another fan of the hyper212 here 
awesome bang for buck on that thing, be prepared though - itās tall - really tall
Iām using Kingston Hyper-X with the fan mounted on the memory slot side of the mATX mobo and there is room to spare. If you go for that 970A-DS3P you should be ok as there is 4 memory slots. as DT says it is quite a tall heatsink so there is a bit room to play with.
Well, the new A10-7700K and A10-7850 are out and available to order - Scan.co.uk have them in stock, but looking on the pricing on release day Iāve effectively saved myself about Ā£47 (if you include my refunds off Amazon and the gift card credit.) by going for the A10-6800K instead of the A10-7700K.
And luckily SWMBO hasnāt really noticed that the HTPC has been updated, and after a bit of wheeler dealering on fleabay the cost of the upgrade has been covered by the cost of selling some of my āretiredā components. 
Itāll be interesting to hear how those perform.
Well, the upgrade bug is still nibbling awayā¦ now the old laptop is getting treated to a 500GB HDD to replace the original 160GB one, a new DVD writer and an extra 2GB of RAM. Might just squeeze a few more years service out of it!
New keyboard for the lappy arrived todayā¦ only took 5 minutes to swap it!
Alsoā¦ how does a 22% performance increase for Ā£15.49 sound? Tempted to swap the T7100 C2D for a T7500 C2D.
My tower was completely rebuilt just prior to Christmas. Currently running an Intel i7 4930k on an EVGA Ivy Bridge-E āX79Darkā mobo. 16GB RAM and a GTX 770 gfx card. Three hard drives: 1TB, 600GB, and 300GB. A Blue-Ray player/burner and a CD-R player/burner. Itās doing OK with Win 8.1, though I still canāt get Skyrim to run more than a few minutes without crashing (this is a known Win 8.1 issue - it didnāt happen with Win 8.0).
Just ordered a few bits for an ITX HTPC build for the bedroomā¦ the Mrs would like to have Thai TV available to watch in bed!!! :wall:
An Asrock E350M1 mobo and INWIN BP655 ITX case will form the basis of the system along with some spare DDR3 memory and the 160GB HDD that got replaced in my laptop upgrade will make a nice and cheap buildā¦
Will be interesting to see how the E350 CPU performsā¦ might see how it performs in SIMAP
[QUOTE=TheFiend;466196]how does a 22% performance increase for Ā£15.49 sound? Tempted to swap the T7100 C2D for a T7500 C2D.[/QUOTE] jn
T7500 now fitted and running in my laptopā¦ And I reckon the performance boost is a bit higher than I thought due to itsā higher L2 Cache as well as the higher clock speedā¦ All in all quite an impressive cheap upgrade
[QUOTE=TheFiend;466245]Just ordered a few bits for an ITX HTPC build for the bedroomā¦ the Mrs would like to have Thai TV available to watch in bed!!! :wall:
An Asrock E350M1 mobo and INWIN BP655 ITX case will form the basis of the system along with some spare DDR3 memory and the 160GB HDD that got replaced in my laptop upgrade will make a nice and cheap buildā¦
Will be interesting to see how the E350 CPU performsā¦ might see how it performs in SIMAP[/QUOTE]
Placed this order with Amazon on Saturdayā¦ the case turned up on Mondayā¦ but they have pissed me about with despatching the motherboardā¦ Order tracking had it showing with a City-Link tracking number and as having being despatched from a fulfilment centre in Leipzigā¦ Found out today that it wasnāt picked up by City-Link and was in fact with another courier so I canāt even track it. Well, I have had enough of poor service from Amazon.co.uk so I cancelled the order and got a refund off them and now just have to refuse to take delivery of the parcel.
Found Ebuyer had stocks of the Biostar A68I-350 DELUXE motherboard, which has a more recent chipset on it and was also cheaper than Amazon, and was on free next day delivery so an order was placed with them.
In the meantime I have made a small mod to the In-Win case - I have removed the HDD/Optical drive mount and after drilling a couple of rivets out have mounted a 2.5" HDD adapter bracket to the side on the case which makes the airflow in the case a lot better. I will also be replacing the standard fan on the motherboard with a 40mm Noctua so should run nice and quiet.
Hmmmmā¦ after a little research found out the E350 APU suffered problems with stuttering playing flash videos so it got sent back and has been replaced with a A6-6400K and Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI set up. Nice little motherboard with a lot of features but a bit of a squeeze when you add in a Scythe Shurinken low profile cooler. Have set it up so it runs undervolted on VCore for better power consumption
Iām using a XFX HD4350 GFX card with the intention of outputing S-Video to the bedroom TVā¦ a 32" Panasonic CRTā¦ but to get the GFX card to fit in the case I needed to modify the passive heatsink on the card as it was catching the CPU. coolerā¦
Iāve had a little fun trying to get WIN 7 playing nicely with the old skool GFX card, but now Iāve installed the older ATI Catalyst Control Centre instead of the AMD version it seems to be playing ball.
Is S-video your only option? Would it have been cheaper to replace the CRT with something from this century instead of buying the extra video card? I do like that moboā¦ didnāt know they made anything that has wireless built in.
Picked up a ārefurbedā HD4350 very cheap and I mean very cheap and even came with a new S-video cableā¦
And yes, your right, the TV is a bit old, but it was one of the best Panasonic made, even now it still has a great picture quality and still works great. And I donāt think the Mrs is all that bothered about the picture quality, she is just happy she can watch Thai TV in the UK.
Have had the A6-6400K clocked to 4GHz running quite happily on 1.3V VCore and have just dropped it to 1.285V to see if itāll run at that. Iām quite impressed by these AMD Richland core APUs
And that motherboard has also got bluetooth as well - itās surprising how much they have crammed into that tiny little board.
That is impressive. Amazing you can drop the v-core and still have it run nicely. What temperatures are you seeing?
With the Scythe Shuriken Rev B cooling it and running SIMAP on on both cores itās not exceeding 40 degā¦ And it has run quite happily for 24 hours on 1.285V.
Just connected up to the āmuseum pieceā CRT and demoāed it to her and she is more than happy with the picture qualityā¦ Tried talking her into getting a new TV for the bedroomā¦ Her responseā¦ āSave money for house in Thailand betterā - She has got an eye on a new build single story 3 bedroom house near her sisters and weāll be heading over in June to sort out a deal to buy one.
Damnā¦ I cracked up againā¦ just built another Mini-ITX systemā¦this time a low power cruncher using a 65W AMD A8-6500 which turbos to 4.1GHz and got it running ol lower core-voltage as well. Going to have to mount a 140mm externally on the side panel to improve the cooling as the is no room in the case for any fansā¦ after that Iām not doing any more upgrades for quite a whileā¦
OK I admit Iām an addict!!!
As a result of upgrading a mates HTPC to a ITX based one, I came into possession of a very nice Silverstone HTPC caseā¦ and decided to build an an HTPC using one of the new AM1 Quad core Athlon 5350 and an ITX motherboard. Total outlay for APU and motherboard a grand total Ā£65 and has the bonus of very low power usage. Threw in some memory and a HDD and it was good to go!!! Even managed a 10% overclock without much effort and a it copes quite well with streaming Thai TV hor SWMBO. It also means my A10-6800K will now become a dedicated cruncher.
Thought Iād see how the little 5350 coped with running BOINC projects. Have set it to run SIMAP on 2 of the 4 cores and running FlashPlayer at the same time and it copes admirably without affecting Flashplayer, So perhaps it might become a part-time cruncher.
Upgraditus struck againā¦ this time itās my old lappy againā¦ have replaced the 500GB HDD with a 240GB SSD!!!
Itās a hell of a lot faster than it was originally, especially after the T7500 transplant. :driving:
The prices of SSDs have come down so much now Iām thinking of popping a Crucial 250gb in my Lenovo laptop. Itās only got a 250gb rotary in it at the moment and I havenāt managed to fill that as itās for work, but the speed difference would be an advantage.