If you mix 1l of boiling water with 1l of water at 50°C, the temperature of the resulting 2l water won't be at 75°C .... Actually it will be at 75°C, discounting the heat gained or lost from the container. If you put the warm water into the boiling water, then it will be a little hotter than 75°C d...

So no Pentiums or Celerons in this batch?

Here is a (not too favorable) review of that case.

What OS do you plan on using? If you are looking at a linux distribution for the HTPC tasks, you might want to lean away from AMD, since their linux support is worse than Intel's.

What about the Apex MI-008?

The obscured header is the third USB header, so unless your case has 6 front USB ports, it shouldn't be a problem.

Plug it in, leaving the appropriate 4 pins just dangling off the end:

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnec ... l#24into20

Two years ago, I would have told you to avoid AMD/ATI graphics for linux, but now there isn't a good low-power option. Intel and AMD have largely shouldered nVidia out of the integrated graphics market. There are some CULV ION2 boards with last generation pentiums, but nothing really competitive. I ...

He sounds like he was a wonderful pet. I'm sure he will always have a place in your heart.

How about something like this:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/zotac-zbox

A question and two bits of advice: Q) Do you have a linux distro in mind? If it is (like most) a binary distro you don't need much horsepower. If it is a source-based (like gentoo, sabayon, arch or lfs) you will probably want something with good multithreaded performance. Advice: 1) Avoid AMD graphi...

The recent intel sockets are name after the number of pins they have. LGA 1155 has 1155 pins, LGA1156 has 1156 pins, etc.

I've been thinking of doing something very similar, but have recently decided that I would rather do a NAS and a Boxee box.

jebus_beler wrote: I can run two drives on the same sata port right

Nope, each port runs one drive.

They previously reviewed a similar machine in the same case. In this review he suggests reading that review if you want pictures.

I think I just totally screwed myself. I have an old pizza-box style htpc: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856110011 It has been running hotter than it had historically recently. I thought maybe the thermal compound had dried up, so I wanted to reapply some arctic silver. I ope...

Other options for playing commercial DVD's include stand-alone programs mplayer and VLC, as well as other media center suites like Freevo, MythTV and VDR.

If you zoom in on the image of the board on newegg you can see that the 3rd and 4th slots are labeled x4 and x8 respectively.

If you are planning on using this machine for Linux, many people stay way from AMD/ATI graphics for linux. Nvidia is usually the way to go. However, the new SNB graphics are looking very promising. Check out phoronix.com for updates about that.

I'm looking to replace my current P4 based HTPC with a new model. I'm going to be using linux, so nvidia vpdau is a must. With that in mind, I was excited to see the ION/CULV board from Zotac, so I put together a shopping list based around that: MB: Zotac IONITX-P-E $200. Case: Apex MI-008 $50 HDD: ...