2013-10-28, 04:25
I have built a few home stereo devices: a DAC, room EQ DSP, and two Tripath amplifiers using the Hi-fi 2000 cases. They are nice quality and easy to work with. We have been using an older Logitech Revue Google TV device, but I wanted to build a custom HTPC to round out the equipment; my goal was to have the idle power consumption better than the Google TV it is replacing which is around 12 W. Like the Revue, this HTPC will not be turned off or put in standby.
Hi-fi 2000 ITX 288 Case
Intel i3-4330 CPU
Intel 7260 AC WiFi/Bluetooth card
Intel X-25M 80GB SSD
ASRock H81M-ITX Motherboard
G.SKILL 2x2GB 1.35V DDR3-1333 DRAM
Pico-Box Z2-ATX-200 Power supply
Sparkle 12V 60W Power brick
Ubuntu 13.10 Operating system
I've undervolted the CPU a bit and overclocked both the GPU and DRAM to 1600 MHz; everything is stable. The ASRock board has a lot of tweaking ability. It consumes 10.6W on the desktop with display on and WiFi connected, display off is 9.5W. 15.5W when playing Bluray rip. I needed to tweak Ubuntu a bit to lower the power; basically I enabled the "laptop on-battery" features at all times by modifying pm-utils. This had virtually no negative performance impact.
Initially I put a G3220 CPU in, and while it was fine for XBMC, it wouldn't play the Wii emulator games that well. The i3-4330 is about twice as fast in the GPU, and only consumes a little more power at idle. The AC wireless works very well, I get over 37 MB/s file copying speed from the NAS and it takes little power. I suspect the speed will improve as Linux drivers get better. The speed is important as I keep all the emulator ROMs on the NAS.
My next modification is to add a graphical OLED display to the front of the case. I have already bought the display and finished writing the Linux drivers, next thing is to machine the opening in the front panel. The display will connect to an internal USB header and has 256x64 resolution, 16 grayscale. This display will show nowplaying information as well as the GUI for a Squeezebox music client.
Hi-fi 2000 ITX 288 Case
Intel i3-4330 CPU
Intel 7260 AC WiFi/Bluetooth card
Intel X-25M 80GB SSD
ASRock H81M-ITX Motherboard
G.SKILL 2x2GB 1.35V DDR3-1333 DRAM
Pico-Box Z2-ATX-200 Power supply
Sparkle 12V 60W Power brick
Ubuntu 13.10 Operating system
I've undervolted the CPU a bit and overclocked both the GPU and DRAM to 1600 MHz; everything is stable. The ASRock board has a lot of tweaking ability. It consumes 10.6W on the desktop with display on and WiFi connected, display off is 9.5W. 15.5W when playing Bluray rip. I needed to tweak Ubuntu a bit to lower the power; basically I enabled the "laptop on-battery" features at all times by modifying pm-utils. This had virtually no negative performance impact.
Initially I put a G3220 CPU in, and while it was fine for XBMC, it wouldn't play the Wii emulator games that well. The i3-4330 is about twice as fast in the GPU, and only consumes a little more power at idle. The AC wireless works very well, I get over 37 MB/s file copying speed from the NAS and it takes little power. I suspect the speed will improve as Linux drivers get better. The speed is important as I keep all the emulator ROMs on the NAS.
My next modification is to add a graphical OLED display to the front of the case. I have already bought the display and finished writing the Linux drivers, next thing is to machine the opening in the front panel. The display will connect to an internal USB header and has 256x64 resolution, 16 grayscale. This display will show nowplaying information as well as the GUI for a Squeezebox music client.
