It’s Christmas day. The family dinner was on Christmas Eve so it has been a very peaceful day with time to put together the stack of stuff depicted in this post. I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Home Edition to the stack for a complete new HTPC. Here are a few snapshots of the assembly:

HTPC 1 HTPC 2
Life is like an empty box… Who comes up with these ridiculous names? “Memory lover!”. That doesn’t sound like a motherboard for real men. Well, the specs looked right.
HTPC 3 HTPC 4
It’s so fun to put things together so I often do it twice. Having fastened the motherboard with all 9 screws I realized that the fan backplate needed to go under the board (“backplate” should have rung a bell). I decided to install the fan with the motherboard out of the cabinet. It was easy enough. The fan fit into the cabinet with a 5 mm margin. I will not install any cabinet fans to start with. Hopefully the CPU fan will keep the air moving fast enough. I’m a bit worried about the GPU as the GPU heat sink and the CPU fan are on opposite sides of the graphics PCB. I need to keep an eye on the GPU temp for a while.
HTPC 5 HTPC 6
Most of the stuff fit in. I didn’t want to install the digital TV tuner as its slot was next to the slot of the graphics board and it would have covered the GPU heat sink. There are a lot of empty slots further away but of the wrong kind. This I think is an example of poor design as many high-end graphics boards actually require two slots, whether for a big fan or for a heat sink. My home burnt Windows DVD seems to work (I always use the Linux application Brasero to burn my DVDs including ISO images).
HTPC 7 HTPC 8
I agree, I guess… The SilverStone cabinet gives good value and looks for the money. The Blu-ray/DVD drive lid doesn’t work perfectly but maybe it just needs to be broke in a bit.

There were some glitches:

  • You still can’t buy stuff from Microsoft through a Swedish site. Clicking “Köp nu” (Buy now) on the Swedish Microsoft site takes you to the US site where you are required to enter a state (but no country) in your address. After some confusion I found the UK on-line store where I was finally able to purchase a copy of the home edition of Windows 7. I’ll spare you the obvious comparison with the ease of getting Linux.
  • There was no way of telling from the mother board documentation which way to connect + and – from the power led and the HD led. I got the HD led right – and the power led wrong.
  • The default sleep mode (S1) leaves the CPU fan on (and maybe some other things as well). What kind of sleep is that? I’ve seen this behavior on some older computers I’ve had too, but not with boards from ASUS. The next motherboard will probably be an ASUS again. Or else I should avoid Corsair power supplies.
  • The power-on button often requires multiple pushes for the computer to wake up. The board gets powered up for a fraction of a second at the failed attempts but then dies again. I will try to find out if there is a pattern.
  • The lid over the optical drive doesn’t open as it should. It gets slightly stuck in a semi-closed position. This seems to be a result of a bad fit.