My old Zalman HTPC - "The DustBringer"

silencerbob · April 21, 2013

Hi all!

Zalman HD135 HTPC Case (Black)

Gigabyte P31-DS3L Mobo

Core 2 Duo Quad Core Q6600 2.4Ghz/4MBx2

**NEW CARD Zotac nVidia GT430 Zone Edition**

2x1GB Corsair Twinx 2x2048-8500C5D twinx 1066Mhz RAM

Pioneer BDC-S02 (Blu-Ray reader, DVD-Burner)

Zalman CNPS8000 CPU Cooler

650W Antec Neo PSU

500GB Sata HDD /16MB

FireDTV Digital TV Tuner

I built this PC years ago and though I'd share my HTPC build. It has a nice layer of dust inside and out. My aim was a near fanless home theatre PC for minimal noise while I watch movies / TV / blu-rays / music. A nice large case was needed for cooling, as there would be little to no air flow. Keep in mind the specs are from a few years ago and u dont Really need high specs for playing video, just a good graphics card and great software.

Im running Windows 8 Pro on it now (was Win 7 at the time of build). MediaPortal is my preferred HTPC software.

I had the top lid custom cut and shut from a local metalworker, which ended up exactly enough room (height-wise) for my graphics card Zotac "Zone Edition" GT430. This choice of card was important due to it being the best passively cooled nVidia graphics card(no fan = no noise) that has hardware decoding of both h264 and mpeg2. Its important that it was an nVidia card as MediaPortal can use LAV filters (codec that supports hardware decoding of h264 and mpeg2) which requires CUDA support and the VP4 support was my primary concern of the whole system.

Digital TV broadcast here in Australia (DVB-T) is in mpeg2, and there was no hardware acceleration on previous models of geforce cards.

Its still going strong and I LOVE it.

/preparing for incoming unwanted advice (LOL JK)

1. My original graphics card which burnt out

2. MMM.. delicious DUST..with the new graphics card..but wait.. its too tall!

3. I know..lets make a custom ..err.. something-or-other

4. With little power comes little responsibility

5. Money shot

6.No wait... thats the money shot!

7.Damn YOU tall graphics card!

8.Success!

9. "The DustBringer"