"The Hammer" Home Entertainment Build

Because leaving the couch sucks!

Hey folks, thanks for popping in. I recently decided to build a new rig for the living room of my house as streaming over airplay limits what I can play through my TV. That idea being that this will be able to do anything I would want to do in the living room, which may eventually end up including some gaming.

Knowing that I was going to be using the rig for some what of a HTPC I knew I wanted it quiet, with plenty of power, and the best sound quality. Knowing that was all it took to drop $3000+ on a new tower in hopes of never having to leave the couch again.

That being said, this is the build log for the rig, with finished photos.

Build Inventory:

Case: Lian Li PC-100 "The Hammer"

Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling Silencer MK II 950W

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 UD5

Processor: Intel Core i7 3930K 3.2GHz Hexacore

RAM: 32GB Geil EVO Veloce

Graphics: EVGA GTX 680 4GB W/ Backplate

Sound: Asus Xonar Essence STX -124dB

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 for LGA 2011

Fans:
1 x Noctua NF-S12B
2 x Noctua NF-P14

Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST Blu-Ray Burner Combo Drive

SSD: Samsung 830 Series 512GB




The first thing I had to do was get all of this in to the living room and start unboxing all of it. The case was shipped in it's factory box, while there were three other boxes and an envelope. Once I broke open all the boxes I went ahead and stacked it all up for a quick photo and then got to building.



Sadly I forgot to take a picture but being as I used this case on my other rig I knew I had to tear it down and get the motherboard in it first thing. That being said, I've no photo of the skeleton.



The case is completely tool free and comes with the standoffs already setup for a full ATX setup. This meant throwing in the back plate and motherboard only taking a couple of minutes.



This was my first build with an intel socket since my 775 build quite some time ago. Needless to say, I was confused to see a socket that had... the.. pins.. in.. it.

Once I figured out how it all worked out I applied AS5.

Came the time to install the CPU Heatsink, and things got sketchy. During the ordering process I looked at the depth of the case, the height of the cooler, added some space for the motherboard tray... and overlooked the height of the memory.




The only thing that was sketchier than the clearance between the heatsink and then memory was the lack thereof between the memory and heatsink fan.



And for a moment things got worrying. Realizing that the clearance between the memory was non existent I panicked in anticipation of the case panel not fitting on. Luckily that wasn't the case, it cleared... kind of.



There was only a millimeter or two between the case panel and the heatsink.

The only thing that was more jacked up about the heatsink was that once I got the rig together and plugged it in I noticed one of the fans not spinning. Swapping wires I determined it was the software control for that specific fan header. Realizing that the header wasn't labeled as CPU_FAN I started thinking and took a look at the owners manual and quickly determined that the heatsink was so large that it had buried the CPU fan header. So out came the heatsink again, fan was hooked up and another twenty minutes later the fan was back on.

After all of the heatsink non sense I started to move towards getting everything else in.



The sound card is great. Gold plated terminals, brushed aluminum shield over the amp components, quarter inch headphone jack and RCA outputs.



I chose EVGA's 680 for this build due to the fact that additional power can be added in the way of two more cards later down the road.



Next up was to get the power supply in. This is something I overlooked, that I'm going to regret the next time I have to get inside the rig. I didn't order a modular PSU, thinking I knew what I wanted for this rig. Not remembering that the case isn't as big as my Mountain Mods I ordered the PC Power and cooling. Great power supply, and cables for everything you can't fit in your case!

The next thing in order was to get the drives in.



Knowing that all of my music is on my server and can be airplayed to my reciever and that most video would be streamed or played from a disc I decided to go with a 512 GB SSD as my only storage device.

For an optical disk drive I went with a blu-ray combo drive. Hopefully this will last me as long as my DVD-RW drive has.




After getting the hard drive in I realized I didn't put the fan grilles on the fans. So I stopped to do that.



And one last look before all of the panels go on.



Once I got everything put together I moved the rig to it's temporary home so I could install every thing.



Sometime in the next month or so I'm going to be changing out all of the stereo speakers. I just recently changed receivers and have yet to make up my mind about what speakers I'm going to buy, and if I'm going to keep the room setup with the existing furniture.

So far I'm happy with the build. I may start tinkering around with OC'ing it a bit here and there. I think it will depend on how much time I have with all the other plans coming up.

"Future Proofing"

One of the goals of the machine was to not have to upgrade, but have plenty of room should I choose to. With extra PCI-E slots, and four more RAM slots I can exchange my GPU for a much more powerful set later, and double the amount of memory to 64GB.

Makes my gaming rig look like poop too! This is actually better then the system I use full time. After having some time in to it, I'm thinking of adding two more GPU's and the other 32GB of RAM and making it my workstation/gaming rig and passing the HTPC duties to my existing gaming rig. How ever, everythings done on this, and it's in it's permanent home. I may build another and sell off my old rig or throw a few GPU's in it and use it for folding.