there are no socket 754 board using the nVidia 6150 chipset. The Albatron KM51PV-754 uses the 6150. I don't know if there are others: Albatron website-KM51PV-754 I searched high and low for that board a month ago, and gave up (in the US). Maybe it's becoming available. I ended up with an asus a8n-v...

What were the temps before and after & what kind of cooling are you using? Perhaps one number is reasonable and the other is not. Good question! Here are some numbers: (zalman 7000 HS/Fan on lowest setting; 1 80mm panaflo case fan on lowest setting; LC11 case) V-Core 1.4V CPU Mobo Ambient Idle CPU ...

I recently bought the A8N-VM CSM to put in an LC11 HTPC case, along with an AMD 3000+ (1.800 GHz). The bios was 0506. I did a huge number of temperature readings, using both motherboard monitor and Asus Probe, at idle, using PRIME, and so on. Then I noticed an S-Video output quality issue, and the r...

... This is your problem--the fact that you think that it makes sense to say you have "only 150W of cooling". In reality, you simply can't measure the "amount of cooling" you have in terms of wattage. It's a nonsensical measure, because no matter how much or how little heat is generated, that's how...

The simple fact is that a computer generating 150 joules per second WILL BE COOLED BY 150 joules per second. It's an unavoidable fact! No matter how much heat a computer generates and no matter how little fan generated airflow it has, it will reject exactly that much heat! Even with no fans at all!...

...by an ignorably small amount. Modern HD's dissipate about 10W at idle (we'll ignore startup). If the system uses 100W at idle (may be low depending on whether you have a powerful gfx card), that's 10% of the power. While it's not a major contributor, I wouldn't call it ignorable/negligible. I th...

So the real-world data rate would be Sata/Pata: 60MiB/s, very low latency Gigabit Lan: 60MiB/s, however with a very (relatively) large latency, as lots of postprocessing is needed from disk->file interpreter -> tcp/ip stack -> host compter -> tcp/ip stack -> software Firewire: 40MiB/s, low latency ...

I respectfully disagree [...]My Hard drives run at around 34 deg. C when sitting in the 22 deg C room in 'free air' - about 12 deg above ambient. I have to believe that, if I put those same drives inside the case, with the same amount of cooling / airflow (very little), they are going to run at lea...

Agree about switches vs. hubs, and switches are now coming way down in price. Good reminder. I used the term 'roughly' (which you changed to 'exactly') because I didn't want some pedantic person arguing about 1000 vs 1024 ... that is, I didn't want someone arguing that 54 Mbit/sec is really 54*1024 ...

Well, I went ahead and ordered (after a month of vacillation) the s939 mobo, CPU, and case yesterday, only to read the updates to this thread today! ;) I guess I will live with 1.1V ... I guess I'll HAVE to live with it! I also discovered, after ordering, that the motherboard I picked is incompatibl...

I respectfully disagree ... though I don't have absolute measurements to prove this, and I could be wrong. I remain open minded on the topic. I do have a DigitalDoc 5 to monitor up to 8 temps (ambient interior temp, PSU exhaust temp, room temp, etc), and I constantly monitor all the measurable mothe...

Wireless NAS ... Some totally theoretical calculations, just to get an idea of performance issues Video bitrate (DVD) is about 9 Megabits bits/sec max - roughly 9,000 kbits/sec USB2 = 480 Mbits/sec - roughly 480,000 kbits/sec. SATA = 150 MBytes/sec = 1,200 Megabits/sec - roughly 1,200,000 kbits/sec ...

I was a very early adopter of SATA drives, investing heavily in SATA drives and controllers (before sata was built into motherboards) for all my computers. I had the dream of putting all my drives outside the main cases, in enclosures such as the SmartDrive 2002 . Putting all drives outside the main...

SATA cable quality is very important! I cannot begin to tell you how much time I wasted troubleshooting a new computer setup a few years ago, ultimately traced to crappy SATA cables. I can't recall where I bought them now, but I recall they looked nice, and even came with 'caps' on them to protect ...

Every time I decide on a configuration, some key component is not available from the vendor I want to use, and I end up re-thinking. My latest hope (I'll call it that rather than plan!) is to get a pretty standard AMD 939 processor / board, rather than trying to build a Turion based desktop (last st...

The DFI Lanparty is out of stock over at Newegg; what would be a second recommendation? Anyone have a specific Asus recommendation, one that works well with the Turion, and can take the Zalman 7000 alcu, and be under-volted to take advantage of the Turion? Also - I see a recommendation above for an ...

I would pick a DFI LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb , which have become the mobo to use when running a mobile AMD ... ... the only drawback with this mobo must be the placement of the nF3 chip, but I can guarantee it's not a problem. I've used the S939 counterpart and used a Zalman heatsink on the chip, no pr...

I was on the verge of buying a Pentium M with an AOpen mobo for my new HTPC project, when I came across the associated SPCR article. I'm now ready to go Turion. I've read throught this thread, and related links, and am still a bit confused. Would welcome guidance. Which motherboard would you recomme...

I can imagine Intel not caring, but you'd thnk AOpen would somehow make a statement about 'what CPU to buy for our motherboard'. When you are shelling out $300 for a CPU, mail-order (i.e. difficult to return), you kinda need to know you are getting the right thing. In this case, it would appear the ...

I don't think it is, you know; if you go the Pentium M spec page, it very clearly states that the P-M is made in 478 and 479 packages; you want a 479, because the AOpen M/B is socket 479. IIRC socket 479 CPU's are not electrically compatible with socket 478 and vice versa. Did some more Googling, c...

Was about to start a new thread but found this one by searching so will append here. I'm about to buy the AOpen i915GMm-HFS Socket 479 Intel 915G Micro ATX Intel Motherboard from NewEgg, so I decided to see if they also sold the CPU. Going over to their CPU page, I found (eg) Intel Pentium M 760 Dot...

Yikes - nothing is straight forward when configuring a new system! I've narrowed my choices now to two Aopen Pentium M motherboards for my HTPC: AOpen i915GMm-HFS Socket 479 Intel 915G Micro ATX and the AOpen i915Ga-HFS Socket 479 Intel 915G ATX . The first is Micro-ATX, the second regular ATX. I'm ...

In researching HTPC cases, I came across this one from Ahanix . Looks great to me, similar to the D.Vine 5 . A site search of SPCR revealed not one reference to this case! I like the look of the MCE601 slightly more, but I could go with either. I've narrowed my search down to one of these two Ahanix...

I see that some of the smallest HTPC systems don't have a built-in CD-ROM or DVD drive. Obviously, one can use a USB2 external drive to read and write CDs in general. But - what about initial installation of the OS (Windows XP)? Do these systems without built-in Optical drives have the ability to bo...

How about this one? http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.A/id.300/.f I'm also thinking of a PVR ... I'm thinking about a Sage TV based system. Regarding extra drives - I'm planning to use an external USB2 drive, which has it's own PSU and is air cooled, and not contributing to the heat i...

Does this product help? (scroll down to the "150W PSU and DC-DC Converter Kit"). It seems to offer a little more power than the 120W PSU posted above.

I was about to post a general new thread about this, which I may do anyway.

I did a variation on this many years ago, and the issue I ran into was video 'ghostging'. If you just string a bunch of Video extension cables together, the image quality deteriorates. Now, that was possibly in the days of CRT monitors, which had higher refresh rates - have not tried it since I got ...

Some thoughts, after spending the whole weekend reading many posts and links on this site ... I'm going to build an AMD Athlon 64 Venice system; it took a while for the impact of their new AMD design to sink in, but now I see that it is a very elegent solution. I presume the new AMDs are now ok with...

Ah, decisions, decisions! The Asus mini looks great, but ... a requirement for me is the use of a standard PCI slot for a Hauppauge 250 card (my partner is hard of hearing, and the Hauppauge is one of the few cards with widespread closed-captioning support). Mike's referenced Silverstone LC-11 looks...

dfrost - lovely pictures, thanks for the info. I would hazard a guess that your setup is noisier than mine - I have only the one 80mm panaflo 'on' the CPU, with no case fans; only the (extremely low-flow) PSU fan - that may explain why my temps are higher. I have my hard drives mounted outside the c...