so anyway, i've been putting this little monster together for almost 6 months, and i realised it's nearly finished i suppose

http://i.imgur.com/GadAUlI.jpg

it's not the overpowered little chuggernaut i had planned it to be when i started spec'ing the parts for it, but it's not too bad for the power it draws and it doesn't necessarily need a gpu to run any of the Steam library when i get around to migrating all that data over (but one definitely wouldn't hurt itf for the 3d 1080p decoding stuff off the storage)

it's an

- intel i5 ivy bridge with 8Gb of fancy ram with blue aluminium heat dissipating headers
- a 128Gb SSD Samsung Orange as the primary drive
- Fractal Node 304 mini-itx case with a Gigabyte H61N-USB3 snuggled in which has a single spdif optical digital audio and HDMI and a couple of e-sata outs
- 1TB & a slower 750Gb hdd's in no particular raid or lvm array yet
- a Silverstone 650W or 700W p/s (won't be enough if i ever need to buy 6 x 3TB drives to use all of the drive sleds)
- some kind of stealthy acoustic silencing 120mm fan that makes almost no sound
- but alas, not yet. the short cable kit for less clutter in there hasn't come in yet but i'm assured that what was paid for is not forgotten about on backorder :)

it's all humming along and stable, running Debian and an XBMC alpha build for now. i might try Linux Steam when i work out how to port the Steam backup volumes without completely corrupting them again like the last time i managed to when i upgraded my workstation machine

all up about $450 for the build, not including the ssd or hdd storage of course

i have an 8" xenarc touchscreen that I want to cut into the case somehow, not sure about how i'm going to go about that yet though. probably should have just bought one of those silverstone or antec cases with the cutout for one already done


p.s. i know, sweet painting huh? got it for 5 beans at a salvo's store. pretty sure it's from Kyoto or Tokyo in one of the market districts. love it

consider it was all obsolete as soon as it left the electronics engineers CAD program to get mass produced, your point is valid but moot :p