I have been lurking SPCR for a long time now, and after making a dead silent home server that pretty much only serves music/movies and pictures.. I thought...

Wouldn't a HTPC be far better!?!
My girl and I shall be moving to a new place soon anyway so instead of having heaps of crap like a DVD recorder, FM tuner, Media Extender, BluRay player etc etc in our lounge, it seemed much more suitable to make a real nice HTPC running Vista Media Center... Bring on zombo...

Specs:

Pentium 4 3.2ghz LGA775 (Soon to be upgraded to E5200)
Asus P5KPL-CM Motherboard
2x 1024mb DDR2-667, overclocked to DDR2-800 with 5-5-5-10 timings.
1x Western Digital Green Power 750gb, modded with AAM to silent
1x Western Digital Green Power 640gb, modded with AAM to silent
Asus 7600GS 256mb passive graphics card.
Creative Audigy 2 with SPDIF breakout box
High Power 420watt quiet PSU.

So I bought an Antec NSK2480B (BLACK!!)...



Took out the tricools and replaced with some 12L Arctic Cooling 120mm fans, very very silent, barley audible and rubber mounted! Sweet little things.
Also replaced the 380watt noisy 80mm powered "Earth Power" Antec PSU with my 420watt with a 120mm fan, removed the grill also, to make it even quieter

A few hours later, great success!! Yes EVERYTHING is wired up.. nice huh? Just all very sneakily hidden

I have modified the heatsink on my P5KPL-CM chipset as it seems to get quite hot, have epoxy welded another northbridge heatsink from a Gigabyte motherboard to the top of it, runs a LOT cooler!











I have also very carefully routed the two fan wires for the 120mm arctic's under the motherboard tray to hide the wires.





Whats left?

Well she's memtesting right now, passing no troubles, have to setup vista now!



In a fortnight I will be replacing the FlyTV Platnium (basically just in there for FM radio for now lol) with a Hauppauge HVR-3000 I think.. unless anyone has a better idea? Want to run DVB-T Terrestrial Freeview on it under Vista Media Center.

Will be replacing the P4 3.2 ( hot mother ) with a Intel Core2Duo E5200 or maybe even E8200.

Going to add a Blu-RAY/DVD Combo drive also, and in turn find a good graphics card maybe a nVidia 9400 would that suit? I basically need one with a passive cooler that is single slot, or a very quiet single slot fan'ed model otherwise I will have to find a pci-express TV tuner that also can do FM and DVB-T... hard to come by!

That is a nice looking build and the case is SWEET!

Very nice and tidy. LOL at heatsink epoxied on.

Very nice build indeed What CPU cooler is that - is it stock? Only ask as I've never seen one like it on an LGA775.

if I am not mistaken, that is Arctic cooling Alpine 7 pro without fan... The structure really looks like new Alpine 7 series. That building is one of the most cleanest HTPC buildings Ive seen. very good job!

I have that case but it's in Silver. I've had it since they were released a few years back. How did you get the Black model? The silver with black faced optical drive just isn't pretty. Do you live in the US? Where did you order it from?

Thanks.

Winner!

Thanks everyone for the responses, been working on it again today will post results when I'm home!

This sadly means I don't have life but one between monitor and chair, if I can recognize a heatsink without fan. I really need a life...

I am waiting eagerly more pictures. Its very good so far ^^

I envy you for being able to get a nice black version of this case without having to waste anywhere near as much time as I did to repaint. Looks very clean on the inside!

New Goodies!





Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 2.6ghz per core.
2x 2GB DDR2-800 (4GB RAM!).
Hauppauge HVR-3000 Tripple Mode DVB-T, DVB-S, and Analouge with FM.





On a real hot day its running about 45 celcius passive UNDER LOAD with my Alpine 7 Pro heatsink (no fan)... PERFECT

Nice additions to an already sweet build!

Why didn't I see this before? Very nice build! I'm digging the black panel!

GOOD JOB!

man...i really wish they had released the all black version here in the US.

I'm about to build and HTPC, and this si the perfect case, unfortunately the silver doesn't macth any of my components.

dame good wiring work

Okay so I been pretty busy

Wiring is even tidier than shown in pics now, but you get the general idea.

Upgraded a few things, specs are now...

Intel E5200 Dual Core at stock ghz.
4gb DDR2-800
nVidia Geforce 8800GT
Creative Soundblaster Audigy XFi Xtreme Audio (PCI Express)
Hauppauge HVR-3000 Triple Tuner
1x 750gb Western Digital Green Power
1x 640gb Western Digital Green Power

I also upgraded the CPU cooler to an arctic freezer tower, had to remove about 5 rows of it and then bend the heatpipes to make it fit, but now after a few hours of work it fits MINT and cools so well! Also I fitted some spare ramsinks to the graphics card heatsink and northbridge heatsink to help them keep cool!

The PSU fan is now an Arctic 12L mounted on top of the PSU to reduce air turbulence, its temperature controlled by the PSU also, the rest of the case fans are manual control by the little black Zalman fan control boxes, set on very low speeds, this thing is virtually inaudible HDD's have been set to low acoustic setting too!

PICS!

Why didn't you just get Scythe Ninja Mini? Would have saved you the trouble of modding the Arctic Freezer.

Props for the cable management. I never got my NSK-2480 to look that tidy.

Great work. I have Antec Fusion case, and I used Mini-Ninja and it fits with out any mods. Just like you did I replaced Antec Tricool with Arctic Cooler PWM fans connected to CPU header.

I am curious what is original CPU heat sink in your first post? I am interested that kind of CPU heatsink for a custom build.

Thanks

Thanks mate,

Yeah I already had the arctic cooler so didnt bother spending extra $$$ when I could have fun and mod this one

http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/cpu/6 ... tml?c=2181 is my old cooler if you want to get one

Thanks for quick reply!

Though off topic, I am looking for a heat sink like that with height less than 4" (ideal is 3"). I intended to use this with single case fan, so it needs to enough tall, but not obstruct my custom HDD cage.

I am also looking at Alpine 11 Pro which seems little wider, but not sure what is the height of the actual heat sink not including Fan. If the difference in height between these two heat sinks is less than 5mm, I may prefer Alpine 11 Pro, but if the Alpine 7 pro is considerable taller, I may go that route.

I am looking at several review, but none seems to provide accurate heatsink height information.

I have the same case along with the same ASUS P5KPL-CM mATX motherboard and an Intel Pentium E5200 (Core2Duo Wolfdale) 2.5GHz CPU as well.
This is the memory I'm using: OCZ OCZ2F10664GK DDR2 PC2-8500 1066MHz 4GB Dual Channel memory (2x2GB)

You may not want to do this, but using decent 1600MHz memory, you can easily overclock your CPU to 3.5 GHz by only changing TWO BIOS settings!

1) change the memory setting to "667MHz" (which is really the 3:5 memory divider, just labelled poorly)
2) change your CPU FSB to 280.

With these settings, my CPU is happily running at 3.5GHz (12.5 x 280) with the stock Intel heatsink/fan.

I didn't need to touch the voltage settings at all. Everything was left at the default "auto" setting.

I've prime95'd the hell out of it for 12 hours and it's totally stable.

I believe that with the E5200, you'll likely have trouble getting the FSB over 300. Mine wouldn't boot past 300, and it was still flaky at 290.

Thanks so much for the helpful information mate!! I'll do this!