The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

One thing I will say about cable management is that in order to have so many cables tucked behind the motherboard tray area makes removing the second side panel an absolute chore. Normally there wouldn't be anything in there, but in the interests of cable tidying (and to be fair, this is a good idea) the hard disks are mounted motherboard to open side in most coolermaster cases, as opposed to open side to motherboard, or front to rear as is conventional. So when you need to get at your hard disks or hard disk cables, getting that side panel back on again afterwards is a chore when there's so many cables trying to push it off.
Omega: DVD duplicator case I suppose is what you're after. You presumably don't need to hear me caution you about the 'included' PSU with that case.
DVD drives do get quite warm. If you run them for hours on end I suppose they can get quite hot if cramped together. I haven't run DVD drives in a cramped environment for quite some time.
Russ: Agreed, cable tidiness does make sense to a certain extent, but beyond that point it does become a little obsessive. Also, full tower cases for anything but top-end PCs are a waste. When I see giant full tower cases that store maybe 2 HDDs, have a standard CPU cooler in them and a small single graphics card it annoys me, it's a waste of space. Much like the people that use 1KW PSUs to run systems that use less than 200W. These two examples often coincide...
ddp: There's an advantage to having a desktop case already the right way up for maintenance, but it's really not an issue to put a tower case on its side for complex work, and I actually do a reasonable amount of work on PCs when they are still upright.
Omega again: Onboard 6200 may be a little tricky, but there are linux drivers for the 8400GS that can run 1080p smoothly with GPU video acceleration.

I think the reason why desktop PC cases fell out of fashion was that PC hardware has simply grown in size for a lot of markets. Basic workstation PCs will still fit fine, but any reasonably powerful graphics card either won't fit or won't be cooled properly, there's only room for a couple of hard drives or optical drives, sometimes less. That was fine in the past, but now many hard drives is quite popular. The desktop case market was reborn into the HTPC market, the demand for HDDs is still there, but typically those that can't fit their data onto two HDDs (typically 3TB+) will know how to network in some other storage.

I've ordered the new case for my fileserver. I'm still tempted to run it on its side permanently like an HTPC case, I think it would still look the part like that.
Sadly, I have to leave a large enough gap in my spending to cover the eventuality that I don't receive the undergraduate bursary, since last year I only ended up getting half of it. 4 weeks to wait to see if it shows up or not. That means 4 weeks until I know if I can buy the i5 upgrade or not...
For now, it's just the NZXT Whisper, another TRUE cooler, some extension cables and PCIe S-ATA cards and thermal paste, the NX5000R3 PSU and the four second hand WD10EACS drives I've acquired.

 

am i the only one with 1 HDD in my system (and one external)

 

Well, one of my systems only has a single HDD in it

 

I'd consider soon to be having 13 HDDs in one system making up for the singular in another

 

my step is too nice, get off of here sam!

hehe. i do need some more space. i think 2.5TB up from my 1.2TB currently seems like a good upgrade. 1.5TB WD green externally, and 1TB samsumf F3 for speed (OS and games) internally.

 

sorry to hear about the lack of job

yeha i know what you mean, i could be burning some of the films i have to DVDs, wouldnt be a bad idea. cant burn 1080p films, but 720p on a DL no problem.

 

1080p films burn to DL discs if they are standard length, standard bitrate. A large number of the 1080p rips I have are sized correctly for DL disc usage.

 

DVD+R DL discs see plenty of use as Xbox 360 rips here. That's their only real use, though having run out of single layer discs I'm going to waste one putting Windows Server 2008 R2 on it. (Meh, £1.40 instead of 40p, I'll live!)

 

Once I upgrade to i5 or i7 I'll have one system running as a server and only have two hdd's in my main rig (OS and a bit of storage). Problem is I can't find a good "server" chassis that has sufficient cooling. A modified lian li A77 would be nice but it's just too much money lol.

 

I've generally found that people underestimate things. I was leaning toward the 6200 being able to play BD's/1080P files. The athlon 5200 continues to impress me as well

 

Sam,
I really don't think that PC hardware has anything to do with it at all. I say that, because there used to be a lot of real nice Desktop Cases on the market. For instance, the last Desktop Case I bought had lots of room in it for anything you could think of. It had 3 5.25" bays and 5 internal and 1 external 3.5" bays. I think that the early popularity of Window Cases, was what did desktops. I mean, lets face it, a tower is nothing more than a desktop, stood on one end! 6 bays = two rows of three drives each, or they can be mounted sideways. I never even owned a tower at all, until 2004.

Russ

 

Creaky: As a Q6600 user, the CPU can do all the work and you'd never notice any lag. GPU decoding is only of fundamental importance when the CPU isn't powerful enough.
Russ: Hmm, that's quite possibly true, though Desktop cases I remember being thinner than tower cases typically are.

 

Not all 1080p I wouldn't expect. I've heard instances of the newer Atom chips being powerful enough to decode low bitrate 1080p encodes, but the higher bitrate encodes will be a bit on the laggy side.

 

With proper GPU acceleration enabled in MPC I was able to get my sister's netbook playing high quality 1080p rips lag-free.

Users take note: 99% of media players rely entirely on the processor to decode. Even Media player classic must have Dx9 GPU acceleration turned on in order for low power machines to play 1080p properly.

And regardless of being advertised for HD or not, any true Dx9 capable GPU(GeForce 6 and up, Radeon X100 and up) can accelerate 1080p with the Dx9 rendering option turned on.