New Media Centre, Stage 2
Posted by Trejkaz Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:08:37 GMT
I completed most of the assembly of the new media centre after work last night, finishing everything but the CPU and RAM. Insomnia struck at about 4am this morning, and since there was no point going back to sleep even if I could, I decided to head to the office early to finish the job before the normal working day started. The basic hardware is all in place now.
The newer CPU heatsinks being employed by AMD are really nice. I can’t count how many times I’ve been pushing down on a screwdriver, scared that it will slip or break, and smash some expensive piece of electronics. Now, you just have a little rounded lever, which wedges it firmly into place and locks onto the socket.
Lessons learned:
- It’s really hard to discipline yourself to install drives upside-down, even when you know they have to be installed upside-down.
- IDE cables really blow when you’re trying to save space inside a case. A SATA DVD-ROM drive would have been really nice, but for some reason there is “no demand” for them (a dongle costing more than $50 doesn’t count, because that would triple the effective cost of the drive.)
- The provided front-panel audio connectors will never correspond to the available pins on the motherboard (now that I have four computers where this is the case, I can be fairly safe to make this kind of assumption.)
Now I’m just waiting for an opportunity to start a Linux install on the box. Maybe that can start at lunch. Or maybe I’ll just have to wait until the work day ends again.
Remaining hardware I need is mainly an IR receiver. I’ve noticed that many video encoder cards come with them, so perhaps I should just use that approach. I do need something compatible with LIRC though, and I’m not yet sure how much that need will restrict my choices.