Stopped in at Fry’s earlier and was able to grab that combo I mentioned a day or so ago.  It’s the ECS 945GCT-M/1333 motherboard and Celeron 430 for $49.99.  I can get the processor alone for $39.99 at MicroCenter, so that board is well worth $10.  I plan on replacing the crappy nForce board in my son’s HTPC with it.  I also grabbed 2GB DDR2-667, so hell get a memory boost from two angles (it has 1GB in single channel mode now).  I’d like to get a 430 in his box too, but it’ll have to wait a bit.  Plus, it may run just fine once I get that extra memory in there.

So, sometime this evening or weekend, I’ll move that 430 into my unRAID server and start building an additional 2003 Server system around the E1200 to replace my old VPNSVR.  The E1200 might even go into my bedroom HTPC…I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

Anyway, I’ll post how things went once I’m done.

Sometimes, there doesn’t need to be anything special to post about – like now.

I found that I won’t need a new cooler for my rebuilt quad system.  I ended up taking the board out of the case and rotating the heatsink 90° so that the fan was blowing upwards – out the 140mm exhaust mounted in the top of the case.  I also noticed that the mounting screws in the base were placed away from the cores when mounted this way.  That pretty much tells me that the unit I’m using isn’t capable of universal mounting for 775 sockets.  My temps dropped >30°C at idle and are at >60°C under full load while encoding with x264.  One core went as high as 89°C before this change.  I’m happy since I don’t have to waste another $40 on another heatsink.

I hope Fry’s has another combo special on their Celeron 430 tomorrow/this weekend.  I’m really wanting to grab one so that I can swap out CPUs on my unRAID server with it.  It just doesn’t need dual cores – it doesn’t even support them yet.  Even if it did support them, I doubt it would benefit me anyway since I don’t do anything but file serving with it.  I want to use the E1200 in it to replace that aging Pentium-M I’m using as a WSUS server.  I have the P5B-MX and 2GB DDR2 standing by collecting dust now.  I also want to go with x64 2003 Server this time.  I’ve never really used any 64-bit OS at home before and this would be a good time for it.

If I can get that $50 combo, I can use the leftover ECS 945P board it comes with to replace my son’s craptacular GeForce 7-series board.  It would be OK if it didn’t have only a single-channel memory controller.  I eventually want to get another E1200 or Celeron 430 for it as well.  The D805 in it is just a dog.

On the Media Center front, the OpenMediaLibrary team released the first public beta of their OML video library plugin.  I installed it on my test box and took a look and it’s very nice.  I can’t really use it, however, since it doesn’t support individual XML files (which I recently switched to), nor does it work well with layered directory structures.  I’m sure it could be set up to do so, but no way am I starting over – yet again!  Besides, MyMovies is going to have their first introductory MCML version out in the next couple of weeks or three.  I’m still updating that database so that I can use it again if it astounds me.  I’m feeling lazy today, so check my other posts for relative links to OML and whatnot.

I finished my round of rotating boards this weekend when I replaced the P5B in my bedroom HTPC with my primary system’s DS3.  All in all, it was a pretty painless ordeal.

The Asus P5Q vanilla appears to be a terrific board.  Perfectly stable so far and provided exactly what I was looking for on the overclocking front.  I initially had some issues getting it to post and found that it apparently hates my USB DVD reader.  After removing pretty much everything trying to track that down I was finally able to get it going.  No issues beyond that point.  I do have to get a better cooler for my quad, however.  For some reason, it’s just not handling the heat when under load anymore.  At idle, I’m at a respectable >40c for all cores.  When going under load with RipBot264 during the second pass, I noticed temps climbing into the <80c range.    I think I’ll probably pick up an OCZ Vendetta tomorrow, along with a Celeron 430.  The E1200 in my unRAID box could be put to better use, so I think I’m going to pop the 430 in there.   I have that P5B and 1GB DDR2 left over, so I want to do something with it.

The HTPC “upgrade” went well too.  I did find that two of my activity buttons on my Harmony 670 stopped working though.  I’m not sure why.  I can’t imagine it had anything to do with the hardware change, but that’s when they stopped working.  Weird, but not a show-stopper.  The biggest change is the ability for the system to actually enter and come out of standby by the remote now.  For some reason, both of the old 945P Asus (Asus only, maybe?) I used in my bedroom HTPC would not go into standby properly.  They would do a weird reboot and then be unusably sluggish upon reloading Windows.  I tried everything and it just never worked.  A little less noise at night and a few dollars saved on the electric bill is a good thing :)

The new Antec Three Hundred case is pretty nice.  Not as much room as what was in the ancient full tower Antec I was using, but a welcomed change nonetheless.  It definitely looks better.  The extra 160GB drive for my RAID 0 array also seems to add a little extra punch to my mux/demux operations.  I also decided to go back to Vista for this rebuild.  I’m starting to wish that I had gone with x64 so I could make use of the full 4GB of memory that I have now.  I just don’t know if all the encoding software I use fully supports it though.  Maybe I’ll get adventurous in the upcoming months.

Well, I just got back from visiting MicroCenter to return the dead WD hard drive, only to find that the email I received from them was incorrect…this weekend is tax-free weekend in Georgia!  I returned that dead HD and the CM PSU that I bought and replaced them both.  I got another, identical drive and also traded up (?) for a BFG 650W PSU.  Now, the BFG is not a powerhouse and is considered very ordinary.  However, I’m not expecting much – only more than I currently have.  It should fit that bill fine.  Plus, it has a lifetime warranty.  I only had to spend an extra $26 to get that PSU.  Not great considering it can be found for much less with rebates, but I don’t really want to wait on a rebate.

Tomorrow I will be ordering my board and memory, so it should make it in by Thursday of next week – just in time for the weekend.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to put it all together.

I have put my Blockbuster Online account on a 3-month hold, but after last night I think I will go ahead and cancel.  I signed back up for Netflix so that I could try out their 4-at-a-time plan with the unlimited Watch Now service and I have to admit, I’m more than impressed at the quality of their online videos.  I expected something a little grainy/pixelated and got movies that are as good in video quality as the DVDs I convert at home using h.264.  I was amazed.  To sweeten the deal for me, I did all of this using the VMCNetflix Vista Media Center plugin.  Although a little slow to initialize the interface (it’s probably not the plugin’s fault) and get a movie streaming, the plugin works absolutely perfect.  It looks good too.  I have a feeling I’m going to be making good use of the Watch Now service.  It has an excellent selection and my wife and I have recently been on a TV show kick and there are close to 200 TV titles available.

On the system upgrade front, I ran into some issues yesterday.  It appears that the new 160GB WD Caviar SE that I bought is toast.  Every time I tried to write to it, it failed and disappeared.  On at least one occasion, I heard a loud shriek when attempting to access it.  It’s going back during lunch today.  I’m a little torn on whether I want to get another, however.  I sort of would like to get a better PSU, but they’re all pretty expensive and I don’t know if I can swing the cash for anything much better than what I already have.  I may just get a refund on the drive which will take a little strain off my current PSU and wait a while until I can get a quality 600W+  My Fortron is still kickin’, but I know it’s got to be feeling some of its nearly 3 years of constant operation.  I don’t know what to do, really.  I probably should just wait until the tax-free weekend which is next week.  There will be some sales and no tax is a big plus.  I did decide to go with 4GB of memory over 2GB though.  I figure I might as well.