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The case

After selecting a case for my new living room computer I had to buy some more parts to piece together a running PC. The case I selected was the Lian Li PC-C32, in black. Overall I am satisfied with the case. It is fairly spacious, it looks good, it was pretty easy to mount everything inside of it. However, when I got the case it was a bit bigger and lighter than expected. The plates used for the case were a bit thin and the top lid had two screws in the front which I did not see and they almost made me force the top off. Other people have said the case comes with one motherboard stand too many. I did not have that problem as I installed a microATX board. The stock fans on full speed were a bit nosier than I would have liked too but it was nothing a replacement of fans and a fan controller could not handle. I chose the ZM-MFC1 Plus controller from Zalman.

The hardware

The computer consist of a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H microATX motherboard with an on-board AMD HD3200 video chip powerful enough to playback full HD video. The AMD 780G chipset is a favoritte among many reviewrs (1). The motherboard is fitted with an AMD Athlon 4850e CPU which only requires a limted amount of power and 4 GB of Kingston DDR2 memory. Both the 1TB Spinpoint F1 hard drive and the SH-S203B DVD player came from Samsung. The plan is to get another hard drive and install it in a RAID level 1 to have backup of images, music and movies. Hopefully will the prices of solid-state-drives fall while the performance contines to increase so I can get such a drive and use it for the operating system drive. The whole ting is powered by a NorthQ Giant Reactor power supply which I had laying around.

The software

I have I have been using Windows Vista 64 because I had a license and I eventually plan on getting a better graphics card to be able to play games. Currently the cards are either too expensive, too noisy or not powerful enough so I think I will be waiting until the next generation arrives or until someone starts selling better cooling solutions for, for instance the AMD 4870X2. If I wasn’t planning on gaming I would have used a Linux distro for sure.

The problems

I wish I could say everything went accoring to plan. Unfortunately it did not. First, the PSU is a bit too noisy. The 850W version of the Zalman ZM1000-HP could be a possible solution. Second, the DVD is way too noisy. I do not plan on using this much but it sounds like a plane taking off. Third, the stock fans were too noisy on full spead. This has been solved by using a fan controller. I might also replace the fans. Fourth, I will certainly get a modular PSU the next time I buy a new one. I hate all those cables. Finally and most annoying. The graphic chip has some problems with HDMI and TVs. If I select the right input on the TV and then turn on the PC I get an image and everything works perfectly. However if I change the input on the TV to something else and then back again to the PC, I do not get any image. It seems it is a problem with the Catalys driver and the handshaking with the TV. I hope this will be fixed with the release of a new driver. As a consequence of this problem I have not used it as much as originally planned. I have not moved neither movies, images nor music to the PC.

The future

As mentioned I have planned to get another disk and a new graphics card. This is however somewhere down the road. It would have been nice to get a quieter PSU as well but with the noise level of the graphic cards of today it is no point of getting a silent PSU before I know which graphics card I will be pairing it with. When new and more powerful CPUS are comming I will probably update those too. However until later the two core AMD should do the job.

Building a combined HTPC and gaming rig for the living room is according to a lot of people a stillborn idea. Nevertheless, I have a HDTV and a surround setup and I want to enjoy PC games using it. Where the HTPC is slim, cool and silent the gaming rig is big, powerful and noisy. Finding a good compromise between these two extremes is challenging and much like trying to cross a cat with an elephant.

To build a good HTCP you would want a PC with a decent storage, capable of high definition (HD) video playback. It should look good in your living room, be small, slim and silent and have a high WAF rating. Most modern computers with an integrated graphic chip coupled with a CPU with low power requirements are able to do the job. Low power requirements mean limited heat which again means no or only very few fans for cooling. Platforms based on AMD’s 780 or Nvidias GeForce 8300 based chipsets have for these reasons been popular.

A gaming rig should produce as many polygons as possible per second. To do this you need a very power hungry CPU and GPU. Power means heat, and to move this heat away from the CPU and the GPU you will need large coolers and a lot of fans. This combined with the fact that most graphics cards are quite long you would want a quite large case for this gaming computer.

For fans there are some simple rules. The larger the fan is the more hot air does it move per second. The higher the velocity of the fan is the more air does it move per second but the noise will rise to unbearable levels.

Requirements

So let us look at the requirements for a HTPC/Gaming computer. I’ll start with the one which are absolute. Since I have a girlfriend it has to look good! Looking good would in this case mean black (to match the other equipment), small and probably shiny.

Second, it should be powerful enough to run modern PC games at resolutions up to 1920*1080. This would include a large and hot graphics card which requires cooling and a pretty deep case. I will also need a decent CPU which would require good cooling. Big tower coolers like TRUE could reach up 160mm but they could be fitted with one or two 120mm fans.

Third, it should be silent. This would include water cooling or really big coolers and several large fans at low velocity. Water cooling would have been fun but it is a bit expensive and I don’t really bother right now. Since I am no millionaire it cannot be too expensive either.

To sum up, it should be a large good looking case which looks small and has room for large coolers, large fans, long graphics cards and a couple of hard drives. Most HTPC cases are small so it is a bit of a challenge to find something which matches all these requirements. However, after searching the web for a long time I found some candidates. And the nominees are:

Antec Fusion 430 Black

This case looks great, uses two 120mm fans for cooling, the critics are great and the price is quite good (about 1200 NOK = 150€). Unfortunately, a bit too small (445mm (W) x 146mm (H) x 414mm (D)) for my planned PC.

Review:

• Bjorn3d
• Silentpcreview
• Tomshardware
• 3dGameMan (if you can call these reviews )

Antec Performance One P182

Another case from Antec. I really love this one, it costs less than 1000 NOK (125€), it is big (520mm (H) x 210mm (W) x 510mm (D)) and has a lot of space for hardware, coolers and five 120mm fans. Unfortunately it is a tower, not a desktop case. If I was looking for a pure gaming rig I would have gone for this one but since it has to fit in the living room it is a no go.

Reviews:

• Bjorn3d
• Silentpcreview

Silverstone CW02

This case is another beauty, at least in my eyes. It is quite tall (435 mm (W) x 225mm (H) x 440 mm (D)) and a large cooler should fit inside. It has quite large fans with one 120mm fan and two 92mm fans. Unfortunately it got a pretty low WAF rating, it is a bit expensive (3800 NOK = 450€) and it could be a problem to fit long graphics cards so was not a winner.

Reviews

• XtremeComputing
• 3dGameMan

Silverstone LC-20

This case has room for in total two 92mm and three 80mm fans. It is fairly large (430 mm (W) x 170 mm (H) x 430 mm (D)) but neither really large coolers nor long graphics cards would fit. It got an overall good WAF rating and the price is attractive (about 1000/1500 NOK or 125/200€ without/with the LCD ). However, there is something to it which I did not like. 80mm fans are perhaps a bit small and there is not plenty of room inside of it.

Reviews

• DevHardware
• DreamWare Computers

Lian Li PC-C32B

This is the case I selected. It is no way near flawless but it is a decent compromise. It is very deep (426mm (W) x 167mm (H) x 530mm (D)) which would allow long graphics cards, and standard ATX motherboards and power supplies to enter. It has room for two 120mm and one 80mm fans. Coolers up to 140mm should enter according a very helpful forum user at hw.no . The fans should according to some reviews be replaced with some, less nosier ones. The fact that the case is pretty deep is also somewhat of a problem because it will take a lot of space in the living room. Hopefully this will not be too much of a problem. The price was about 1700 NOK (210€). It looks great (without the rack mount handles) and it got a very good WAF rating.

I am eagerly waiting for it to arrive in the mail tomorrow or one of the next few days and I will probably post some images when I get my hands on it. Having decided on the case it only remains to decide on all the other parts of the PC …

Reviews

• XSReviews
• Visual-Hideout
• CaseUmbau (in German)

Some Case Providers

I found several other nice cases when searching for this one and I recommend you to check out the following if you are looking for a HTPC case yourself.

• 3RSystem
• Antec
• Chieftec
• Lian Li
• OrigenAE
• Silverstone
• Thermaltake
• Zalman

According to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, the author Neil Gaiman increased his book sales after posting one of his books online, for free. While the Free Software Foundation and free software enthusiasts normally talk about free as in free speech, Neil Gaiman decided to rather go for the free beer. Who could resist free beer? Even though the book was available from the Internet, at no cost, an increased number of people decided to buy this and other of his books.

Personally, I think this is great news. By providing their works at no cost (preferably also with the freedoms attached), artists and software developers are able to attract people who are willing to pay for their services. I believe this is the future for an increasingly larger share of the software industry. Attract customers with free, both as in free beer and free speech, commodity and charge for value-adding development and services.

I have personally seen the same with other books as Producing OSS by Karl Fogel, Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, several books by Eric Raymond, and the O’Rilley’s Open Books project. Even though they are available for free I have ended up buying several of these books (which I recommend). Bruce Eckel claimed that the feedback he got from his online readers enabled him to write an even better book. This is very much the same as with a lot of the high quality open source software out there. Open it up to contributions from others.

Having material freely available on the Internet enables artists to reach out to new potential fans. I would never have found nor bough anything from stand up artists like for instance Carlos Mencia, Steven Lynch, and Jeff Dunham if it wasn’t for the Internet and youtube. I have also found music and movies in the same way. So keep up this free trend. I believe it will pay off for everyone in the end, well except perhaps for distributors of movies, music and so on.

In the first part of this series of blog entries I introduced some basic features of open source software (OSS). In the second and following parts I will discuss open source software I use to make my day as a researcher simpler. One of the most important activities related to research is publication and dissemination of results. To aid this process I use the typesetting system LaTeX.

There are probably more options for writing your publications and your thesis than there are stars in the sky. I will not go into detail on hardly any of these (see for instance here). Most people choose between an office tool like Mircrosoft Word or OpenOffice, or a typesetting language like LaTeX. Office tools offer easy editing based on WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and with reference managers like Endnote they would probably work quite well. That is if you are writing small to moderate sized documents, strictly using document styles, never writing mathematical formulas, and writing alone or with some sort of e-mail document locking.

LaTeX has its shortcomings as well. You have to compile the document, writing tables can sometimes be painful, the treshold for using it is higher and it is sometimes a bit difficult to place tables and figures exactly where you want them to be. However, LaTeX shines when you easily want to create large, good looking documents with plenty of (cross) references. Completely change the style of large documents is done in seconds thanks to the variety of packages and templates available through the Internet. LaTeX is furthermore written in plain text, meaning that you can use your editor of choice. Additionally, you can use Subversion (a revision control system) or similar tools for document version control and backup. This is to me a very important feature as you can easily collaborate with others on the same document, work on it from more than one computer and be certain that everything is safely backed up. Safe and secure backup should be the first commandment of all PhD students and researchers. Take a look at this comparison of Word and LaTeX or use a search engine to find more information about the strengths and weaknesses of the two.

While there are several text editors and editors designed for Latex I started using Eclipse to write LaTeX documents a few years ago while writing documentation for a Java project. It was easy to use the same editor for both tasks. Even though Eclipse is or should I say was an IDE it works quite well as a text editor and it allows me to use the same platform on both Linux and Windows. To simplify the LaTeX editing I use the Texlipse plug-in for Eclipse. This enables auto completion, colored text and visual feedback of compilation errors, see below.

To enable Subversion I use the Subclipse plug-in. This allows easy check out and commit of files from within the Eclipse platform.

Both plug-ins can easily be installed using the “Software update” feature of Eclipse but you do of course need a TeX implementation. This is included in most(?) Linux distributions and on Windows you may download and install MikTeX. What I like the most about MikTeX is that it automatically downloads missing packages.

Fitting different software systems together is not always done without small configuration challenges. As for instance after updating to the newest release of Eclipse (Ganymede) and reinstalling Subclipse I got some error message and I had to set the correct SVN interface. The good thing about many open source products is that they have plenty of users and in this case someone had already found a solution to the problem.

I really do not watch a lot of tv and tv-series (at least not until they start broadcasting over the Internet and allow me to decide when I want to watch them)  but after finishing season four of Lost I was again left with more questions than answers.

I know they do this to make me watch season five, six, seven … and seventy eight but don’t they realize that the viewers get tired of all the new unanswered questions and mysteries? Prison Break is a prime example of this. The first 13 episodes were great but I totally lost interest when they decided to kill Peter Stormare and make a new season and yet another one. What’s next, “Retirement Home Break”? I do not know and I do not care.

Why can’t the makers of tv series try to make some good series, bring closure to open questions and try to make up new stories rather than endlessly drawing out the same story. Band of Brothers on the other hand is a good example. A good series, with a start, 10 good episodes and an end. Way to go!