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A pic of what works as my main pc and the closest thing i have to a htpc at the moment.
Specs:
Opteron 1218
tf550 am2
4g ddr800 gskill and supertalent
320g sata
samsung sata dvd rw internal
Xbox 360 HDDVD drive external
MSI 7900gs hdcp
Avermedia m150d analog tuner
HdHomerun (still working on making it work)
Alpha cool wc setup for cpu only
st85zf psu
aerocool spiral galaxys case
22" and 24" acer lcd's
 

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Here's my contribution:

My HTPC consists of my some older S939 parts:
DFI Lanparty UT Ultra-D
AMD 3800x2 @ 2.8ghz
2x1gb Muskin XP4000 Redline + 2x1gb Corsair TWINX2048-3200PRO @ DDR510
eVGA 7900gs
Coolermaster GeminII heatsink, Thermalright HR-05 chipset cooler
2x500GB WD Caviar16 + 2x500gb Hitachi Deskstar 7K500
OCZ 600w Gamestream PSU
Thermaltake Matrix case, 2x120mm Antec Tricool fans
Nec 3520A DVD drive
Logitech Dinovo Edge keyboard
Samsung LNT5265
Yamaha HTRN-5060
Logitech Harmony 880 remote

Sorry for the crappy pic. :)
 

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Here ya go!!!

got a Rocketfish bluetooth keyboard and mouse-waiting on my LG blu-ray-hd dvd combo drive to arrive!!!! OH and its hooked to a Samsung 52" lcd.. Bioshock has never looked so good!!!!
 

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please excuse the wiring, its all over the place:p

IMG_1119_small.jpg
 
OK finally decided to post some pics up of my hometheater setup...

(for info on the speakers check it out HERE)

OK my htpc is in my sig but heres the details..

Lian Li PC-6070 Silent
E4300 ocd to 3ghz and undervolted to 1.25v (1.325v is stock)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L w/ custom made Vreg heatsinks (not pictured)
2x1 GB Crucial DDR2 667 4-4-4-12
Evga 7600GT KO 256mb PCIE gfx card
80GB seagate PATA hd
ATI TV wonder elite
and an older Enermax 350w psu.

I custom made a socket 775 backplate and mounting hardware for my socket 478 thermalright SI-120 ... detailed HERE

I use Media portal as a front end (simply AMAZING front end i might add) and an Ati Remote Wonder plus to control it. I also use nvidia purevideo audio and video codecs as well as ffdshow with upscalling goodies, hence the reason i needed to overclock my e4300 to 3ghz. The connection to the tv is via an HDMI cable with a dvi to hdmi dongle, and i connect to the receiver via coaxial SPDIF from the onboard rear IO pannel

Pics of the comp
P2170049.JPG


hd mounting system... i hate hd noise!
COMP%20005.JPG


Pics of the HT steup.
rears (just plain crappy pic)
IMG_0333.JPG


EDIT... forgot the fronts! and htpc
w_o_grills_front.jpg
 
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Mine has changed a lot in the last few months, here's the latest images;

dsc02129oo5.jpg

My rig and projector are all close together now, makes it easier to do things.

dsc02131kw0.jpg

It's hard to see just how big the screen is but you can see my cat there for perspective, it's just over 155"

dsc02135ew8.jpg

My living room is over 18ft long so you can see the effect it has.

dsc02134zf6.jpg

I love HD sources on LCD's, they look so much better. :)
 
My setup

Time to show off my goods!

Starting in the office...

p2040301ig9.jpg


You can see my wrap-around desk config. My son is playing Spiderman on my old PC. It's a 3.0c P4 OC'd to 3.6 on stock voltage w/ an X800XT AIW. Still plays most of the games my son likes at 1680x1050 and has no problems acting as a HTPC if my son wants to watch movies by himself. It does heat up the room more than even my behemoth, though. Here's the inside:

p4060020en4.jpg



Moving around to the right we have the file server. 4 x 640GB WD HDDs, & an old IDE 250GB HDD for cache gives me almost 2TB of usable storage w/ lots of room for easy growth due to the unRAID software. I'm still in the process of moving all my DVDs to the server. Only ~200 have been moved across so far.

p9260172dw2.jpg


p9260170nm2.jpg


I actually have a better HS in there now, but it isn't needed. This thing really sips the juice:

pb180191xl1.jpg


It's a E5200 & a P43 MSI Neo3-F I have it underclocked to 2GHz (333x6) at 0.88v.


Coming around we come to my main rig (and company laptop). See sig for details.

p2040304sg3.jpg



Continued...
 
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My setup continued...

Moving into the adjacent room (living room/home theater) we get to my HTPC setup! Here is my Sanyo PLV-Z4 720P projector:

p2040305ch2.jpg


Notice the concealed wiring:

p2040306qy4.jpg


Below you can see the surround speakers (all speakers are Paradigm). I had to go 6.1 b/c using 7.1 would have been difficult due to the open area toward the kitchen. All the wiring is hidden in the walls. 10AWG w/ hand soldered gold connectors to a triple-gang faceplate behind the entertainment center.

p2040309yt7.jpg


Here is the front shot. Screen is 95" diagonal viewable custom-made 'Light-Fusion' which uses a Mississippi-mud painted acrylic mirror to ensure all available light is reflected back towards the viewer.

p2040307wa4.jpg



Close-up of entertainment center. I built this thing as a temporary fix when we moved in. My brother-in-law promised to build us a custom cherry entertainment center. I bought the raw wood, and he did get started...but then he got my sister pregnant. It's been 2 years now. We are currently looking for something that will fit...

p2040311pr9.jpg


You can see the triple-gang faceplate on the wall behind the equipment. Also pictured is the PVR for the satellite dish, the IR receiver for the HTPC, my modded Wii, DVD player, modded PS2, component A/V switch, and 7.1 receiver. I recently retired my VCR, and tape deck.

p2040312xp0.jpg


Here are the guts of the HTPC. Its an E5200 & a P5Q-EM OC'd to 3.6GHz (300x12). No optical drives..don't need them. DVDs can be played on my DVD player, but most movies will come from the server. I just used an old IDE 40GB HDD for the OS...again the main storage is in the server. I think I'm going to put my extra gfx card in here eventually so that some games can be played out here. I used to have my main rig pull double-duty as my main rig and a HTPC w/ some creative wiring, but w/ a dedicated PC for HT it is much easier to control and I can still game or OC while my wife/son watches a movie.

One remote to rule them all! Well I guess it's really 2...I also have a IR keyboard to go on the web and what not.

p2040310bq2.jpg


This is what pulls it all together. Before I had a remote for the projector, stereo, PVR, etc. I programmed the PVR remote to control most other things, but it could never control the projector, and a lot of the more advanced controls were impossible to program. The Logitech 880 is easy to program, and the macros are easy to setup. 1 button, and the system automatically turns on the right gear and turns off unneeded gear...even the HTPC!

When the HTPC is turned on (actually it just wakes up from sleep) it goes right into Vista64-MediaCenter. Here is a shot of the movie selection screen:

p2040313cg3.jpg



And here is the money shot!

p2040314nv4.jpg


Edit: just noticed I need to re-align the projector...
 
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Just reorganised, rebuilt, re-jigged everything...


HPTCMANAGEDANDCLEAN.jpg

Specs are now as my main rig in the sig, I have really struggled with wires, there is one power receptacle in my room, which sucks real bad.


I got some power usage figures too..

80W Desktop Idle
85W Mediaportal Idle
90W Playing TV or Movies
7.5W S3 Standby
 
alright, here's an old pic of my dedicated HT that I built about a year ago (I have a build progress thread over @ avsforum). I'll post up some newer pics later on included the new living room setup (HTPC, speakers, AVR, etc.)

68.jpg


Epson home cinema 1080UB projector
100" Elite CineWhite screen
Yamaha RX-V1800
Full Definitive Technology speakers: BP7006 x 2, CLR2300, BP1.2x x 2, and a SuperCubeI sub.
Panamax 5300 power conditioner
Harmony 1000 remote
Wii
PS3
etc.
 
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and here's the living room and bedroom

the living room HTPC is also working as my PVR server.

Antec Fusion Black (my personal fav htpc case!)
P5Q-EM, E8400, Mini Ninja, Seagate 1.5TB HDD, LG bluray/DVD burner, HVR-950 OTA HD tuner, HD-PVR tuner for DirecTV STB.

Connect to the Onkyo via single HDMI and Onkyo to TV also via HDMI.

1.jpg


4yrs old 52" Samsung 720p HDTV (next on the upgrade list)
Onkyo 606
Mirage Omnisat OS3 5.0 speakers (2x FS, 1x CC, 2x SAT)
Velodyne SPL-800 sub
(the whole sound system was my last year's x'mas gift from....................me :D )
Harmony 880

3.jpg


and the bedroom basic HTPC client.

Shuttle XPC, E6600, ATI 2600Pro w/ HIS Ice cooler, cheap 42" Sceptre HDTV and cheap LG 2.1 sound system, Harmony 520.

also connect from the HTPC to TV via a single HDMI cable.

2.jpg


and my home main media server. running WHS and store all of my media files (music, movies, tv series, pics, etc.), and also backing up my whole house PCs.

Antec 300 case, used/old E2180, used/old P35-DS3, 2GB ram, 2x WD 1TB Green HDD, 1x WD 750GB AAKS, have another 750GB Seagate 7200.10 from my previous living room HTPC going in it soon.

4.jpg


I'm going to do a detail write up thread and post more pics 'bout my home media setup. :cool:
 
Well here goes...
IMG_0030.jpg
Living room is in an older cooler master desktop case (ATC-620-BX1). Specs - 2.66 Core 2 duo@stock, 2GB corsair DDR2, MSI 9400M motherboard, Hauppauge PVR 150 for the satellite tuner and a Pinnacle PCTV HD for OTA HD, 1TB western digital SATA drive, external dual layer DVD burner, 50" samsung TV (connected via HDMI), Logitech Z680 speaker system, OS is Vista Ultimate and I use Vista Media Center with the My Movies plugin. It streams most it's media from the server in my room over a Gb connection. One of these days I'll get some real cable management going on :D

Speaking of the server...
IMG_0032.jpg
Case is an Antec Nine Hundred, the power supply is some generic norwood micro that's been my workhorse PSU for years. Motherboard is a pretty basic foxconn (forgot the model) with an A64 3700+ and 512MB DDR 400. The system won't post/boot without a video card so it has an ancient voodoo2 to serve the purpose though the system has never had a monitor hooked up. I added a second NIC and use the system as my firewall/router as well. Storage is 4x1TB Western Digital SATA drives in a software RAID 5 using the onboard ports and is served to the LAN via the onboard Gb NIC and 5 port Gb switch. The OS runs on an old 80GB seagate PATA drive. The server runs Gentoo for the OS and serves up files via Samba (windows file sharing protocol) and Mediatomb for UPNP aware devices (PS3/360/etc.) It also runs Subsonic for a web based music server so I can listen to my music at work. The server also has a stripped out XP install that runs in a vmware virtual machine solely for running uTorrent. I have yet to find a linux torrent client that is as configurable as uTorrent and I hate leaving another machine on all day/night just for torrenting.

Now for the newest addition...
IMG_0031.jpg
I know it's a bit overkill but I felt like a media center for the garage would be nice since I spend a LOT of time out there. A former client abandoned the computer because it only had a bad hard drive. I threw in an old drive and wireless card I had lying around an voila. It streams media from the server as well via the wireless. System is a 3.0Ghz P4, 1.25GB of RAM, 40GB hard drive, ATI x300 video, netgear wireless card and onboard everything else. The OS is Vista Ultimate. The sound is hooked up to the receiver with the speakers mounted near the ceiling. I actually really like this set up and its nice not having to go inside and getting my nice keyboard all greasy if I need to look stuff up online, Having all my music and movies available is nice as well. The screen is 19" LCD w/ wallmount I got for $20 when Compusa closed here.
 
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The PITA of Media

Specs:
Specs
Intel E8200
Gskill 2gb ram
Lite-ON DVD+-RW
WD 640GB BLACK
Anyware MCE Remote
Galaxy 9800gt (non reference)
Happage 1250
Linksys Wifi G
X-FI xtrememusic
ARK Black Aluminum / Steel HTPC 400BA Case
Coolermaster Silent pro M 600w

Heatsinks:
HR-01 4u
HR-03 r600
HR-05
HR-05 IFX SLI
HR-07 duo Low
HR-09 Type 2 X 2 qty
HR-09 Type 3
HR-11

Fans
Exhaust Scythe KAZE JYU SLIM SY1012SL12L 100mm
Intake Panaflo 92x25mm 2100rpm FBA09A12L1BX modded to 5v @ 875rpm
Exhaust 135mm fan in PSU 800 - variable fan

Accessories:
Lamptron case damping foam
Lamptron PC silencing kit
Techflex non fray sleeving
Thermaltake sleeving
3m thermaltape
3m ceramic thermal pad
Krylon Black spray paint
Vespar Gold spray paint

Mods:
Months of planning before deciding on hardware to use for the build. Interior spray painted case. No Stock heat sinks anywhere. Passive build relies solely on negative pressure under airflow path cooling (similar to most dell systems). Custom spray painted gold I/o back side and pci parts. Black spray paint for some pci parts for black pcb.

Time to make this? Over a month.
How much I spent? Too embarrassing to say, you do the math.
Why it's called it PITA? It was PITA during installation, that's why.
More to come for images and updates. Subscribe people Smile









 
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Newly assembled HTPC. Been using it for about a week as a desktop. Still waiting on TV money.

htpc3.jpg


htpc2.jpg


htpc1.jpg


AMD Athlon X2 5050e 2.5GHz 45W (Will be upgraded to Phenom II X4 when the 65W versions finally come out this fall)
Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P AM2/AM2+/AM3
G.Skill 4x1GB PC6400 DDR2-800
Sapphire Radeon 4670
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (100 OS, 900 Storage) (have 20 drive server for actual storage, see below the htpc in first pic)
NEC 16x DVDRW (IDE lol)
Encore ENLWI-N Wireless N card (3 antennas) (not pictured, placed in last PCI slot next to PSU)
Nexus Value 430W PSU (silent)
Nexus Real Silent 80mm Fan x 2
Silverstone LC17 Black
 
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