So today my new hardware arrived for my MythTV rig. I had planned on spending about two hours moving the hardware over, and have it all running just in time for another run at Nip/Tuck tonight.

So first I cracked open the nMEDIA HTPC 400BA. It’s a beautiful case, sleek black with bright blue LED’s. On the front it’s got a huge power button that looks like a stereo volume knob. It also has 4 memory card readers, 2 USB ports, a firewire port, headphone and mic jacks, and a LCD readout of temperature and fan speed (if you hook it up to your fan). It also has a DVD drive cover to maintain the “Sleek” look of the system. Inside, it’s got plenty of room for either an ATX or micro-ATX motherboard, 2 3.5″ drives and a DVD drive.

Read on inside for my notes on setting it all up…
[tag:mythtv][tag:nmedia][tag:htpc][tag:computer][tag:hardware]

I took a quick look around, then got to the business at hand. My
quaint little 40G hard drive dropped in without a problem (That’s next
on the upgrade list). But when I got to the DVD drive I had my first
problem. The case wants you to fully enclose the DVD drive, faceplate
and all, inside the 5 1/4 drive bay, and then use their faceplate to
operate it. The first part of the problem was that the faceplate made
the drive just a fraction too bit to fit inside the case. With a bit of
effort, and 5 minutes with a hacksaw, I was able to trim the left and
right edges of the faceplate making it fit just fine. The next problem
was with the further screw locations, the drive still was too far
forward. I had to get the hacksaw out again to trim the DVD Eject button down. Neither was a huge problem, but it was a bit annoying.

Once
I got the drives in, next part was the motherboard. I pulled the BP6
from my old case and spent a few minutes removing the old Golden Orbs
that were on it. I then cracked open the second NewEgg box containing
my two WhisperRock V‘s.
It didn’t take long before I ran into another problem. These two fans
weren’t really designed for the BP6, and extend the heatsink a good
1/2″ away from the processor on all sides. It took a good 20 minutes of
fighting, but I finally got the two fans on the processors, but they
are literally touching on one side and slightly offset (I think).
Either way, they look fantastic and definately are quiet.

Once
the fans were on the motherboard, another problem. The rear case fan
protrudes about 1″ toward the processors, which normally wouldn’t be a
problem but now collides with the WhisperRock. Simple solution: Just remove the fan.
If I need to, I can replace it with a smaller one later. With that out
of the way, I could move on to the final step: Installing the cards.

This
went quickly, with one hitch. The NVidia 5900 card I’m using is a
full-length/full-height card, and it bumps into the Hard Drive. If I
had a shorter one, this wouldn’t be a problem. As it is, I was able to
“bend” the card slightly to get it into place. Unfortunately, this
seems to make the fans a bit noisy as they aren’t really aligned
properly anymore. Another item to add to the upgrade list: el-cheapo passive-cooling nvidia (Like this PNY 6200 for $36)

With it all done, I was able to power it on. I plugged it up and hit the big honkin power button on the front: It’s alive!!!
For about 3 seconds, then it powered down. “Hrm, that’s odd”. I check
my connections, and do it again. Same story, 3 seconds and then off.
Thus began the next 5 hours of my life: Trying to figure out what was
going wrong.

I called my dad and he reminded me that the
behavior was similar to holding the power button on: After a few
seconds of being held down, hard-power off. I checked the connections
on the power switch, and I verified it wasn’t stuck. I thought perhaps
the power supply was bad, so I took out the one from my old case and
saw the same scenario play itself out again. After a while I broke down
and removed the motherboard from the case, and tried again only to find
it wouldn’t power on at all. “Oh no,” I thought, ” I’ve fried
it.”. Finally I found out that, with the power connected, I could tap
the corner of the board near the power switch and it would power on for
the 3 seconds. Occasionally, it would even remain on. “Ok, so
something is just shorting out.” I took the user manual, and slid it
under the motherboard, and it seemed to work although it still wasn’t
100% reproducible.  After several hours of moaning and frustration, I
finally found the problem: The brass mounts for the motherboard that
raise it from the chassis.  I didn’t bother to move them since they
were all in ATX locations, all except one which I didn’t notice which conveniently shorted out the two pins to the power switch. 
Once I wedged a piece of paper over that one (I was too tired to take
everything apart yet again to fix it) it worked flawlessly.

So the system is online and recording now, assembled with 20 minutes to spare.  A quick mbmon shows the following:

        Temp.= 35.0, 36.0, 40.0; Rot.= 2220, 2280,    0
        Vcore = 2.19, 1.52; Volt. = 3.33, 5.03, 12.40, -12.61,  3.55

An amazing 35 degrees C, down from the 80 it was at previously (45 when I got the CPU fans working and pointed a box fan at the case).  I’m going to leave it running for a few days while I shop around for a few more needed items:

  1. Much larger Hard Drive… 250G probably, whatever I can get
    cheap.  If nothing else, I have a 160G in my windows machine I could
    probably reallocate for this.
  2. Remote Control – Laura won’t live with using a keyboard for this.  The StreamZap seems a strong possibility.
  3. Quieter Case fan – the one case fan I have in the system now seems a bit loud.  It may be the GPU fan, I can’t really tell yet.
  4. Maybe a quieter/smaller (better?) graphics card
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