So my HTPC ate sh!t tonight. Some memory error or something during a Windows update.
This gives me an excuse to upgrade it, I was never happy with the lack of power of it (AMD Brazos mini ITX system). It decoded most video fine, but anything over 9-10 Mbps bitrate was trouble, as was anything Flash based. Then again, the world is moving away from Flash...
Part of me wanted to just get an AppleTV/Fire TV, but I have a lot of unused rack space in my basement. Soo, I picked up a 3U case today and I'll slowly build it over the next few months. Ideally I'll minimize the power consumption and keep it always on, it seems to provide less shock to the system than constantly waking it.
I have no idea where to start though. Broadwell is out only in small quantities due to a delay, but Intel haven't pushed back Skylake. So maybe just wait instead of getting into a Haswell setup? The power envelope was already vastly improved with Haswell, and Broadwell is supposed to knock another 30% off of that...but we're taking about fractions of a watt at this point at idle.
This gives me an excuse to upgrade it, I was never happy with the lack of power of it (AMD Brazos mini ITX system). It decoded most video fine, but anything over 9-10 Mbps bitrate was trouble, as was anything Flash based. Then again, the world is moving away from Flash...
Part of me wanted to just get an AppleTV/Fire TV, but I have a lot of unused rack space in my basement. Soo, I picked up a 3U case today and I'll slowly build it over the next few months. Ideally I'll minimize the power consumption and keep it always on, it seems to provide less shock to the system than constantly waking it.
I have no idea where to start though. Broadwell is out only in small quantities due to a delay, but Intel haven't pushed back Skylake. So maybe just wait instead of getting into a Haswell setup? The power envelope was already vastly improved with Haswell, and Broadwell is supposed to knock another 30% off of that...but we're taking about fractions of a watt at this point at idle.
