As far as PSU recs… I’ve

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August 14, 2011 at 6:59 pm #5254
RehabMan

    As far as PSU recs… I’ve had good luck with Seasonic and tend to stick with them.  I tend to limit myself to those that are either fanless or with 12cm fan.  I have two HTPCs (on in guest house, one in garage) where I wanted to save some money and went with the SS-350ET, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151077.  Not modular but has 12cm fan… hard to find modular in the lower priced, lower wattage.  For my main HTPC, I bucked up and purchased the SS-400FL, which is fanless, modular, and of course, expensive.

    re SSD… Other than the sudden failure of the first-gen OCZ Vertex, I’ve had good luck with the OCZ drives.  Just don’t try to run them in a RAID0 config.  You lose trim, and there are issues with sleep in an Intel RAID0 config.  I did that for a while on my dev machine and eventually got tired of it…  I see you have a Windows Home Server and so do I.  To tell you the truth, because of the reliable backup system in WHS, I don’t worry about hardware failures that much.  And… Intel has had their share of trouble with their SSD drives too (I seem to recall their drives suddenly failing and reporting only 8MB or storage available — think that was a firmware issue that they later corrected).  SSD is new tech… no getting around it… there will always be problems when you’re on the bleeding edge of tech.  Well worth it if you have a good backup strategy (which is just smart anyway).

    As far as CPU performance, that i5-2500k is getting you almost double the performance (according to the charts at passmark.com) of an i3-2100.  But it may be a bit more difficult to keep cool/quiet than a lower wattage i3.  I’m using the i3-2100T with a Skythe Big Shuriken cooler, and my HTPC is silent unless you get your ear about 12″ away.  From the couch, silent…  Performance is more than adequate, but I don’t do any commercial skip stuff (for some of the same reasons you mention).