oliverredfox

[oliverredfox]

Fry’s is having some anniversary sale making a lot of stuff dirt cheap. They’ve got the i7-2600k for $250 this weekend.  All the sale items listed are here: http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2923683

[oliverredfox]

I rolled back to the 2279 drivers (they were the ones that came on my motherboard driver disc).  The newer ones had the handshake HDMI blank screen boot/minute later blue screen issue.

Whenever swapping motherboards, it’s a good idea to a clean install.  The last thing you want is a driver ghost hanging around causing issues.  Maybe Windows 7 is better at it, but I know older Windows versions were never happy with motherboard swaps.  You probably want your HTPC to be stable so shows get recorded 100% of the time, a clean install will keep you from having worry about the old OS’s stuff being an issue.  I don’t know how much RAM you’re putting in your new system but it might be a good time for you to jump to 64-bit.  There are several good tools out there to make backing up/clean installs painless.

[oliverredfox]

I’ve got the 600w version of it and I agree that it’s nice power supply line.  Very quite fan.

[oliverredfox]

The drives should be new enough stock to have the latest firmware but be sure to check when you get it in.  http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386  It patches a pretty important bug that can cause corruption.

[oliverredfox]

Heh, yeah, they do eat space fast.  I’ve got LOTRO on the big SSD and it’s nice not having any lag going between zones.  I’d love it if was bigger so I could fit Portal 2 on there too.  Maybe in a year when the prices drop down to my impulse buy range.

[oliverredfox]

[quote=swoon]

I’m always tempted by these deals on the smaller capacities, but I always want the 120GB .

[/quote]

I still want a 120GB or bigger too =).  For now I’m living with my 32gb and 64gb(60gb technically).  I was a bit worried about the 32gb, but it holds enough to run a Windows 7 system along with a few key apps.  If I was running a laptop or single drive computer then both would be too small for me, but since both have 2TB+ of hard drives in them too it works out.  I got the 32gb on Black Friday for $30 and since then every SSD I see tempts me to add them to all my computers.

 

Here’s a 128gb one just for you: http://dealnews.com/Kingston-128-GB-SATA-3-Gbps-2.5-SSD-for-150-after-rebate-free-shipping/460736.html

[oliverredfox]

You ruled out 3 rippers because they require a separate program.  Running your ripper and encoder separately will offer you more options.  I typically use DVDFab Decrypter or MakeMVK (both free) to extract the video from my discs (a lot of people use AnyDVD to skip the middle man and if you’ve got the money for it, it really is a great program).

I typically re-encode my videos with Handbrake since it’s fast, high quality video(x264 is one of the best out there), and lets me adjust the output.  Lately I’ve swapped to using Badaboom2 to take advantage of QuickSync.  While some people like using CUDA or other video card offloads, I generally prefer using CPU encoding since the video quality is better.

[oliverredfox]

I’ve got this drive too.  I never hear it, even when doing large file transfers.  That humming noise makes me think you got a bad drive that may fail soon.

As for the bit about it being a slow drive, it is fairly responsive.  It’s in a system with a 64gb SSD (OS Drive), but games and data are kept on the hard drive.  As far as I can tell, the SATA III port is just marketing and doesn’t offer any benefit over SATA II.  I don’t have a modern 7200 drive to compare it to, so maybe in comparison it could super slow.  I have a SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 in another system and they seem about the same.  Haven’t benchmarked either, but in my real world use, they both do their job well.

[oliverredfox]

I swapped to using a PS3 in the living room for the 1080p/5.1 streams.  This gives me hope that WMC may soon catch up and I can stop having to swap back and forth between devices to watch shows.

[oliverredfox]

It seems like it might be a good way to save power.  My main computer stays on nearly 24/7 while my HTPC is only on when recording/watching shows.  I figure cutting out the middle man for shows that can be played via DLNA off the main computer could save a little juice(that and it’s a new toy to play around with).

I’ll be really interested when someone rigs up software to do transcoding off QuickSync in the background so it won’t eat up CPU cycles.

[oliverredfox]

After reading more about the z68, I ended up going ahead and getting a h67 motherboard and the i5 2500k.  I’ve got to say, I’m quite happy with it, the performance is amazing.

I followed the links on Intel’s website to all the software that currently supports QuickSync and grabbed demo versions of them all.  Most of them were too dumbed down for me but Badaboom2 (never even heard of badaboom ver 1) was good.  It let me adjust video quality, size, bitrate, etc all while using QuickSync for the decode/encode.  It took a 1h30m long 1080p MKV (Main movie rip using MakeMKV) and re-encode down to 720p in 15min.  It took up 1 CPU core, putting my system at 25% usage(I’m guessing for the audio re-encode).  The system was still zippy and responsive letting me keep working while doing the encode.  I think Intel has a real winner with this new function.

[oliverredfox]

I do clean installs and reinstall the programs from the ground up.  I find it’s a good time to speed things up, get rid of any older driver’s that might have still been clinging in the system, and reduce used space.  Over the years, I’ve developed the habbit of keeping only the OS(and some programs) on C:.  I keep a few programs installed to D:(Steam being on D helps since it doesn’t install any odd files and can be copied to a new system without needing a reinstall).  Anything data files are on other partitions/drives.  I never let the system save any data files to my C:.  This lets me backup my Firefox bookmarks and do a fresh install of the OS without any risk of data loss.

I blame Windows 98/ME for this.  Used to have to reinstall every couple months to keep the system running fast so I developed this routine to minimize the pain of it.  I have a folder with commonly used installs dating back a decade.  It’s full of current (sometimes older versions that I liked better) of programs I regularly use so I can reinstall fast without scouring the internet for all of them.

[oliverredfox]

The tool worked fine.  No issues with moving the schedule data to a new system.  It felt like a lite version of MCEbackup.

[oliverredfox]

New customers can do $10 off $50+.  http://promotions.newegg.com/nepro/11-1111/index.html  They had a new customer $25 off $100 recently too.

[oliverredfox]

Thanks =)

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