Turning some old stuff into useful things
- Thread starter homestudio4k
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An interesting build(the article glosses over a few things) but wouldnt the cost associated be better spent on a small atom system that would be quieter, smaller and lower the power usage?
i like atom or intel soc or amd 5350 setup. i have another setup of n3150 for 24/7 p2p server. but they lack the expansion slots of sc440. i feel that i can deploy my little sc440s in many ways if i add different adapter cards. in terms of cost, i should have gone the ebay route to be cheaper. i just got used to amazon and newegg for their fast shipping and some kind of safe mind. but i rarely return things after buying from these sites.
the SC440 certainly is flexible with it's expansion but that doesn't make it an ideal HTCP, an instance where profile and noise are most important things like the nuc's and the compute sticks are the champions in this arena the sc440 would have been interesting as a PLEX server however attached to one of these(and in that scenario you would have only wanted the q6600 upgrade)
i tried raspberry pi 2 but it is not as ideal as a full fludge htpc. maybe a nuc has enough power for htpc, i don't have hands-on experience. i understand your point because this sc440 cannot be 24/7 loaded, otherwise too much power consumption to defeat its purpose. i found out a solution to this though. i can use ir remote control to hibernate this and wake it up for htpc purpose. in the future i may use a standalone rp2 to smart manage its power status with some scripts. so this setup is definitely not for 24/7, but good for xvmc, mythtv, security cam server etc, as long as a rp2 is used to hibernate it when not using. i am exploring this approach. it can be significant, because the major issue for old servers is power consumption. if smart power management is successful, buying cheap yet power hungry old servers for real world application is possible. as i mentioned earlier, i totally understand your point, and actually felt the pain.
for noise, i can change the cpu fan to noctua 12mm pwm fan to reduce. for size and looking, i hide it behind tv stand.
probably in the future i will do a more comprehensive review on different platforms (nuc, atom, old server or workstation, etc) for htpc, so that different systems can be compared more objectively. thanks for your input and suggestion.