The GD04 is roughly equivalent to my old NSK2400 in terms of width/height but a good deal shorter depth-wise. That makes it much easier to fit into a living-room media cabinet. My old Antec case has given me a good six or seven years of solid service but I wanted something a little less "PC like" th...

Did you end up using the HDPlex case like you were planning or did you opt for something else? Nope. I sent a mail to them asking about some features of the case, specifically an integrated IR addon that supported standby/resume. I got no response at all. I was a little wary of fully passive anyway...

After a lot of waiting, I finally took the plunge over the Xmas period. I found a source for the i3-4330T, here's the final spec: Intel i3-4330T CPU ASUS H87M-PRO Mobo 8GB RAM Noctua NH-L12 LP CPU Cooler Silverstone GD04 Grandia 128GB SSD 430W SEASONIC M1211-430 PSU I know a lot of people don't like...

An USB soundcard then, or something fancy like the Musical Fidelity V-Link ? I'm in a similar situation; HDMI for video, Optical SPDIF (Toslink) for audio. I'm thinking about something like a V-Link and I like Musical Fidelity. I'm very happy with my V-DAC. Don't know how OS dependent such a soluti...

You know...it hadn't even occurred to me that my TV might have audio out. My current setup lacks an HDMI out (I use a DVI to HDMI converter for video and separate toslink audio) so audio over HDMI has never been something I've considered/looked at. I've checked, and sure enough there's an optical au...

Just noticed the NUC doesn't have a dedicated audio output. That's a bit of a killer for HTPC applications, imo... Use HDMI for audio. One thing to wait for in the reviews - earlier models that shipped with wifi had a disfunctional physical layout - the wifi card sat on top of the RAM. This caused ...

Ah. That would definitely explain the lack of reviews and real-world implementations. I'm not in any hurry so can wait a bit. I run MePo, so will be using LAV filters. There's an article on anandtech which looks at the HD4600 iGPU and it seems eminently capable of handling the demands I will throw a...

Hi. I'll be upgrading my HTPC soon and have been holding off in anticipation of the new i3 Haswell processors. Now that these things are (nominally) out there...has anyone had any experience of building a rig with the i3-4330T? Particularly interested in the GPU/video performance. I'm not finding an...

Looks like the consensus is that I should wait for Haswell i3. The Core i3-4330T with HD4600 certainly looks like it may do the job better than the i3-3225. I'm always a bit wary of picking up very new kit as people haven't yet had the time to find any problems with it, but it can't hurt to wait and...

A long time ago in a galaxy...well...here, I specified and built an HTPC ( see post here from back in 2008 ). I've been running with my current MePo (Media Portal) machine for a number of years now and it's beginning to show its age so it's time to build a new box. My MePo setup is pretty basic. I d...

I've just bought and installed an HDTV. The TV is lovely but I have encountered major problems with the 1080p output from the Asus M2A-VM HDMI. The screen flickers randomly with all video output at > 720p. This means I'm currently stuck at 720p. The culprit seems to be the ATI x1250 gfx chipset. The...

Thanks for that. I've set-up an event in Speedfan to shut the system down at 60C. I don't seem to be getting close to that at the moment but I'm not really playing HD for long periods of time yet. That's soon to change, however, as I've just dropped some cash on a 40" HDTV. I'll run some more protra...

I am trying to decide between Media Center and the open source MediaPortal for the main application, as well as TheaterTek or Media Player for the DVD software. Any ideas/opinions on these? Also, given the mobo, efficient CPU, and 2.5" HDD, what size PSU should I be looking at? I would guess someth...

OK, another quick update. The Seasonic PSU arrived yesterday. I installed it and fired up the machine. Everything fired up fine and I'm very impressed with the noise levels. The build is easily a lot quieter than my existing media centre build (Sonata Mid-Tower case). I can't hear disk access at all...

There's a discussion on fan-swapping the SU380 in the PSU forum. One good suggestion is to use the fan that comes with the Scythe Mini Ninja. This fan is a close enough match to the stock PSU fan, but it's considerably quieter at low speed, and our review sample started as low as 2.5V , which means...

Bought the kit and assembled last night. Not had time to load the OS/Software yet but have had a bit of a play to get an idea how it sounds. Had to go with Noctua fans in the end due to stock issues. Only running with one at the moment and placed it near the Minja, blowing air out of the case. I'm r...

Okay, Xmas is over and I've got a bit more time to work on this project. Going to buy in the next week or two. The finalised kit-list is: Antec NSK2480 I'm going with the NSK because the iMon VFD/IR Receiver in the Antec Fusion v2 is extremely poor. A number of users are experiencing problems with l...

How did you get to the 90W figure? If that is the max theoretic power draw, consider it very unlikely you can achieve this with normal use (IE without running cpu, memory and disk stress simultaneously) Thanks for the response. I got the power requirements from http://www.silentpcreview.com/article...

Hi all. I'm a long-time reader, first-time poster. I've been running an HTPC for some 7 years now. The system has served me well over the years but just isn't up to dealing with modern 1080p content. I'm planning on getting an nice shiny HD TV in the January sales and will need to bring my HTPC up t...