My latest box built

[Dartman]

Well not too much going on here lately but my buddy just set me up with my latest build. A i7-980 on a old Asus P6T Deluxe X58 with the last and latest firmware they gave it. 2 sticks of 8 gig DDR 1333, a Nspire 750 PSU, ATI 6970 2 gig video card, Sandisk Aphrodite II-Z400s 128g SSD, and a Antec 1100 full tower case with lots of fans and pretty light also Win10 pro 64.
Been busy chasing down video driver problems and slowly swapping over things from the old 1090t box that's in my beloved old Stacker case. Also swapped in my 850 Thermal Take Black Widow PSU and swapped the 750 to my old box.
The video driver keeps crashing and resetting itself even after a clean install of just the latest video drivers but there is a registry hack that backs off how fast 10 decides the driver has stopped that has almost eliminated it but not entirely yet. You set the delay longer and it gives it more time to catch up and respond before 10 resets it.
Also keeping the old box running for now to run my Media Center recordings to my HD HomeRun Prime with 3 cable card tuners, 10 no longer supports it without a hacked version from 8.1.
Box seems pretty snappy but really haven't done much with it yet, 10 is pretty different but usable and most of my old stuff still works in it.
Hope they decide to fix the video driver issues as many user with Nvidea and ATI/AMD cards have been having the same issue with varying degrees of success fixing it with the registry hack and other tweaks like using older drivers.
I like all the cooling and fan controls on the Antec box but the snap in rails on the Stacker are so much easier to deal with when swapping things around. Half the fans were locked up on it from being old and in buddies shed for a while so I relubed the bearings on some, and swapped out others and all the fans work again.
Now I need to get a few games on here and crunch some videos down and see how much faster this monster really is. At least so far it hasn't thrown a BSOD, the old box would every so often, then just reboot itself and go on but not often enough to be a huge problem.
If anyone knows a fix for the driver issue I haven't tried I'm all ears.
Also getting tired of how they keep removing extra SATA ports and things like nobody runs lots of drives anymore, at least this box still has one legacy IDE port I use for my 1655, I had it on a SATA converter to a add on SATA card in the old box and all the extra burners that I had in it.
This one has 6 normal SATA ports and 2 SAS ports I can't use so I added the add on card to the one extra PCI slot that isn't covered by my video card just in case I want to put more drives in it later, it does seem to work, just no drives on it for now. The 6 ports are full though as I kept 3 opticals and 4 hard drives in it, the 1655 uses that IDE port.
Should be fun dialing it in and eventually hope to set up a mini box to run the WMC home theater stuff.

[Ian]

Nice. I snagged an HP workstation from work awhile ago. I tossed in an extra CPU, some more memory and a couple of SSDs. My only complaint is that it doesn't support SATA 6 Gb/s, but it still works great for ripping movies and Facebook.

Dual Xeons.PNG (36.89 KiB) Viewed 15235 times

[Dartman]

This CPU was the top end 1k 980 cpu back in the day and he got it a tiny bit later for 100 bucks because his supplier didn't care as it wasn't the latest one anymore. It has 12 virtual CPUs that show up in the task manager and runs at 3.33 mhz.
He used it briefly as his main monster then upgraded and it got shuufled then retired. My total cost was 80 bucks for the 16 gig memory upgrade that this old board now supports with that last firmware upgrade.
It doesn't have usb3 ports but I THINK it supports sata 6 provided I turn it on in the bios. The 1090t board was newer and much more advanced as it did have usb3 and sata 6 support, but no ide port and still not enough ports for all my extra drives.
I had 5 hd, and 5 opticals in it with the ad on sata card and new box is pared down to 4 and 3 for now as I really never use most of the extra burners any more. I have the ssd, a 500, 320, and 500, plus the LG h10 bd/hd 6x bd, Sony 7260, and the 1655.
Everything's networked together and both boxes see each other and use shared and USB drives hooked into the network.
Eventually I might try the media center hack and see how it works as reports say it works fine but sometimes gets disabled when you do a update and have to redo it.
Maybe eventually we both need to see what the latest board is that support our CPUs and see if we get some of the newer missing features. I know mine is a first gen x58 so probably newer better ones out and want a bigger ssd someday, missed that deal for 111 you posted.

[Dartman]

I have installed the Media Center that was hacked from the last 8.1 version and so far it is completely stable, works, and has survived several official updates without being disabled.
When I was running it on both boxes it tended to get confused or drop a tuner trying to decide which box to take the recording instructions from, so I backed up and deleted the the schedule on the 7 box and everything's happy now and I GUESS the beta HD HomeRun DVR still works too, though it doesn't always seem to pick up the one test show I set to see what happens.
I finally got a few captures that were close enough to native H264MKV format that they didn't need massive re encoding and man this thing flies with them, easily twice as fast as my hex core AMD was.
The non compliant ones take a while but would probably have taken all night to do with the old box. Now if I can just get the video drivers a bit more stable this thing would be awesome.

[Ian]

A bunch of the guys I work with record TV. I just never had the patience for any of that.

[Dartman]

I hear you but once Comcast here encrypted EVERY channel all my old bought and paid for HD ready clear QAM stuff now longer worked so I couldn't use any of it to record at least the SD shows, and a few open HD channels anymore. SO, I bought a HD HomeRun Prime and got a cable card and re enabled Media Center, the rest is history.
Made me have to figure out networking and everything but now I can easily record anything I'm paying for on Comcast, most of it copy freely. Now I don't have to make sure I'm home and watching my favorite shows. I just capture them, use Video Redo to edit out the commercials in a batch edit setup that does a bunch at once, then double check and save them in a HD format I like and watch them on my Plex based Andorid media player out front.
I save up a weeks worth or so, let it find the commercials, double check, then batch save to the appropriate folders on my Large external drive using FileBot to rename them in a format Plex likes.
Works great and looks like the X1 format or tivo and like that so everything has a title with pictures and descriptions and info, very non geek friendly for other family members.
Maybe you should set up a tiny media center PC and some sort of tuner or cable tuner with a card that works in your area and play with it in your spare time. It's pretty cool when everything you have is on your main TV and easy to play for anybody.
If your not really into TV or movies much then maybe it wouldn't be for you but I enjoy finally being able to easily play everything I have on my setup out front.