I decided recently to upgrade both my desktop PC and my Home Theatre PC to Sandy Bridge, so thought I'd post some photos and stuff here for your amusement.
Goals:
Here's what I chose:
For my Desktop PC:
For my HTPC:
Let's start with my desktop PC.
I've moved house since my last build and decided to bring along my 19" 12U rackmount cabinet, even though I have fewer rooms now. It's great for squeezing in lots of electronics into a small(ish) space. It's now sporting a Playstation 3 too.
It has a 24 port patch panel and 16 port managed Gigabit switch (Dell PowerConnect 2716). My apartment is cabled up with cat-6, so this also connects up to another switch in my living room as well as my wireless router and VOIP box.
The new motherboard has no IDE ports so I junked the DVD writer as it never got used. This frees up space for better cable management. My old 250Gb hard drive is still in place in a Scythe Quiet Drive enclosure and I'm reusing my Xilence Office Edition 460W Semi Fanless PSU. Both the Vertex 3 SSD and the hard drive are connected to SATA 6Gb/s ports.
I also reused the Noctua NH-9U heatsink from my old PC. Massive thumbs-up to Noctua - they sent me a conversion kit (NM-I3) free-of-charge all the way from Austria to allow me to use my 4 year old heatsink on the LGA1155. Seriously impressive and I will definitely buy a Noctua heatsink next time!
The Noctua is easy to fit, but does require removal of the motherboard in order to fit a backplate.
Gratuitous picture of my OCZ Vertex 3. Droooool. Benchmarks later...
My room is quite small so I found a glass corner desk that is just big enough for my three Dell 2007FP monitors. These give me a desktop resolution of 4800x1200.
But three monitors is never enough! I bought an Optoma HD67 DLP projector for movies and TV. I fitted it on a floating shelf and ran the power and HDMI cable inside the wall. The projector is absolutely the best component I've bought!
This rocks! It casts a 75" image next to the three monitors.
Toggle bolts just to make sure it doesn't rip itself off the wall and result in my untimely death.
Just a quick mention of my VIA EPIA EN12000E. I built this 4 years ago mainly for Network Attached Storage. It's still running perfectly (now with a vLited Windows 7 instead of Debian) with the main OS on an industrial 8Gb Compact Flash card. Current uptime is over 400 days!
Continued...
Goals:
- Fast desktop PC for web browsing, photo editing and general use (don't really play games)
- Quiet HTPC for live TV, movies and music
- Low power consumption
- Reuse some of the old components
Here's what I chose:
For my Desktop PC:
- Core i5-2500K
- MSI P67A-G45 motherboard
- 2x2Gb Corsair Vengence DDR3 1600Mhz 1.50V
- 2xAMD Radeon HD6450 DDR3 512Mb
- 120Gb OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
- TBS8290 DVB-S2 PCI satellite card
For my HTPC:
- Core i3-2100T
- MSI H61MU-E35 motherboard
- 1x4Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333Mhz 1.50V
- TBS6981 dual DVB-S2 PCI-E satellite card
Let's start with my desktop PC.
I've moved house since my last build and decided to bring along my 19" 12U rackmount cabinet, even though I have fewer rooms now. It's great for squeezing in lots of electronics into a small(ish) space. It's now sporting a Playstation 3 too.
It has a 24 port patch panel and 16 port managed Gigabit switch (Dell PowerConnect 2716). My apartment is cabled up with cat-6, so this also connects up to another switch in my living room as well as my wireless router and VOIP box.
The new motherboard has no IDE ports so I junked the DVD writer as it never got used. This frees up space for better cable management. My old 250Gb hard drive is still in place in a Scythe Quiet Drive enclosure and I'm reusing my Xilence Office Edition 460W Semi Fanless PSU. Both the Vertex 3 SSD and the hard drive are connected to SATA 6Gb/s ports.
I also reused the Noctua NH-9U heatsink from my old PC. Massive thumbs-up to Noctua - they sent me a conversion kit (NM-I3) free-of-charge all the way from Austria to allow me to use my 4 year old heatsink on the LGA1155. Seriously impressive and I will definitely buy a Noctua heatsink next time!
The Noctua is easy to fit, but does require removal of the motherboard in order to fit a backplate.
Gratuitous picture of my OCZ Vertex 3. Droooool. Benchmarks later...
My room is quite small so I found a glass corner desk that is just big enough for my three Dell 2007FP monitors. These give me a desktop resolution of 4800x1200.
But three monitors is never enough! I bought an Optoma HD67 DLP projector for movies and TV. I fitted it on a floating shelf and ran the power and HDMI cable inside the wall. The projector is absolutely the best component I've bought!
This rocks! It casts a 75" image next to the three monitors.
Toggle bolts just to make sure it doesn't rip itself off the wall and result in my untimely death.
Just a quick mention of my VIA EPIA EN12000E. I built this 4 years ago mainly for Network Attached Storage. It's still running perfectly (now with a vLited Windows 7 instead of Debian) with the main OS on an industrial 8Gb Compact Flash card. Current uptime is over 400 days!
Continued...
Last edited:
