I just finished building a fanless HTPC. Here are my components:
- HD-Plex H3.SODD Fanless HTPC Chassis
- HD-Plex 150W Fanless Power Supply External
- Internal IR receiver with MCE Remote Control(RC6) (from HD-Plex)
- Lite On 4ETS slot loading bluray combo drive (from HD-Plex)
- OCZ Solid 3 SATA III 6Gbps 2.5″ SSD 60GB
- SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s
- ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT
- Crucial Ballistix 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
- Intel Core i3-2125
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
- Ceton InfiniTV4 USB
Once I got all components that I ordered through HD-Plex, Amazon and Newegg The assemply was pretty traight forward. HD-Plex had good documantation on mounting the heatsink and heatpipes for cooling.
The only issues I had was; I had to move my SSD due to conflict with the eject button; The wires for power button and LED is streached to a maximum because of the placement of connectors on the MB (see picture)
After installing and configuring Win7 MCE, the biggest challange was to get Time Warner to understand what they needed to do. What I could have done on the phone with TW in five minutes (assuming I talked to a sensible person) took them 3 hours on site. Most of the time on the phone. Anyway, at the end they did wha I asked them to do and everything worked. Including the SDV.
Now I enjoy up to four channels in paralell (live and record) and no noise from my home theatre. I also have a Pioneer AV receiver and Panasonic Plasma TV connected with HDMI.
After a couple of weeks using this setup, the max temperature I have seen on the CPU is 58 degrees C.
My next project will be to build another system as extender for the bedroom.
I can recommend this setup to anyone that can build a PC.
(BTW, the HD-plex HTPC replace a PS3, Tivo and Netgear media player)
.
