show off your htpc!

New setup for me. With our new 42" LCD TV the Celeron-1200 / Radeon 9250 just wasn't cutting it anymore. Plus I was out of drive space.

New setup:
Asus P5QL-EPU (P43 based)
E5200 cooled passively by a Scythe Zipang 2
R4670 cooled passively by a Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo
2x 1GB OCZ Platinum rev.2 DDR2
2.5" 160GB WD Scorpio Blue (5400rpm, 8MB) OS/Apps
Promise SX4-M controller
2x 1.5TB WD Green (5400rpm, 32MB) RAID 1 Data
Blu-Ray ROM
MS Bluetooth Mouse & Keyboard
Vista Ultimate
Logitech Harmony 880 & USB IR receiver

My wife gave me "carte blanche" on my basement... to start off with, yes I need a new TV (stay tuned the "hole in the wall" fits a 58' screen, I'm thinking 6 series samsung 60')... I need better Audio, my HTPC is lacking. And my cable management sucks. There is also a sony receiver and a JVC powered Sub that you can't see for the Antec Skeleton system. 100W RMS for front stage (sony/polk), logitech 5w (per channel center and surround). Logitec MX Air mouse controlling the HTPC, works great. Wireless keyboard to come, on HTPC. I'd like suggestions, I'm board as hell with theis system.

Here's some pics of my HTPC setup. Its a college apartment so it's not exactly the best looking.

Specs:
Mobo - GIGABYTE GA-MA785GM-US2H
CPU - Athlon II 250
Memory - 2gig DDR2
Video Card - ATI HD4200 (785G)
Hard Drives - Maxtor 300gig | 2x1TB WD GP
Case - nMediaPC 1000B + PRO-LCD
PSU - Sunbeam NUUO 550watt
Tuner - Hauppauge HVR-2250

bit late getting to this, ive had this setup for about a year. i still tweak things here and there but right now my priority is to get the wiring into the wall and get everything cleaned up in the back

Latest Rig

I recently moved from Houston, I own T'S & Blues Custom Computers

Dang, you guyz need to resize those pics!

Mine:

P4 3.0 Prescott w/Scythe Ninja
ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe
(2x512) PQI DDR2 667 and 512MB (2x256) of Crucial Ballistix
Nvidia 5200 PCI Video card (ugh), but serves it's purpose for now
Seagate 160gb HDD
Sony DVDRW
Fortron 400w Psu
Giant Apevia Case (ugh)


27" Westy LCD ( Upgrading to a 32" soon)
JVC RX-5020V
Brown Boxes:
12" Electro Bass woofers
4" Pioneer Mids
3" Piezo Tweeters in ea.

Far right corner:
JVC Sub Base

CPU-- http://go.ocforums.com/?id=1132X508...com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103726 $79.99
MOBO-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ecs 785g $81.00
Memory-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227321
Hard drives-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152096 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136359
Windows 7 Ultimate($20)
Gyration remote and Keyboard--(~$80)
Power supply-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...89&Tpk=cu-700b (paid $49.99 w/20 MIR)
Video card-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...258R-_-Product attached a quiet 80mm fan to it to help keep cool
TV tuner card-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815293002
Looking to get this again 'cause I have hd dvd movies and can get them cheap- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-137-_-Product
I want this case-- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811204023 I like the shorter height

Well-got everything for my new setup(except for bluray drive) but now I have a dilemma. teh fins on my fanless 4850 are about an 1/8" to tall to close the case!!! I believe I can bend them down w/o to much problem, but theres a row of copper plates I have to contend with. Any ideas how I can do this(maybe grind them down???))

My htpc in sig:

Here are some pics of my Home theater that is in my room. I have a projector that projects onto my wall with 5.1 sound system. I have a 25 ft vga cable going to the projector and i use xbmc for my movies.

The front audio

By fusion509, shot with Canon PowerShot SD1000 at 2010-03-25

The Couch/bed

By fusion509, shot with Canon PowerShot SD1000 at 2010-03-25

Rear speaker mounted on the bed

By fusion509, shot with Canon PowerShot SD1000 at 2010-03-25

66in screen

By fusion509, shot with Canon PowerShot SD1000 at 2010-03-25

Hi, I am new here and thought I should contribute my HTPC built from a couple of years ago...

It's pretty straight forward:
Motherboard: Asus AT3IONT-I
Power Supply: Apevia ITX-AP250W
Hard Disk: Western Digital Scorpio Black 160GB
Blue Ray Player: HP (model number?)
OS: XBMCBuntu

The fun part was the case. This used to be a CD Transport, from a German company called T+A. It didn't work anymore, so I decided to recycle it for this HTPC built.

It's a nice steel case with solid 1/4 aluminum side panels; the steel case is about 16 gauge thick. It was quite a pain to make the cutout in the back for the connectors, and drill the holes on the side for the power-supply fan.

I decided to only put the connectors that I really ever used with this HTPC: HDMI, optical digital out, USB, and Ethernet.

I am a sort of a "metalsmith", and thus you see a few fancy metal parts in here, all custom cut by hand, brass and bronze. It's much more fun to make these yourself as opposed to hunting down fitting parts/brackets online of lesser quality

I also modified an old remote-control dongle that originally came with the XBox. It's actually a USB dongle, one just needs to figure out which cable is what, and solder a USB connector on it to connect to the MB. Once connected, it worked like a charm. I hid it behind the original LCD panel cover.

Of all the buttons at the front I only ever bothered to make the power button work. I also still need to glue the front CD cover-pate onto the CD Drive.

It all worked perfectly fine with HDMI and audio over the optical out. Until I pulled a cord from an amplifier and somehow ripped out the IEC socket... which caused a 120 volt shock all the way through the audio cables into the HTPC. The power supply was fried, but unfortunately also the MB.... a big bummer. 'now looking for a replacement MB, but it's hard to find one that's fanless and has HDMI?!?

Here some images:















In this picture you see the HTPC while I was testing it in its new environment. Notice the turntable... oh how much simpler technology used to be!

Cheers,
DrTebi

Solid post, awesome work, but holy thread necro!

its not much c2d e6600 2gb of ddr3 1333 160gb wd scorpio black hd5450
goes into my yamaha 5.1 receiver though hdmi

Need to take a pic of mine next time I take it out for a cleaning and/or upgrading.

WIP. Got to clean up some of the wiring, put an outlet behind the TV, and the Monitor 40s on the left will be my rear surround.

Finally put the outlet behind the TV. Just need to wire my roll of Cat5e throughout (that orange wire goes to my computer room) and some speaker wire for my rear speakers. Going to put some wire raceways for the fronts so it looks cleaner. Not sure what to do with the indoor antenna - maybe the attic if I can find a good spot for it up there.

quote failed, so this is regarding cullam3n's last picture in the post above mine.

How many HTPC's do you got? I count two cases, far left and a open computer on the top right.

btw, I like your setup.

the one without a case is his pfsense machine lol.

Squadfer said:

quote failed, so this is regarding cullam3n's last picture in the post above mine.

How many HTPC's do you got? I count two cases, far left and a open computer on the top right.

btw, I like your setup.

Click to expand...

Thanks

The open computer at the top right is my pfsense box like wagex said. I had to take it out of the case so I just set it up there for the time being. It's where my cable drop is, until I put another drop in the house.

Only have one HTPC (the one on the middle shelf). The one on the bottom I'm going to make a gaming computer for the TV.

ASRock P67 Extreme 4
i5 2500k
2x2GB DDR3 1333
Galaxy GTX 650 Ti BOOST™
Corsair CX430

It had 4x2GB in there but I took 2x2GB of it to go into my NAS, and took the 2x1GB in that and put it in the HTPC since it hardly uses anything. Just need to put a HDD in there, and a optical drive to cover up the open front tray.

In this age of cheap streaming boxes such as the Fire TV, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, etc. is anybody else still dedicating computers as HTPCs in 2016? I'd like to see what you've built. So I'm reviving this thread.

I recently upgraded my old Core 2 setup for my HTPC with a cheapo Fry's combo consisting of some board-of-the-week that they had on sale with an A4-7300 for $50, my first AMD build in about ten years. Running Windows 10 it's fairly snappy and with the Start screen set to fullscreen like how 8 was I have to say I'm pretty happy with it as far as a HTPC goes. I've always felt that the Windows 8-style Start screen was ideal for a ten-foot interface for a TV.








With the APU and no case fans it's a pretty quiet computer, far more quiet than the ten year old Intel setup, although I'd like to upgrade the stock fan to something larger to make the system as silent as possible. Suggestions for a replacement HSF are welcome.

benbaked said:

In this age of cheap streaming boxes such as the Fire TV, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, etc. is anybody else still dedicating computers as HTPCs in 2016? I'd like to see what you've built. So I'm reviving this thread.

I recently upgraded my old Core 2 setup for my HTPC with a cheapo Fry's combo consisting of some board-of-the-week that they had on sale with an A4-7300 for $50, my first AMD build in about ten years. Running Windows 10 it's fairly snappy and with the Start screen set to fullscreen like how 8 was I have to say I'm pretty happy with it as far as a HTPC goes. I've always felt that the Windows 8-style Start screen was ideal for a ten-foot interface for a TV.


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With the APU and no case fans it's a pretty quiet computer, far more quiet than the ten year old Intel setup, although I'd like to upgrade the stock fan to something larger to make the system as silent as possible. Suggestions for a replacement HSF are welcome.

Click to expand...

nope, ditched mine for an Amazon Fire TV, never looking back.