Windows Media Center – Ceton Prime Part Two (Motherboard, CPU and Cooling Fan)
17. Dec, 2009 | by Timothy Daleo |
11 Comments
This is the second of five (?) articles about my Windows Media Center build in anticipation of the new Ceton CableCARD tuner release. Tonight I will be showing the motherboard, CPU and cooling fan that will be installed into the Alienware P2 Chassis.
Background
The plan is to have this system replace my Moxi Charter Cable DVR AND my WMC PC.
The first article can be found at:
The chassis is a Alienware P2 case with light kit I bought from Dell for $125.
Timeframe
I get paid every two weeks and will get a few items each paycheck. I should be done just in time for the Ceton release. This paycheck I had a little extra and bought the motherboard, CPU and cooling fan.
Ceton Prime? – Revisit
I am naming her Ceton Prime in honor of the Ceton Multi-Channel Cable TV Card I hope will be released someday soon. March 2010?
http://www.cetoncorp.com/ProductsWMC.php
With their 4-tuner card, according to the Ceton web site, I will be able to have:
- 1 TV set watching live TV while the Media Center DVR records 3 other shows at the same time (4 live streams total)
- Four HD channels recording on 1 TV set while other TVs in the home are playing back previously recorded shows.
- 2 TV sets each recording 2 live shows at once (4 live streams total)
- 2 TV sets watching a different live channels each, while 2 other TV sets are each recording 1 different show to the DVR (4 live streams total)
This Paycheck – $355 (ouch)
$170 for the board, $35 for the fan and $150 for the CPU. Newegg had a deal on the board and Microcenter had a deal on the CPU. So much for Christmas presents.
P55 Motherboard
I chose the EVGA P55 SLI since it had the 1156 socket and the right amount of expansion slots. I do not know the final Ceton card slot configuration so I need a couple of extra slots ready.
http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=132-LF-E655-KR&family=Motherboard%20Family
The 1156 board fit my budget and was a good choice for a standard WMC build. I am not going to do any gaming or over clocking so this board seemed perfect. It has many features including:
And it is a fine looking board I must say.
No X58 or i7?
It was tempting but this is a Media Center rig and not for gaming. The price for the i7 really jumps so I wanted to stick with the P55 chipset. Again, it was tempting to go X58 because I am sure the Intel Gulftown Hexa-Core (using the X58 1366 socket) will be released in May. It does not matter since no one can really confirm the X58 board compatibility anyway and I can always start a new build for 2011.
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield
I chose to pay a little more for the Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield processor. You probably have your own opinions on CPUs but the i5 was the best choice for my anticipated usage. I referenced many online tests and benchmarks and the Core i5 750 beat out the Core 2 Quads for video playback and transcoding.
I assume the load of 4 HD video streams of the Ceton card, the recording of these programs and the transfer to my WHS will take some serious power. This rig has to be able to record four shows at the same time.
My wife and I drove down to MicroCenter in Orange County on Saturday to get the in-store only price of $149.99 for the Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield. The sale price of this Intel CPU put it right in the middle of the current Intel processors.
Current Intel Processor Costs (12-17-09)
Dual processors like the Wolfdale are from $50 – $170
Intel Core 2 Quad-Cores are from $160 – $360
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield is $200 marked down to $150
Intel Core i7 (quad-core) go from $280 – $600
Cooling Fan
I bought the ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro. You can see it compared to the stock i5 Core fan in the picture above. Purchasing it was like the power supply in that I just ordered it from Newegg based on the good ratings and price.
I must say as an alternative product source that anyone near a Microcenter should check out their fans. They have a whole wall! I had no idea we had so many options for cooling a CPU.
What is next?
For my next paycheck I have to decide on hard drives. I think I will go with two smaller hard drives rather than a large TB drive. What do you think about a Caviar Black for the OS and a Spinpoint for the video?
Oh, and at some point I will need to assemble and load Windows 7. Ugh.
See you next paycheck,
Tim
Similar posts you might be interested in:
- Windows Media Center – Ceton Prime Part Three (Drives, Memory and OS)
- Windows Media Center – Ceton Prime Part One (Case and Power Supply)
- Windows Media Center – Ceton Prime Part Five (Start Up and Windows Installation)
- Windows Media Center – Ceton Prime Part Four (Assembly and Video Cards)
- Ceton InfiniTV 4 CableCard Tuner Card Now Available For Pre-Order
Author Info
what about raid?
could help with playback or is it going to all be streamed back from server
HI Timothy,
I use WD Black drives in my desktop and they’ve worked very well for me so far. I have two (1TB) in Raid 0 and this makes them pretty fast. At this time I am ripping two DVD movies, recording three HDTV shows and the drives are having no trouble keeping up. I noticed an instant speed increase once I put the drives in Raid.
You will need plenty of space to store these recordings if you plan on keeping them forever. These recordings are huge, as in several gigs. I’m recording the Saturday Night Live Christmas show right now and at just over 30 minutes of recording (in 1080P) the files is already over 3 gigs.
If you are going to store these shows on your WHS then I agree you don’t need all that space in your HTPC. I’m not sure how well these drives would do if they weren’t setup in Raid though trying to do all of this at the same time.
fasthair
I wanted to add that I have that same cooler. While it will probably work better than the stock one in the photo. I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t cooler my AMD AM2 CPU much better then the stock unit. My CoolMaster Scout case has plenty of air flow so I know it’s not the problem.
fasthair
Too funny. I am on the West Coast and A Very Gilly Christmas starts in 45 minutes.
I plan on archiving some but not all of the media to my WHS. I will keep the Star Trek and SG (480) episodes on this PC and TV Archive the rest to the WHS. My current Recorded TV folder is 133 GB with 28 shows.
My original plan was to have two drives so the processor could split the work however I am still open to RAID. I will keep looking for data. I did see results similar to this article:
“Finally, it is sometimes beneficial to use the identical drives individually rather than in a RAID array because it is then possible for each drive to individually serve a different process. For example, one drive could handle paging to disk, and the other could handle other disk I/O needed by applications. Using a media example, one drive could read audio/video and the other could write the modified result. This would be faster than having a RAID array do both reads and writes, because individual drives could read/write linearly, eliminating the need to move the actuators back and forth between the area of disk being written to and the area being read from.”
Quoted from http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0
Tim
Got a few beers in me last night and ordered:
Western Digital WD5001AALS Caviar Black Hard Drive – 500GB, 7200 rpm, 32MB, SATA-3G (TSD-500AALS) 2 $64.99 $129.98 from TigerDirect.
I get 8% CB from Bing and no tax so they end up being $59 each. I still have a few weeks to determine if RAID or separate is the way to go.
Should I just forget the mongo-cooler?
HI Timothy,
Those will make some nice drives for this system. I should of mentioned this earlier but it slipped my mind. Larger drives have better speed then smaller drives. I read this at ZD Net just a few weeks ago in Robin Harris’s post titled “Disks: Why size means performance” dated 11/28/09. Give it read to understand the thinking behind this. All of that to say the 500s should give you good performance.
As far as Raid goes. After reading your link this is just what I have seen with my Raid setup. What you are after with this setup from what you have said you want to do, record video, then I think Raid really shines for this. Looking at the performance chart it is clear the write speeds are twice as much as a single drive. The rest of the tests are a wash for either setup.
You can always play around and see if you can do what you want without Raid. I’ll be honest I’ll wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t up to the task without Raid, but it is pretty cool to see those high benchmark numbers : ) Also remember if you lose one drive in Raid 0 you lose all of your data. Not a big deal since your trusty WHS is on the job.
I would use the cooler for sure. I didn’t mean to make it sound like a bad cooler. In fact in my review at Newegg of it I gave it a good rating. I even stated it would make a great replacement cooler for a wimpy OEM cooler. Which looking at what came with the Intel sure appears to be the case. Plus it is really pretty quiet in my system. I can’t hear it at over all the other fans (a bunch) and I have it running at 100% all the time. Overclocking + Quit n Cool = Sucks : )
You’ve got the makings a really nice system going here. That board is real sweet. Now all you have to figure out is what and how much RAM. RAM can mean a system that is fast and stable or one that just crashes out of the blue for no reason.
I’ll see your beers and raise you a Crown Royal and water!
fasthair
Ohh Tim,
I hope the wife doesn’t see this post. You know you promised not to spend anymore money on your computers until you get paid again. Tisk Tisk. =)
BTW what is your reason for not storing all your video on the WHS and just have WMC7 play from its network share?
CD
She went with me to Microcenter so she was aware of the cost. Not too sure how she will handle the drunk dialing a hard drive though…
I do plan on storing MOST of the video on the server. The Star Trek shows are all low-res so I would never watch them on the the large TVs.