New Build HTPC

[Cheesegeezer 3087]

@@Heckler

 

Loving the Pics mate, it looks lush that case!!! Amazing..... like PC Porn hahahhahaha.

[Heckler 147]

I finally got all the temps figured out for this FX6300... there's so much misinformation out there. A lot of people saying that these are only rated to 64º. So I contacted AMD about it and gave them some figures from HWiNFO64 program and AND Overdrive.

 

They told me that the upper recommended limit was 70º and that my temps were fine... albeit a little high for stress testing at a max of 64ºC (6ºC under the thermal margin)... But considering the case it's in and the very poor airflow and lack of exhaust fans... It's actually quite impressive. Mind you, that CPU fan at just over 3000rpm is way too noisy... But when stress testing the CPU levels out at 60-61ºC at that speed.

 

Under normal loads it's hitting 55ºC (15ºC under thermal margin), so I'm happy with that as the fan RPM never gets above 2100, which is still audible unfortunately. When it was cooling the old Athlon II X2 (3ghz), I don't think it ever rose above 1800rpm under normal use.

 

They also helped me figure out which sensor the HWiNFO64 was using to give the correct readings, and I matched that to the thermal margin readings in Overdrive and they matched up.

 

So I can now confirm that this CPU is idling at just 23ºC which is just 3-4ºC above ambient temps according to my heating thermostat... But the limitations of the Phenom II heatpipe cooler really show up when you realise that under stress testing I'm seeing a 40-42ºC jump. That new case and cooler should make a huge difference to those temps. I'm not expecting idle ones to drop, but I am expecting to see a 10ºC drop under stress testing... and off course not be hearing a damn thing from the fans.  

 

The GPU during all of this never topped 51ºC and 28% fan speed... But i think the most amazing part of the stress test was seeing that the max Watts consumed by the CPU when it was hitting 64ºC... was a meagre 56w and as you can see, at idle that drops to just 28w.

 

So I can stop worrying about those temps now, I was reading the wrong sensor and that was saying it was hitting 74ºC whilst the Overdrive software was still claiming I had headroom with the thermal margins.

 

I also experimented with turning of cores from the BIOS, disabling cores 5-6 to see what effect it had on power use and temps... and the result is a resounding... Zilch. I never saw more than a 1ºC difference on average and power use was the same.

 

Email from Amazon today to say the new cooler has been dispatched, I just need to decide on a fan splitter cable... Was thinking of this one.

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001J2YRUC/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A11V6WRCCP617O

 

I can't stand waiting... I want to put it all in te new case ASAP.  

 

 

 

[Heckler 147]

Feast your eyes @@Cheesegeezer  @@Luke @@trusselo

 

It's pretty damn quiet... but not as quiet as I was expecting, especially as right now I only have the 2 fans on the cooler and a single case fan (intake) going.  I am using the ULNA leads for the cooler so those fans are only at 1000rpm and the case fan is 900rpm... It's possible the low hum/whirr I can hear is the fan on the Radeon HD5670 graphics card... They only way to tell for sure is to remove it and use the onboard graphics and compare.

 

It comes apart so easy, but there are no easy thumb screws so be prepared to use a screw driver and little fiddly screws.

 

The cooler is awesome... Currently the idle temps are matching ambient temps around the 19-20ºC mark and when I stress tested it for 30 mins it never even hit 40ºC... That's a full 20-22ºC lower than with the old cooler, and using the lower speed setting for the fans.... Frickin AWESOME!!!

 

I love that the power LED has a slider just underneath the front panel to adjust it's brightness or turn it off altogether... and I love that the HD activity light is combined with the blue power light and so you get little flashes of purple as there is HD activity... I like purple so that was a bonus.  

 

Cons... it's actually pretty tight inside there once you've got 6 hard drives and an optical drive in there... and the optical drive puts paid to me turning the cooler to exhaust to the rear... because the power/sata cables will be connecting with the fan itself... Which is a real shame, as it is exhausting to the side isn't so bad because there is a grill there with a single 120mm fan, even though there's room for 2 fans side by side... Oddly all 3 case fans were set as intakes which is just daft. So the side fan was removed, flipped and moved over to the empty slot because that will grab 3/4 of the cooler fan rather than 1/4 in the other position.

 

I thought you'd be able to slip 10 drives in here... but sadly it's just 7, even though they advertise it as 8... There should be enough room for two SSD's above the optical drive... but it looks like they share the middle screw holes. Which is crazy as it restricts you to just one SSD up there. I'll need to revisit that and see if there are any holes hidden under the handle that I missed.

 

I've installed the USB 3.0 PCI-E card, just need to do some speed test on it to see it's running at full speed. I've got a USB3 16GB stick I can play with as that's given me between 130-160mb/s over the rear USB ports before.

 

I need to disconnect the bluray drive now that everything is installed... I only have 6 SATA ports on the board, and I've fitted 6 drives... until the SATA expansion card comes I can live without the optical drive, I've got 1100+ movies on there and around 11000 episodes of TV shows, 110GB of music and XXXGB of... erm.. adult content.  

 

Sorry for the crappy pics, phone in low light is not very good and a small screen means sometimes you don't catch that a pic is just slightly blurry.

 

 

 

 

Still got some cable management to do. There is a very handy little box underneath that I've routed a lot of cables through, but there are limits to how much to can fit in there. I also need to order some new SATA cables as all of the ones I have are between 40-50cm long, and I need some closer to 25cm. I'll order 6 at once when I find the right ones, I want retention clips on all of them and 45º connectors on one end only... Preferably round ones too, so I can easily zip tie them together.

 

Had to put the Noctua badge in the lower right corner, it's a quality metal badge too not some cheap printed sticker like you get with the AMD CPU... I do want to get a nice Bluray badge for the optical drive cover though, there are two drive bays and I just want to make it clear which one is in use.

 

That's also a niggle for me, at the moment (when it's plugged in) the optical drive doesn't operate from the button on the case. I've adjusted the slider inside and it's definitely pushing the button, but it's not enough to activate it;.. I'll need to address that, might be as simple as moving the drive a couple of mm closer as there is some adjustment in the fitment screw holes... or the button could require more pressure than the case one is able to give.

 

 

 

This is the brightest the power light gets, which is perfect because on the old media center case it was bright enough to blind you, I had to put tape over it... This is perfect, and you can adjust the slider underneath to dim it even further if you want.

 

 

 

One final thing... Because the cooler is keeping this thing below 40ºC under a full load... I've reactivated the Turbo feature, so when needed it will go to 3.8ghz at the moment... I thought it was supposed to go to 4.1ghz... So need to look into that.

Edited April 28, 2014 by Heckler

[Cheesegeezer 3087]

That is frickin awesome!!! Loving it. I like that you stress tested it and saw pretty low increase in temps. You're probably right about the hum being the gfx card.

 

I'm really please for you bud. Nice job!!!

 

Now go and tidy those cables lol

[Heckler 147]

I just recorded a read speed of a little over 200mb/s from the 16GB Sandisk USB 3.0 drive I have... Using the PCI-E USB 3.0 card I added, and that's from the front ports on the case, not the 2 extra ports on the rear of the card itself. That's actually quicker than the mechanical drives across the internal SATAIII controller.

 

Write speeds aren't so good, I'm only getting 60-70mb/s over USB 3.0, more a limitation of the drive I would think.

 

Mind you, I do need to check if all 6 SATA ports are SATAIII which they should be in this day and age... I'll be royally pissed if that's the case... Not that it's essential as the two 1.5TB drives are SATAII but are going to be replaced with 3TB SATA III drives at some point.

 

I tested it reading the same 1.5GB video file from the thumb drive to each of the internal hard drives (except the SSD) and obviously the SATA III drives recorded the higher speeds, but the SATA II ones still got up into the mid 150mb/s ranges.

Edited May 1, 2014 by Heckler

[Cheesegeezer 3087]

@@Heckler

 

Pretty impressive. Can i ask what software(s) you use to test all these things.

 

I bit the bullet and ordered the R9 270 Vapor-x GFX card. I better put up some figures like you have when i rebuild mine.

[Heckler 147]

I'm not using anything except the windows copy function @@Cheesegeezer   

 

I'm not putting up any figures for my vid card... it's a 5670.  

[Heckler 147]

Digging up an old thread from the past as I made a change to my hardware and it's not worth a new thread... one change to the server and a bigger change to the gaming rig.

 

Due to my gaming rig getting a rootkit infection... I decided it was time for an upgrade if I was going to have to reinstall windows anyway... tried everything and then some and rootkit still persists... quarantined... but still there on reboot.

 

 

A friend just built a new gaming rig so had his old stuff going spare... Sold it to me for £20 plus postage.

 

My gaming rig is almost 5yrs old now.

 

ASUS M4A79 XTD EVO motherboard with Xfire is being replaced with an ASUS M5A88 board, it's the mATX board and has no Xfire... But seeing as I upgraded the old Xfire 5770's for a single R9 280X over Xmas... Not a problem for now.

 

 

CPU was a Phenom II X4 955BE... 3.2ghz that ran perfectly fine at 3.5ghz, could go higher but I wanted rock sold without a voltage increase... Now the CPU he sold me was a 4 core FX4170 @ 4.2ghz (4.4 turbo)... But I am putting that one in the media server and using the 6 core FX6300 for the gaming rig. It's only 3.5ghz and 4.1ghz turbo... But they overclock nicely and I plan on sitting this one at about 4ghz and turning turbo off.

 

Everything else remains the same for now.

 

It's a temp upgrade... I was saving for a new motherboard, cpu upgrade and probably throwing in a decent SSD and hydro cooled AIO setup... But car failed it's MoT badly, was going to cost £700 to repair, but only cost £340 in the end... But upgrade plans were dead in the water.

 

Maybe later in the year I'll get ASUS Sabretooth board I wanted... CPU will be good for a while now, but I'd love to add a second R9 280X for Xfire again... So add a more powerful PSU into the equation as 550W isn't going to cut it with 2 of them... 800W will be needed.

[rick355 3]

I had been contemplating building a Mini ITX based PC for use as an HTPC in my bedroom. Very small form factor so it could sit up on a shelf up above my wall mounted 37" sharp TV. Well I came across one of these. http://www.asus.com/us/ASUS_VivoPC/VivoPC_VM60/   It's only 8" x 8" and about 2" tall. I found  one of the i3 models on sale for $369 at Frys. It came with win8.1 preinstalled with a 500gig HD. I upgraded the HD to a 1TB Seagate that I also found on sale at Frys for $39.99! I had been using WMC and win8.1 doesn't come with it so I upgraded to 8.1 pro with WMC. Did a fresh install and it's been working like a champ! I also added 4gig of ram that I found on ebay for $25. This is my 3rd HTPC, my other 2 are running intel DG45ID boards, core2duo's with 6450 graphics cards and 8 gigs ram, and they run really good!

[Heckler 147]

What's the power useage like on one of those?  I've noticed that the 4170 in my media server is a little more power hungry than the 6300 I took out. Would be nice to get a little system that can sit behind the TV in the bedroom and allow me to move the server back downstairs... It's gotta be ultra quiet though.