Posts Categorised: Misc Hardware

0PSU LogoThe perfect HTPC power supply 2020?

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I recently got a new GPU for my HTPC which required a replace­ment power sup­ply as the old one was­n’t suit­able for power­ing a GPU with an 8 pin PCIe power cable. The HTPC is in use for an aver­age of around 6 hours per day and with elec­tri­city at 15p/kWh any reduc­tion in power at the wall works out at 33p a year per Watt. This isn’t a big sav­ing, but if con­sump­tion is reduced by sev­er­al watts the sav­ing can add up.
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4Sleep and WOL with Intel 82567LM‑3

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I have a couple of old USFF Dell Opti­plex 760 PCs that have a built-in Intel 82567LM‑3 gig­abit eth­er­net con­nec­tion. Get­ting this adapter to work with both Sleep (S3 Sus­pend to RAM) and WOL (Wake on LAN) has proven very tricky. The PC ori­gin­ally came with Win­dows Vista and as a busi­ness class PC you’d expect these 2 fea­tures to work but it has always been a battle to get them working.
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0PSU LogoThe search for a storage server PSU

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I recently pos­ted abi­out my search for a new stor­age serv­er case. My next search involves find­ing a suit­able PSU! It seems in recent years it has got much harder to find the type of hard­ware I like to use, prob­ably because the fash­ion has been to go smal­ler and sleeker which is gen­er­ally more pos­sible in this era of improved per­form­ance-per-watt devices. How­ever, if you have space and you want sys­tems to be cool, quiet, and effi­cient then large is still the way to go.
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2The search for a 12 bay 5.25″ full tower case

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I have an ori­gin­al Cool­er­Mas­ter Stack­er case (STC-T01-UW) that I use for my serv­er. It is great because it has 12 5.25″ extern­al drive bays. Strictly speak­ing it has 11 useable as 1 of them is taken up by the power but­ton and front-usb mod­ule, but this can be mod­i­fied if necesary. This spec­tac­u­lar case is great for fit­ting lots of HDDs for a stor­age array. My sys­tem cur­rently has 10 reg­u­lar size HDDs and 2 SSDs in it which fit eas­ily with plenty of cool­ing. As I want to build a second serv­er to migrate the older drives into I am look­ing for anoth­er case with equally impress­ive capacity…
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0Fixing a slow Amazon Fire HD 8

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A couple of xmases ago I bought my bet­ter half an Amazon Fire HD 8 tab­let as she wanted a budget tab­let to read books on at night, and to play free android games like clash of clans. The Fire seemed an ideal option as it would link into her Kindle account without any hassle, and is also android based. It was also pos­sible to get a good sized device with­in the price lim­it we set each other.
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0Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Wi-Fi AMD Fusion Mini-ITX MotherboardFixing stability issues with Asus E35M1‑M Pro

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The basis of my main HTPC is an AMD E350 Brazos in the form of an Asus E35M1‑M Pro. I had quite a lot of prob­lems with the sys­tem when I first built it, which were caused by issues with the Seag­ate Momentus XT stor­age drive I used. These were fixed a good while ago via firm­ware update from Seag­ate, and since then the sys­tem has largely worked without any issue.… Read Full Article

1CoolerMaster Elite 335 PC CaseThe end of regular PC price drops?

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I reg­u­larly build PCs for people, and have recently been look­ing at a high end spec for someone.  I star­ted, as I often do, by look­ing at what I’d got for a high end sys­tem about a year ago, to see if it was worth mov­ing up the the new gen­er­a­tion, or if a sub­stan­tial drop in the older spec made it tempt­ing to repeat.  In the past the year old sys­tem has always been sub­stan­tially cheap­er, so I was quite sur­prised to find that this time it was­n’t.  … Read Full Article