2013-10-20, 00:36
While I briefly had an Athlon 64 3200+ based box, it gave me a lot of problems and I build an A6-3500 box to replace it. It was an ATX case to allow me to stuff more hard drives into it, but otherwise sat quietly with it's A6 ticking away nicely.
This Christmas, as AMD was discontinuing the FM1 socket, I picked up the A8-3870K to replace the A6-3500 in a boxing day sale. If the socket is being discontinued, might as well max it out for longevity, right? Slowly it ingested more hard drives as things went on. It had 5 SATA ports and 1 eSATA, so I used an eSATA to SATA cable, fed from the exterior to the interior, to enable me to use a 6th hard drive. Recently, my desktop workstation was upgraded to an HD 7950, allowing me to 'hand me down' the HD 6850 into the XBMC box. Since the HD 6850's fan was a bit loud, I replaced it with a new cooler kit from Arctic which also took up less space (Not much clearance between GPUs and HDDs). The HD 6850s graphics performance in benchmarks went up 3x or more, in comparison to the HD 6550D that was built into the A8-3870K. I expected an improvement but not 3x. There's still more to go. The next HDD will require a PCI-E SATA controller card and 5.25->3.5 adaptor rails but I'll keep it coming. Till then, please enjoy the mess that is my current XBMC box.
Oh and what do I use it for?
XBMC, Sabnzbd, SickBeard, CouchPotato, MySQL (For it and other XBMC clients in the condo), DriveBender (To pool it's HDDs into one while sharing it over the network as NAS), Steam Big Picture Mode and Cinema 4D Team Render Client. Yes, it ALSO sometimes help to render 3D rendering for Cinema 4D, though the render client is permanently set to lowest CPU priority to allow everything else to run smoothly. It's a bit busier than the E-350's being built on this forum.
This Christmas, as AMD was discontinuing the FM1 socket, I picked up the A8-3870K to replace the A6-3500 in a boxing day sale. If the socket is being discontinued, might as well max it out for longevity, right? Slowly it ingested more hard drives as things went on. It had 5 SATA ports and 1 eSATA, so I used an eSATA to SATA cable, fed from the exterior to the interior, to enable me to use a 6th hard drive. Recently, my desktop workstation was upgraded to an HD 7950, allowing me to 'hand me down' the HD 6850 into the XBMC box. Since the HD 6850's fan was a bit loud, I replaced it with a new cooler kit from Arctic which also took up less space (Not much clearance between GPUs and HDDs). The HD 6850s graphics performance in benchmarks went up 3x or more, in comparison to the HD 6550D that was built into the A8-3870K. I expected an improvement but not 3x. There's still more to go. The next HDD will require a PCI-E SATA controller card and 5.25->3.5 adaptor rails but I'll keep it coming. Till then, please enjoy the mess that is my current XBMC box.
Oh and what do I use it for?
XBMC, Sabnzbd, SickBeard, CouchPotato, MySQL (For it and other XBMC clients in the condo), DriveBender (To pool it's HDDs into one while sharing it over the network as NAS), Steam Big Picture Mode and Cinema 4D Team Render Client. Yes, it ALSO sometimes help to render 3D rendering for Cinema 4D, though the render client is permanently set to lowest CPU priority to allow everything else to run smoothly. It's a bit busier than the E-350's being built on this forum.
