HTPC/Server: Aug Upgrades

Apologies for this ‘August Upgrades’ post coming a little late in mid September! August became a bit of a whirlwind and before I new it, we were into September and I’d started a new job! Busy, busy times!

D-Link Powerline Adapters
D-Link Powerline Adapters

Anyway, these are only minor upgrades due to budget this (and last) month, but every little improvement counts and so there’s another, albeit small post to add to the build log. In early Aug, pretty much straight after payday, I picked up a pair of D-Link Powerline Adapters to let us connect the server to the TV downstairs in the living-room where the idea was to have it become more of a HTPC. The other Aug purchase was a Sapphire HD5450 ATI Radeon 1GB DDR3 graphics card. The HD5450’s a basic 1GB card with an all-important HDMI port that offers audio as well as video. This was vital at the time to allow for easy use as a HTPC connected to our TV without having to worry about a separate speaker system for sound. The card copes fantastically with HD content so even BR quality video isn’t an issue. It also copes v nicely with basic gaming and emulators.

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Tech Pickups: Aug 2012

Technically the first item hauled this month is really from the very end of July, when Overclockers dropped the Bitfenix Prodigy back down to below £60. I snagged it for my upcoming Hackintosh build in artic white and can’t wait to use it in my build in the coming months! After payday on the 31st, … Read more

Future Projects

Right now I have a few projects I’d like to complete some day, the first of which is a fairly low-mid range PC offering hefty storage. Currently, John and I watch most of our media via a Playstation 3 console hooked up to our livingroom TV. It’s worked well for us so far, but now it’s becoming annoying trying to keep track of where we’re pulling our media from on our home network. Too many times we’ve sat down to get all comfy on the sofa and kick-started the PC to find that we’ve forgotten to boot up the relevant PC to stream our media from!

Before moving in together, I kept all my media on a Mac Mini which streamed to my own PS3 for viewing. Back at the flat, he had a PC hooked straight up to his TV & watched everything directly from there, avoiding any reliance on a home network. Recently space has also become an issue & with the price of hard drives still slowly crawling back to their pre-flood prices, they’ve still a long way to go before they’re as cheap as they once were. In response to a lot of this (and a few other reasons less pressing), I’ve been itching to get a few projects started. Rough details as follows:

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