My new HTPC-like Diddy Tower

[WheresMyArtisan]

It's not strictly a HTPC, but I've been mucking about with my living room HTPC for years. I've always enjoyed the challenge of squeezing as much horsepower into as little space as possible. I needed a new "proper" computer for my desk so have basically built a performance HTPC that sits under my desk. The requirements were decent performance, small, quiet and cheap.

Specs...
A8-3870K overclocked (105MHz base clock, 848MHz inbuilt GPU, 3.2GHz CPU cores).
4GB 1866MHz memory running at 1980MHz.
Two 64GB SSDs as a RAID0 array.
DVD Drive and memory card reader
TV tuner card (an old recycled one)

I replaced the PSU fan with a decent, quiet twin ball bearing one. Both fans are normally around 600rpm, so very very quiet. Obviously things get noisier when doing 3D or heavy processing.

The two SSDs are in a twin bracket, so they both fit in one 3.5" drive slot. Amazingly, there's still space for another 3.5" drive underneath them. There is a front panel fan for the drives, but it's disconnected as I have SSDs only.

The sound mat is an old mouse mat that fits nicely after a bit of trimming. It doesn't make any difference to airflow and dulls the tiny bit of fan noise a bit.

I'm rather pleased with it - see what people think. The so-called "mini"-tower PC on the right is just for scale...

 

[MultiRoom]

I don't know how to break this to you but........ someone's nicked the MB out of your old tower.

Nice pics! There's nothing finer than assembling a load of bits and firing up for the first time.