case through the side window the biggest cable is either the main PSU one or the floppy cable. Weird
No jumpers to set either, just plug them lil 4 pin flat cables in. Careful though, cos they do be fragile.
Also replaced both floppy drives in machines 1 & 2, cos they'd been playing up, not reading some disks. New drives are coping fine. They only be six quid each, so small beans, really, in the greater scheme of things.
Bought an extra hard disk caddy for machine # 3, which means I now have 5 hard disks I can swap about - luxury.
Oh, and the middle machine's named 'Andromeda' - original eh?
Well, that's about it, here's a coupla pix of machine # 3, named 'Perseus'. For now it's on a KVM switch and is used to mess about on, mostly, but once I can afford a Flat Screen TV it will become my media centre, it has a twin digital tuner Hauppage TV card which is a bit good and, I think, looks rather good.
For anybody thinking of buying the Thermaltake Bach case, be aware things are a little cramped inside.
It won't take a full sized motherboard only ATX or Micro-ATX. I couldn't use the front mounted hard disk cage as they clashed with the memory in my setup.
And as you can see from the following pix the hard disk caddy I used only just about fits.
Still, an HTPC setup doesn't have to be very high spec, as long as it's capable of running Windows Media Edition or Vista you're good to go. Or, of course, your own choice of Linux Distro with a TV card that has Linux Drivers.
My version of that case doesn't have the remote control but the twin tuner TV card I have fitted does have a remote control, so that's good enough for me. And you don't need a high end graphics card for media content, it's only worth fitting an expensive video card if you want to play the latest games on your big-ass TV setup
The setup for my soon-to-be HTPC is:
Asrock K7S41GX motherboard
On board sound and LAN
Nvidia 6200 256Mb AGP Video card
AMD Socket A XP3200 CPU 2.2Ghz
Thermaltake heatpipe cooler with Antec 92mm fan
1Gb (2 x 512) Corsair Value select PC3200 RAM
Asus DVD-ROM Drive
Floppy Disc Drive
Vantec Hard disk Caddy with five different trays
Hard disks for caddy are: 120Gb; 60Gb; 20Gb; 20Gb; 20GB
Plus, for storage (both PATA) Western Digital 80Gb; Seagate 80Gb
Hauppage WIN Nova TV T500 twin tuner TV card
i-Won Mini Wireless keyboard (also contains mouse ball & functions)
Logitech MX1000 laser cordless mouse
The FSB for that motherboard is only 266 but I have the FSB set to 200 so my CPU does actually run at 2.2Ghz. At standard settings it was throttled back to 1.8Ghz.
The previous motherboard the CPU & RAM were fitted to died so I really didn't want to spend a lot of money on another one, hence the choice of board.
When I eventually get a flat screen TV the sound will go through my stereo, just two channel, 70 watts a channel Cambridge Azur Amplifier and KEF Cresta speakers.
Here's a few shots of the inside showing how cramped things are in there and the last pic shows the display on the hard disk caddy, in that pic showing temperature.
The most significant factor is that my main machine 'Shiny Beast' now has no IDE cables. In fact if it wasn't for me keeping a floppy drive in there, there would be no paralell signals flowing to and from the motherboard.
I keep the floppy drives in my machines for two reasons - RAID drivers and paragon disc manager, which boots from a floppy and enables me to format/delete/erase/fix any hard drive, almost regardless of it's state.
I guess I could load the Paragon program onto a bootable CD but I have yet to find a fix around loading RAID drivers onto a Windows installation. You'd think by now that Microsucks might realise computers are now being sold without floppy disk drives.
After 2.5 years my Samsung DVD-ROM drive on my main machine (Shiny Beast) bit the dust and the Philips DVDRW in there I was never happy with, it took too long to read disks.
So, I took them both out and ordered a Plextor 800A DVDRW (IDE) and an Asus DVD-ROM (SATA) drive.
Took out my SATA NEC DVDRW from my second machine and replaced that with the Plextor. I burn a lotta stuff on this machine so figured the Plextor was a good investment, dearer than most but I've heard good things. We shall see
I then installed the two SATA optical drives to main machine. This means I now have five of the six SATA ports on the motherboard used up and if I look inside the case through the side window the biggest cable is either the main PSU one or the floppy cable. Weird
No jumpers to set either, just plug them lil 4 pin flat cables in. Careful though, cos they do be fragile.
Also replaced both floppy drives in machines 1 & 2, cos they'd been playing up, not reading some disks. New drives are coping fine. They only be six quid each, so small beans, really, in the greater scheme of things.
Bought an extra hard disk caddy for machine # 3, which means I now have 5 hard disks I can swap about - luxury.
Oh, and the middle machine's named 'Andromeda' - original eh?
Well, that's about it, here's a coupla pix of machine # 3, named 'Perseus'. For now it's on a KVM switch and is used to mess about on, mostly, but once I can afford a Flat Screen TV it will become my media centre, it has a twin digital tuner Hauppage TV card which is a bit good and, I think, looks rather good.
For anybody thinking of buying the Thermaltake Bach case, be aware things are a little cramped inside.
It won't take a full sized motherboard only ATX or Micro-ATX. I couldn't use the front mounted hard disk cage as they clashed with the memory in my setup.
And as you can see from the following pix the hard disk caddy I used only just about fits.
Still, an HTPC setup doesn't have to be very high spec, as long as it's capable of running Windows Media Edition or Vista you're good to go. Or, of course, your own choice of Linux Distro with a TV card that has Linux Drivers.
My version of that case doesn't have the remote control but the twin tuner TV card I have fitted does have a remote control, so that's good enough for me. And you don't need a high end graphics card for media content, it's only worth fitting an expensive video card if you want to play the latest games on your big-ass TV setup
The setup for my soon-to-be HTPC is:
Asrock K7S41GX motherboard
On board sound and LAN
Nvidia 6200 256Mb AGP Video card
AMD Socket A XP3200 CPU 2.2Ghz
Thermaltake heatpipe cooler with Antec 92mm fan
1Gb (2 x 512) Corsair Value select PC3200 RAM
Asus DVD-ROM Drive
Floppy Disc Drive
Vantec Hard disk Caddy with five different trays
Hard disks for caddy are: 120Gb; 60Gb; 20Gb; 20Gb; 20GB
Plus, for storage (both PATA) Western Digital 80Gb; Seagate 80Gb
Hauppage WIN Nova TV T500 twin tuner TV card
i-Won Mini Wireless keyboard (also contains mouse ball & functions)
Logitech MX1000 laser cordless mouse
The FSB for that motherboard is only 266 but I have the FSB set to 200 so my CPU does actually run at 2.2Ghz. At standard settings it was throttled back to 1.8Ghz.
The previous motherboard the CPU & RAM were fitted to died so I really didn't want to spend a lot of money on another one, hence the choice of board.
When I eventually get a flat screen TV the sound will go through my stereo, just two channel, 70 watts a channel Cambridge Azur Amplifier and KEF Cresta speakers.
Here's a few shots of the inside showing how cramped things are in there and the last pic shows the display on the hard disk caddy, in that pic showing temperature.
...I have a Philips DVD-RW and I just can't rely on the dvd's it churns out, gives errors on some burns and then perfect on others, so I know what you mean..
