Building yet another computer...

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury) 06/16/2019 at 21:57 • Filed to: None

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Still doing Windows updates right now, but it’s going to be a screamer, relatively speaking. I’m calling it ‘Lil Monster’. It started life as a $20 mini ITX system with an i5 2500S. I’ve transplanted it into a slightly larger case, but it’ll still be fairly small and will be used as my DVR and Blu-ray player.

Specs are now as follows:

- i5 2500K on an Intel DQ67EP motherboard

- Samsung Evo 840 120 GB SSD boot drive

- Seagate 4 TB data drive

- 16 GB Corsair Vengeance RAM

- Hauppauge 4-tuner PCIe card

- LG Blu-ray drive

- Wireless networking via a mini PCIe card (which I thought also had Bluetooth, but it’s not showing up in device manager )

I’m a little worried about the cooling in such a small space but it does have a thin CPU fan and the fan from the power supply either blowing air onto that fan or sucking it away from the CPU. There was some warning when I first started it with the new CPU saying that CPUs greater than 65W TDP (like the stock i5 2500S) might not be supported without additional cooling capabilities.

Updates are taking flippin’ forever, as is to be expected for something running Windows 7. Yes, I know I should upgrade to 10, but right now I need Windows Media Center, and will switch when I come up with a viable alternative to that. Right now the old Dell 980 is just too slow and is driving me crazy, even with all of its memory and CPU upgrade. I’ll be happy to retire that dinosaur, or at least demote it to a less stressful life than it’s experiencing now.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 06/16/2019 at 22:30

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You know how I solved the bluetooth problem in my build? Slapped one of these bad boys on an unused USB header on my MoBo and plugged in a USB dongle.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent 06/16/2019 at 22:34

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That’ll probably work, but if the card has Bluetooth built in I’d rather use that. I’ll wait until the updates are done to see if Winders figures it out then, but if it comes down to it I’ll use your suggestion.

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 06/16/2019 at 22:42

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Wtf is a DVD?

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever 06/16/2019 at 22:45

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DVD or DVR? I made no mention of DVDs. DVR is digital video recorder. I use a Windows computer  and that tuner card to record up to four over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV programs simultaneously.

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 06/16/2019 at 22:58

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oh damn. reading comprehension fail.  I was trying to joke about you enjoying an outdated medium

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 06/16/2019 at 22:59

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I wouldn’t be to worried about the cooling, those chips don’t need much. Hell, the i5 -2500k in my HTPC doesn’t even have a fan on it, though the case has two (very slow spinning) 120mm fans (not oriented to pull across the heat sink, because the video card doesn’t fit if I mount the heatsink optimally):

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever 06/16/2019 at 23:14

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No worries. Except for a favorite of TV show I haven’t used a DVD in years. Any sort of physical media seems to be kind of archaic these days. I bought some blank Blu-ray discs last year but haven’t burned a single one. In the last few years I did burn maybe one data DVD. Nowadays it’s cheaper for me to use spare hard drives (I buy DirecTV DVRs for a couple of bucks each  just to tear them open for the drives) or even flash drives as removable storage media.

I recently offered to send my folks a spare Blu-ray player and they asked why they would need it, and where could they even get rental discs. I told them it was for the USB port so that I could send them flash drives with stuff they may be interested in. Flash drives are so cheap these days that I usually just grab a couple when I’m checking out at Micro Center as an impulse buy.

jminer > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 06/16/2019 at 23:44

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I migrated from Windows media center (and windows home server) to Plex like 6 years ago and have never looked back.

You get a ton of functionality for free and can now stream your media seamlessly to all your phones/tablets/roku/xbox (remotely too) with a good meta data library backing it up.

If you want to step up to a plex pass (the premium option) you get integrated TV tuner capability and neat features like video card accelerated decoding. I only upgraded to a plex pass 6 months ago because it was cheaper than replacing the workstation running it (I just added a Nvidia GTX 1050 I already had)

The cpu will probably be ok heat-wise, but those 2nd gen processors do crank out some heat when pushed.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > jminer 06/16/2019 at 23:53

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I’m definitely going to look into Plex as I do believe that it is the future, but at the current time I need a system that can be running right now. I’ll play around with it and plan a migration after I feel comfortable with it. The first time I started messing with it I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and didn’t have the time to stop and figure it out. Once the rush to get a working solution  is over and I have a spare system for testing I’ll take the time to learn how to set it up for my needs.