Assassin's Simple/Beginner HTPC Buying Guide - Page 111

Go for it thats a great cpu.

Done deal. i5 + 1TB Drive will be picked up in the AM.

Sitting with this in my cart at the moment:



One thing missing:

[]Power Supply

Tempted to pick up a Corsair 430 but I'm a bit worried about the power and combining it with an i5....thoughts?

To be honest I'm just looking for an excuse to use the newegg 10% off code. Hmm...

Edit - just thought of another thing. I know lots of people use the stock i3 CPU cooler / fan. Would this same advice hold true for the i5? Or should I look into a cooler/fan for that?

If you plan to overclock you don't want to use the stock fan. At least not for more then maybe 3.8ghz.
But what fun is that, that chip can do around 4.8 at least I'd say. At least most can.

Popular low pro coolers.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103046
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835185129

The 430 will power that fine. Beware of really high DOA rates on those psu's. Also your going to need a graphics card with that set up. You chose P67 which can overclock but has no graphics.

I hadn't planned on overclocking, but if it is fairly simple I may go for it. I'll probably add that Shuriken, as it is a popular choice.

The DOA rate is concerning, I agree. Hmm...

Also, the mobo I choose (here) is an H series. Sorry for the small picture, probably hard to read it.

No need to worry about the upgrade from the i3 to i5? Thats my only concern.

No its fine. But I would take any of Assassin's recommended power supplies over the corasair 430. Man I keep reading those asus model numbers as "P"s instead of "H"s my bad. So no overclocking on that board. I would start with the stock cooler if you don't plan to oc. It should be fine. If your unhappy with the temps then change it.

Although that probably means you need to remove the motherboard.

Also with the Shuriken make sure to check if those ripjaws will fit under the heatsink. May want to get some ram with smaller heat sinks.

EDIT** Looks like they may have fixed the issue as before it seemed like every other review was a DOA. And I would take any PSU recommended by JonnyGuru.

Everything is going pretty good so far with the downloads and setup of my new HTPC.

Small snag. I am ripping some DVDs to my HDD via makeMKV and putting them into folders

E:\\Movies\\Name (Year)\\ movie.mkv

I am getting that to work great, using Media Master and its tagging them all and giving me all the data and backdrops.

However, I was trying to create a folder within a folder (Group) for a series "SAW"

So I did this:

E:\\Movies\\SAW
E:\\Movies\\SAW\\SAW I (2004)\\ movie.mkv
E:\\Movies\\SAW\\SAW II (2005)\\ movie.mkv
E:\\Movies\\SAW\\SAW III (2006)\\ movie.mkv
E:\\Movies\\SAW\\SAW IV (2007)\\ movie.mkv

On the main screen in MediaBrowser, the SAW folder shows up BUT WITHOUT cover art. If I click on the folder and go inside, all the movies inside HAVE cover art.

Question: How do I get the Group Folder to have a cover art? I tried putting a folder.jpg image in E:\\Movies\\SAW but that did not work.

Suggestions? What am I missing?

So no "Group or Series" Folders? I figured that was an easy solution, but didnt know if I could do what I was trying to do.

Reason is because I will eventually do same thing with TV series too.

Thanks Assassin..already made the changes...simple enough

Gotta love the egg...3 day standard shipping
Build is in progress...

-Apex MI-008 Case
-SB i3 2100t
-GIGABYTE GA-H67N-USB3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel H67
-G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 4GB (2 x 2GB)
-Samsung 1tb drive
-Samsung BR

The parts:

SB 2100t - lots of clearance to the PSU. With the PSU and BR drive installed, I would say only about 1/4 of the cpu has solid metal above it before the case.

Another angle:

Top view...maybe not quite as much clearance as I was thinking, too many power cables in they way:


I'm in process of transferring data off the 1tb drive so I can format and slide it in. If anyone wants see particular views, let me know soon Once it's together, I'm not taking it back apart. These mini-itx boards/cases don't have much room to manuever.

Assassin ... what settings are you using in Media Browser to get the following display:

(I understand this is the pearl plug-in and Coverart)

Pulled the trigger on everything except the SSD [3 or 4 different orders, each roughly $100 so I got a $25 discount on each one of them...spent quite a bit of time on Yahoo Account Creation ]. Sitting with this guy in my cart at $109 (134-25). Chances I'll regret this in a week or two or three?

No worries. Thanks man.

I'll pull the PSU back out and take some shots of the MB...let me know if there's anything more you would like to see...Barring any issues, I should have it up and running tomorrow.

I about to upgrade/build two gaming rigs based on Sandy Bridge. Not HTPCs but they can function as such.

Will be both Core i5-2500, one with a Radeon 6850 and the other with a Radeon 6950 2GB (can't believe this video card will have as much memory as my current gaming PC has system memory!)

I think either one will do 1080p Bluray rips with no problem.

Your idea should work I would think. Putting a folder.jpg in the saw folder. It would have to be done manually though like you did. There are some settings in MB about nested folders and stuff like that. For how far media browser should look into folders for videos. Adjusting them may help.

Its a great SSD I have 2.

Make sure to get the "K" versions. $15 more and they overclock like hell!!!

According to MediaBrowser's guide, nesting folders like the above should work fine. Their example is pretty much exactly what the poster was trying to do with his SAW movies, ie, you create a folder for the movie group with it's own folder.jpg (for something like boxset art) etc, and nested within that are the movies in their own folders with the individual folder.jpg etc for their own posters.

I tried it out by creating a SHERLOCK HOLMES folder with the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies each in their own folder within it and it worked fine. Like this:

C:\\MOVIES\\HOLMES folder.jpg (a pic of Rathbone)
C:\\MOVIES\\HOLMES\\SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE VOICE OF TERROR folder.jpg (a poster)

and so on. I got the pic of Rathbone in the top level of MB (under Movies, ofc), selecting that gave me the list of all of his films, as appropriate

I think that MB can act a little flakey at times though, given that it flatly refuses to display the folder.jpg for Season 1 of Thunderbirds, but works perfectly for an identical structure of another show. Aggravating.

I far prefer MB, not least because it does support nesting - well, so does XBMC, but they recommend you don;t do it in the file structure, but instead rely on it's Genre sorting and playlists etc so you have to get the metadata exactly right

I'd be interested in the settings you used for that to Assassin. How do you get a backdrop to display when you're browing through the movies? I only get backdrops when I select a movie and get the synopsis etc.

From the looks, you're using Stark Covers?

Maybe you're using a skin for MB, I'm not, just the basic one as supplied.

Hey whiteboy, I wanted to comment on your post yesterday when you were talking about graphics cards and/or overclocking, I'm not sure but I couldn't find it. Anyway, you sent somebody a link over to over locker.com and they had a list of the best gpu's. When I was researching parts for my Htpc 3-6 months ago the gtx 460 was the 4th-6th best gpu you could buy, depending on who you talked to. According to the new updated list the gtx 460 768mb is 29th place! Man, can you believe how fast things change in the computer world.

I had some issues with my first one, but the second one I have works great. Look into the Lenovo Keyboard, I've been using that as well and it works pretty good at a much lower price.

I don't overclock so I'll probably not get the K. If I remember correctly Intel screwed the pooch on this one anyway. The K versions have the better onboard graphics and are the only one that are overclocked yet those that would overclock would not use the onboard graphics.

Before installing my Samsung F4 2TB hard drive, I neglected to write down the information printed on the sticker. I can't recall for sure if there was a date printed on the drive. Unfortunately, the OEM clamshell plastic case does not contain any info.

I don't feel much like disassembling half the computer to get a look at the drive, so I am leaning towards installing the firmware update regardless if it is needed. In fact, I already created the boot CD with Samsung update file, following the instructions provided by Assassin. But I have two questions:

1) There is this link provided to the firmware update:

Per Samsung: "Patch tool for Identify fail during NCQ write command.(Model: F4EG)"
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...bbs_msg_id=386

But I also noticed this link for what seems to be the same issue but using a different file:

Per Samsung: "Patch tool for Identify fail during NCQ write command.(Model: F4EG HD204UI/JP)"
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...bbs_msg_id=387

Both links reference the HD204UI drive, although with some different suffix lettering. I just want to confirm, it is the former (msg_ID 386) and not the latter (msg_id 387) update that I should be installing?

2) The recommended update file F4EG has a file date of 14-Dec-2010. Given that is 4 months old, does anyone know if there is a more current file that should be used to update the firmware, or is that the latest?