Tiny HTPC Movie and Hulu Box Part 5 Conclusion

Posted in Computers, HTPC by JarrettV on 6/27/2009 10:03:00 PM - CST

The two 50mm fans arrived and I put them into their new home. To line them up in the back, I raised them up on a small piece of wood and tie-wrapped them into place. They are the perfect height for the case. I used some aluminum to fill in the blank spaces. I got lazy at the end and used a wood block to plug the last space.

The HTPC made too much noise with these new fans so I made a couple modifications:

Change fans to run from 5 volt instead of 12 volt (from 5000rpm down to 2100rpm) see here
Remove some of the metal blocking the PSU fan

The noise is now on par with the original Xbox. I plan to replace the PSU fan with a silent 40mm fan from FrozenCPU to further reduce the noise.

I also removed the casing over the PSU and organized the wires for better air flow. I taped over some of the rear holes so the air would enter from the front and travel across the motherboard.

Temps	CPU 1	CPU 2	Northbridge
Idle	32 C	33 C	48 C
Load	58 C	60 C	55 C

The Rear

The motherboard IO panel fit perfectly between the top and bottom of the case.

The Front

I lightly sanded the sharp edges of the black plexi-glass. I did not have any extra fine sandpaper so I used a buffing pad to get a smooth matte match with the case.

The keyboard is a Logitech diNovo Mini and compliments the case really well. The Zotac ITX motherboard allows you to enter the BIOS using the Delete key. So even though the keyboard doesn't have function keys, it will still work in the BIOS.

Here it is in it's final resting place on the fireplace mantel. You can see the Wii on the right for comparison.

I'm very happy with how the custom modded case turned out. The motherboard, PSU, fans, buttons, and black plexiglass all came together much better than I expected. It is a cool, quiet, and beautiful computer. Most of all, it plays every file format and can run video from any website perfectly.

I recently installed Boxee and I've been watching some 1080p files and listening to Pandora all within the same interface. Boxee is definitely the future of the HTPC.