Hi guys thought I might share my recent build I had been running a velocity micro I purchased off ebay back in 2008 with a ceton PCI 4 tuner. The thing that I always hated about this system since day 1 was the noise level sitting in my living room watching TV you always had that constant hum so I set out to build an ultra quiet system. Space was not an issue so I went with a larger case the SilverStone Grandia Series GD06B HTPC case with 2 Hot-Swap Drive Bays, 3x120mm case Fans (Black). I wanted the 2 hot swappable drive bays and pulled one of the 500gig Hitachi HD's from the velocity micro that has all my pictures and music and plugged that into the lower bay and use the upper bay for the WD 2TB drive for video recording. Its virtually silent I wish had done this sooner. Total build cost $702 (not including the ceton 6eth). Also I noticed a huge improvement in picture quality on my Plasma especially the black levels which I assume is due to Intel's built in HD 4400 graphics chip vs the 8yr old Radeon graphics card I was running. Also I was amazed at the boot speed running the OS on an SSD...WMC runs much smoother and faster. The only thing I would have done different would be a modular power supply to eliminate power connection's not being used.
GA-Z97M-D3H gigabyte MB
Intel's new Core i3-4160
Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB Kit (2GBx2) DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800)
Crucial MX100 SSD 128GB SATA 2.5-Inch
LG WH16NS40 Super Multi Blue Internal SATA 16x Blu-ray Disc Rewrite
WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5
Seasonic 360W 80PLUS Gold ATX12V Power Supply SSR-360GP
Ceton 6eth
Windows 7 home premium 64bit
Home theatre receiver pioneer VSX-1021
58" Panasonic Plasma TV that's 8 yrs old (soon to be replaced with a Sony 65X950B)
I run 2 Xbox extenders and 1ceton echo
Ed