Well, after looking around I've chosen the 60W Meanwell one that Abula linked to. Supplied by Baomain in China. so it's gonna take 10-12 days to reach UK but postage was very reasonable and the total cost was £16.18 for a class V power brick. The ratings look good and I'm prepared to wait, since I'v...

Those Mean Well ones are hard to find on Amazon UK. How about something like this?

The picture has V85 stamped on the label. Does this mean that it's class V and about 85% efficient?

Thanks, Abula . They look the kind of thing I'm after. As for the drives spinning up, I think the timing of that will occur on immediate power on, whilst the BIOS is still booting and the CPU has yet to become loaded with tasks. Would there be any efficiency advantage in going with the 40W one, I wo...

Hi, I've just bought a 80W wide range Mini-Box PicoPSU. It'll accept 12-32v input and I'm looking for a brick that's efficient and reliable without being over priced. The Pico is gonna be powering my NAS, which is a headless Bay Trail celeron duo setup, 8GB low voltage (1.35v) RAM pair and 2 x 2.5" ...

Double post due to using my phone browser.

Is two port software RAID-1 under FreeNAS good enough for streaming HD movies? I think the network interface would be the limiting factor (a wired Gigabit could be considered the minimum requirement for uncompressed HD), not the CPU or the software RAID. Anyway, IIRC currently BayTrail GPU may have...

Hmm, Baytrail certainly looks a good idea for a long term energy saver. Dual-channel RAM too, which is a bonus. And how about 2 x SATA in RAID-1 using software RAID? The extra money spent on buying a new mobo would be saved by not needing to buy a RAID card. I'm liking this idea and could mount it i...

I've inherited a barebones old Compaq tower from a friend for free. The mobo is Asus, socket 775 and currently contains a Pentium D 2.8Ghz CPU. I think it's this one . It's got an old GeForce GFX card and no HDD. I will be ripping out the GFX and selling it off cheap. The Pentium D in question is 95...

Well, it just fitted! It was touch and go whether I could slide it into the case, sideways, as it had to be attached to the motherboard outside the case due to the back plate. http://s29.postimg.org/939p9vp5f/IMG_20140301_204445.jpg CPU temp is sittng nicely at 45C but the motherboard is high, idlin...

You're right about the RAM being taller than standard: it's a pair of G.Skill Ripjaws, which have a vertical extension to the heatspreaders. I knew they weren't ideal for a miniITX build but I have a soft spot for G.Skill as they've never let me down with compatibility issues in the past. Anyway, la...

Hi, I've built a HTPC using CiT MTX-001B for cheapness. I've set the stock PSU aside and running it with a PicoPSU variant so that there's only the stock CPU fan in there. CPU/APU is the AMD 6400K and motherboard is an MSI FM2-A75IA-E53. I've currently go a gaping hole at the rear of the chassis whe...