Here is a cautionary tale for all those who are contemplating upgrading their perfectly-functional HTPC for something newer and jazzier. Remember, if it ain't broke....
My old HTPC was a P4 2.4, 512Gb RAM, Asus P4PE mb, Radeon 9000 fanless video card, M-Audio AP2496, Hauppauge PVR250, 2xSeagate 80Gb hard drives, and a Plextor DVD+R drive. It was contained in a PSI Vision II case, which I believe is not sold anymore. Power was from a Nexus 300W quiet PSU. I also had an IRMan IR receiver. This was hooked up to a Sony AV receiver and a 56" Samsung DLP RPTV.
Major software was: Theatertek2, SageTV, JR Media Center 10, plus web browsing and other misc. stuff. No FFDshow used. OS was WinXP SP2.
System was running stable 24/7. Main reason for upgrading was lack of drive space, plus I wanted to do some gaming on the big screen (mainly UT2004 and HL2).
Also, I wanted a smaller and lighter case. The Vision2 has a door that folds down to cover the external optical drives, and I am not much of a fan of that design. Also, I feared for the life of my shelves that the HTPC rested on, since they were glass and starting to bow in the center.
Now, the smart way to upgrade probably would have been to simply get a faster video card and processor, plus "upgrade" the sound card to something a bit better suited for games. Then build a separate media server.
Instead, I decided to use the parts of my HTPC to build a server. I used everything except the DVD+R, hard drives, and sound card (no need for sound in a media server). I purchased an Adaptec 2410 SATA RAID enclosure kit, which is a 4-drive controller card plus hard drive cage. I also purchased 4x300Gb Maxtor SATA drives for the RAID5 setup, plus a 200Gb ATA drive as OS/PVR disk. I had an old server case, a spare Lite-on DVDROM drive, old 15" monitor, and cheap keyboard and mouse. That setup is running fine. I have SageTV and JRMC music server running on that.
For my new HTPC, I planned it around the Silverstone LC11 case. I really like the design of it, it certainly is a beautiful case. Unfortunately, it only supports mATX boards, and only comes with a 240W PSU. Trying to find a mATX board that supports recent processors is difficult. My first choice was an Athlon64, but mATX boards seemed to be virtually non-existent. My next thought was Intel, but I was worried about the heat and power requirements of the Prescott CPU, and all the boards are PCI-E. The case uses a riser, and they only include an AGP riser, not a PCI-E.
I finally settled on an Aopen Pentium M board and 2GHz Pentium M CPU. For video I chose 6600GT AGP, and for sound M-Audio Revolution 5.1. Re-use the DVDR and one of the 80Gb hard drives.
To keep it quiet, I chose to re-use my Zalman 7000 HSF, plus get the new VF700 video card cooler.
This is when I ran into the first big obstacle. The riser card that comes with the case places the AGP card in the lowest slot, closest to the bottom of the case (remember that the motherboard is placed upside down in this case). Unfortunately, there is not much room between the AGP card and the case bottom. Which meant that the back bracket on the VF700 would hit the case bottom. At first I thought I could force it closed, but that caused the AGP card to bend quite a bit, which can't be good for it. So I ended up cutting out a slot for the bracket on the case bottom.
Next problem was that, because the bottom slot was so close to the bottom of the case, the cutout of the slot was partially blocked by the case edge, and the DVI cable couldn't be plugged in without forcing the video card upward a bit. I did that (luckily, the DVI port was the one further from the edge connector, so it had a bit more wiggle room)
So, time to boot up. TV showed "No signal. Please check connection." Crap. Checked connections, everything looked fine. Got a VGA cable and hooked up the onboard video to the TV. It works. Installed the bare XP ok, but powered down before installing drivers because I wanted to figure out why the video card wasn't working. Did I damage it when I was trying to get the case closed?
Unplugged the card, put it in the upstairs computer, and it worked flawlessly. Hmm. Took the video card from the upstairs computer (Radeon 9800Pro) and put it in the HTPC. Couldn't hook up the DVI cable because of interfence with the case lip, so used VGA. It worked. Wierd. Maybe it is the case or the riser? Ripped out the contents and put it back into my old case. Put the 6600GT back in, I got video signal. Yay! For a few minutes, then the video suddenly cut out and I get the dreaded "No signal" message again. Crap again. Thinking it might be the Zalman video cooler, I put the stock cooler back on, no difference. Video would work for a few minutes, then lose signal.
Put the Radeon back in, figuring it was better than nothing. Continued with the XP installation and installing drivers. Computer crashed. Rebooted, same thing. Decided to reformat and reinstall. Install went well, then when computer rebooted, it would load the OS halfway then hang. Triple Crap.
I remain at this point, not sure of what to do next. The motherboard seems to work fine with the onboard video (yes, I tried disabling this, no difference) but does not seem to like video cards. The case is nice, and it is very quiet. But the problems with the video card fitment could have been eliminated if they only gave the case an exta 1/4" of height, or made the AGP riser to use the middle of the three horizontal cutouts rather than the bottom.
At this point, I am looking into getting an Intel 925-based motherboard and P4 3.2GHz chip. Hopefully, the PSU can handle this. Plus, get a PCI-E version of the 6600GT. I have found some PCI-E risers available online, which should line up with the middle cutout so I can avoid the lip of the case. For cooling, might have to go with the Zalman Reserator if I want to keep it quiet. Good thing about the motherboard is that it offers Dolby Digital Live, so I won't even need a sound card.
Sorry about the long post. Just very frustrating upgrade when I had a perfectly functional HTPC before.
My old HTPC was a P4 2.4, 512Gb RAM, Asus P4PE mb, Radeon 9000 fanless video card, M-Audio AP2496, Hauppauge PVR250, 2xSeagate 80Gb hard drives, and a Plextor DVD+R drive. It was contained in a PSI Vision II case, which I believe is not sold anymore. Power was from a Nexus 300W quiet PSU. I also had an IRMan IR receiver. This was hooked up to a Sony AV receiver and a 56" Samsung DLP RPTV.
Major software was: Theatertek2, SageTV, JR Media Center 10, plus web browsing and other misc. stuff. No FFDshow used. OS was WinXP SP2.
System was running stable 24/7. Main reason for upgrading was lack of drive space, plus I wanted to do some gaming on the big screen (mainly UT2004 and HL2).
Also, I wanted a smaller and lighter case. The Vision2 has a door that folds down to cover the external optical drives, and I am not much of a fan of that design. Also, I feared for the life of my shelves that the HTPC rested on, since they were glass and starting to bow in the center.
Now, the smart way to upgrade probably would have been to simply get a faster video card and processor, plus "upgrade" the sound card to something a bit better suited for games. Then build a separate media server.
Instead, I decided to use the parts of my HTPC to build a server. I used everything except the DVD+R, hard drives, and sound card (no need for sound in a media server). I purchased an Adaptec 2410 SATA RAID enclosure kit, which is a 4-drive controller card plus hard drive cage. I also purchased 4x300Gb Maxtor SATA drives for the RAID5 setup, plus a 200Gb ATA drive as OS/PVR disk. I had an old server case, a spare Lite-on DVDROM drive, old 15" monitor, and cheap keyboard and mouse. That setup is running fine. I have SageTV and JRMC music server running on that.
For my new HTPC, I planned it around the Silverstone LC11 case. I really like the design of it, it certainly is a beautiful case. Unfortunately, it only supports mATX boards, and only comes with a 240W PSU. Trying to find a mATX board that supports recent processors is difficult. My first choice was an Athlon64, but mATX boards seemed to be virtually non-existent. My next thought was Intel, but I was worried about the heat and power requirements of the Prescott CPU, and all the boards are PCI-E. The case uses a riser, and they only include an AGP riser, not a PCI-E.
I finally settled on an Aopen Pentium M board and 2GHz Pentium M CPU. For video I chose 6600GT AGP, and for sound M-Audio Revolution 5.1. Re-use the DVDR and one of the 80Gb hard drives.
To keep it quiet, I chose to re-use my Zalman 7000 HSF, plus get the new VF700 video card cooler.
This is when I ran into the first big obstacle. The riser card that comes with the case places the AGP card in the lowest slot, closest to the bottom of the case (remember that the motherboard is placed upside down in this case). Unfortunately, there is not much room between the AGP card and the case bottom. Which meant that the back bracket on the VF700 would hit the case bottom. At first I thought I could force it closed, but that caused the AGP card to bend quite a bit, which can't be good for it. So I ended up cutting out a slot for the bracket on the case bottom.
Next problem was that, because the bottom slot was so close to the bottom of the case, the cutout of the slot was partially blocked by the case edge, and the DVI cable couldn't be plugged in without forcing the video card upward a bit. I did that (luckily, the DVI port was the one further from the edge connector, so it had a bit more wiggle room)
So, time to boot up. TV showed "No signal. Please check connection." Crap. Checked connections, everything looked fine. Got a VGA cable and hooked up the onboard video to the TV. It works. Installed the bare XP ok, but powered down before installing drivers because I wanted to figure out why the video card wasn't working. Did I damage it when I was trying to get the case closed?
Unplugged the card, put it in the upstairs computer, and it worked flawlessly. Hmm. Took the video card from the upstairs computer (Radeon 9800Pro) and put it in the HTPC. Couldn't hook up the DVI cable because of interfence with the case lip, so used VGA. It worked. Wierd. Maybe it is the case or the riser? Ripped out the contents and put it back into my old case. Put the 6600GT back in, I got video signal. Yay! For a few minutes, then the video suddenly cut out and I get the dreaded "No signal" message again. Crap again. Thinking it might be the Zalman video cooler, I put the stock cooler back on, no difference. Video would work for a few minutes, then lose signal.
Put the Radeon back in, figuring it was better than nothing. Continued with the XP installation and installing drivers. Computer crashed. Rebooted, same thing. Decided to reformat and reinstall. Install went well, then when computer rebooted, it would load the OS halfway then hang. Triple Crap.
I remain at this point, not sure of what to do next. The motherboard seems to work fine with the onboard video (yes, I tried disabling this, no difference) but does not seem to like video cards. The case is nice, and it is very quiet. But the problems with the video card fitment could have been eliminated if they only gave the case an exta 1/4" of height, or made the AGP riser to use the middle of the three horizontal cutouts rather than the bottom.
At this point, I am looking into getting an Intel 925-based motherboard and P4 3.2GHz chip. Hopefully, the PSU can handle this. Plus, get a PCI-E version of the 6600GT. I have found some PCI-E risers available online, which should line up with the middle cutout so I can avoid the lip of the case. For cooling, might have to go with the Zalman Reserator if I want to keep it quiet. Good thing about the motherboard is that it offers Dolby Digital Live, so I won't even need a sound card.
Sorry about the long post. Just very frustrating upgrade when I had a perfectly functional HTPC before.
