krynsky.com » Computer Hardware

Unboxing My Acer Aspire Revo. A Great HTPC for XBMC and Boxee

Mark Krynsky — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:06:16 +0000

Today I received my Acer Aspire Revo which I ordered refurbished from PC Connection Express for $159 which I heard about from TechBargains.com Unfortunately the deal appears to be gone but they can still be had for $199 new at Amazon.

I first heard about this machine on Lifehacker featuring this machine in their post “Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap“. I fell in love with XBMC on my original Xbox and have since tricked out my PS3 to try and get most of that functionality but have still longed to get XBMC as well as Boxee added to my Home Theater. I toyed with the idea of hacking an Apple TV to run Boxee but it didn’t handle the Netflix streaming.

I also saw the Boxee box at CES and was pretty excited about it but it’s the same price as the Acer and only runs Boxee. Now I can run XBMC, Boxee, and anything else I decide to since this is a standard Windows PC running XP Home.

Here’s a video showing the beautiful XBMC interface running on it

This little box has really gained quite a following as a great little budget HTPC as many folks have really taken a liking to it and been finding all kinds of ways to hack it. I really look forward to learning more about it and reporting back how it works out. In the meantime here are some links if you’re interested to learn more about it.

Plenty of YouTube videos showing the system
XBMC Forum has many topics on the Acer. Just search for Aspire Revo.
This post on AVSForum has tips
Here’s a guide to set it up using Xubuntu
XBMC + Acer Aspire Revo = Awesomeness
Another guide to install XBMC
HOW-TO install XBMC Live on Acer Aspire Revo – The Complete Guide for Newbies

My New ATI Sapphire 5770 Video Card and Other System Upgrades

Mark Krynsky — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:38:37 +0000

I recently began planning for my upgrade to Windows 7. I usually buy a new system whenever upgrading my OS, however I did research on new systems and didn’t see the cost benefit of doing this even after having owned my current system for almost 2 years. The newer CPUs just don’t offer a large enough performance gain for me when compared tomy current Intel e6850 3GHz CPU.

Itching to at least get a few system enhancements I looked into where I could make some upgrade improvements. I started with my video card. I occasionally like to play games on my PC so this was a good place to start as I had an Nvidia Geforce 9800 GT with 512Mb of RAM which could use an upgrade now that I have a Samsung T240HD 24-Inch LCD HDTV Monitor capable of a 1920 x 1200 resolution. So I went to Tom’s Hardware which offers a great post every month that breaks down which video card is the best to buy at various price points. Here’s the post I read and my timing appears to have been pretty good.

As mentioned in the video there were 3 cards tied in the $150 price range. There were a few key reasons I chose the 5770 over the others. It’s a newer generation card and the only one of the 3 that supports Direct X 11. Secondly I it was the only one that supported 4 video outs. It has 2 x DVI 1 x HDMI and a DisplayPort. Lastly the card uses the newer 40-nm semiconductor process technology which uses less power and produces less heat. This makes this card the quitest of the bunch as well which is an issue for me. My last several cards were pretty loud when playing games.

So having decided which card to buy I now had to decide which company to get it from. There are quite a few of them that OEM the card and each offers small distinctions between them and in some cases they will vary in speed. I headed over to Newegg since the reviews on there usually provide some good guidance as to which computer hardware to buy and I found the Sapphire to be the highest rated of the 5770′s on there. I headed over to Amazon to see if they had the card which they did for $10 less than Newegg and no tax.

So I tested the card with Call of Duty 4 and it ran beautifully at 1920 x 1200 resolution giving me well over 60 FPS on average. It also ran very quiet the entire time. I’m very happy with this card.

I also decided to go from 4GB of RAM up to 8GB since I was moving to the 64 Bit version of Windows 7. This should offer me some more headroom to run multiple apps without worrying about gobbling up memory. For this I found a great deal on some Corsair 4 GB (2 X 2 GB) Memory Kits for $79.99 a pair. These were very cheap for some highly rated memory designed for over-clocking which I wasn’t planning on doing anyways but what the hell. They look pretty cool with their heat spreaders too. More sexiness for inside the case to go with the pretty Saphire girl which nobody will ever see.

I then decided to remove the 2 x 500GB Western Digital drives that were running in RAID 1 fashion to be replaced with a single 1TB drive. I figured I didn’t need the RAID 1 inside my machine anymore having recently built a RAID 1 NAS. I just need to make sure that I’m continually backing up to it. I chose the Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS 1 TB SATA Version 12. I like that I’m removing one more moving part, hot and noisy item from my case.

Lastly I decided to replace my DVD Burner which was the only thing using the IDE interface. I wanted to replace it with a SATA version so I could remove that ghastly looking cable (which nobody will ever see) with a nice clean SATA version. I chose the Plextor PX-880SA 24X DVD Burner with LightScribe and 2MB Cache. This also was a high rated drive at Newegg and I purchased it there for a mere $39.

My New Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Based Computer

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:32:28 +0000

I recently decided it was time to upgrade to a new computer so I thought I’d provide some details.

I’m quite the technology fanatic and that holds true with computers. I hadn’t had much of a reason to upgrade my (now several years old) Dell 8400 which has been doing a great job. And I’m almost embarrassed to say that the primary reason I wanted to upgrade was for PC gaming. Sure I also do video editing and encoding which is another reason to upgrade. In fact you can now encode video faster than real-time with the CPU I chose. But this is not as necessary a reason to upgrade as the latest gaming requirements are.

The planets have lined up just right for the release of a slew of amazing games (links below) for the PC platform that haven’t been matched in recent history. One of the compelling aspects of these games is their video quality. This is largely due to the new graphics technology built into Windows Vista in the form of Direct X 10.

My last 2 computers have been Dell’s but because I decided to go with some bleeding edge tech this time, and Dell hadn’t yet built systems around what I wanted. So it was back to building a machine on my own this time around. In Doing so, it was time to choose from a menu of components to provide the exact recipe for my needs. Here’s the highlights of the system I ended up with:

CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz (Best price/performance choice right now)
Motherboard – Intel DP35DPM (1333 FSB)
Case – Antec Sonata III (Amazingly quiet!)
Hard Drive(s) – 2 Western Digital WD5000ABYS 500Gb in RAID 1 Configuration + Another WD5000AAKS 500Gb for additional storage & backup
Video Card – eVGA Nvidia 8800 GTS 320Mb (mid-range DX10 card)
Memory – 4Gb of PC-6400 800MHz RAM
OS – Windows Vista Business 32bit (almost went 64bit)

I’ve had the system for about a month now and it’s awesome. I’m amazed by how quiet the system is. Everything is also soooo much faster. Of course I’m not using any of the fancy Vista stuff. In fact one of the first things I did was revert to the Windows Classic Theme and use a Classic Start Menu. I’m not a fan of all the fancy look and feel crap…I like it old school and simple.

I’ll post more details on some of the Vista setup quirks I came across and methods to get around them as well as my current software suite. But for now, here’s the amazing slew of games that prompted me to upgrade.

(In order of anticipation)

Crysis, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Medal of Honor Airborne

…and this doesn’t include being able to run my current favorite game Battlefield 2 maxed out.

My Memory Upgrade – Just Because it was too Cheap not to

Mark Krynsky — Mon, 21 May 2007 04:44:05 +0000

I’m running a Dell 8400 3.2GHz system with 1Gb of RAM and didn’t have a real need for more memory until recently. I’ve been contemplating getting VMWare up and running to play with Vista and Linux in an isolated environment. I was working on a friends system and while doing so decided to temporarily borrow some of his ram and drop it into my system. It was nice to have the extra memory and I decided to look around at RAM prices which I hadn’t followed to see were prices were.

I was pretty amazed when after doing a little searching around on dealnews, techbargains, and fatwallet I was able to find a 2GB Kit (2 x 1GB dual channel kit) of DDR2 memory for only $70 with free shipping at one of my favorite online merchants newegg.com so I decided they were too cheap not to buy them. I could then easily get about $30 for the 1GB dual channel kit I already had in the system making the upgrade net at only $40, but I decided to be nice and put the memory in my son’s computer.

As I went to the page to provide you with the link I come to find out that they dropped the price another $5 to only $65…amazing…Here’s the Link

My Experience Building a Raid 5 Server

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:01:06 +0000

I recently built my first RAID server. I’ve been the victim of 2 hard drive crashes where I lost data. I have a large media collection that includes tons of digital pictures, family videos of over 30 DV tapes I’ve captured, and countless other irreplaceable data. Concerned with the possibility of losing all of this I finally decided to dive into the world of data redundancy. I wrote “Guide to Protect Your Digital Camera Photos with Automated Backups” if you’re interested in protecting your digital media as well with Offsite backups being a very important part of the equation which I will write about soon.

Since basically all I needed was a file server that also offered redundancy I opted for going with RAID 5. I didn’t need huge performance and in a RAID 5 configuration you only have to sacrifice 1 hard drive for redundancy as opposed sacrificing equal numbers for mirroring. This seemed like a good comrpomise to me.

After making that decision I had to find a controller. I ended up going with the Promise Technology FastTrak S150 SX4 SATA controller card (no longer available. The FastTrak TX4310 seems like a good alternative). I mainly chose it due to the affordability and good reviews. Be careful of some cheaper cards that only offer RAID 5 in software. Another major consideration was the fact that I only had a standard PCI slot available in the Dell 400SC server I was using. That limited my choices quite a bit since most of the other contenders only worked on a PCI-X bus which requires a much pricier server motherboard.

The next choice was which hard drives to go with. I was looking to get at least 500Gb of available storage so after a little research I found that the best bang for the buck was getting 3 x 320Gb drives. I went with the Western Digital WD3200JD SATA drives. I like Western Digital and have had good experience using them.

So my build went smooth and I am extremely happy with what I now have. Here’s another good bit of advice that a friend passed on. Make sure to test your array after you are done building it by forcing a failure to understand how your hardware / software deals with it and you are aware of what to expect. I did this by starting to copy a 4GB file to the array and during the copy I unplugged the SATA cable from a drive. The software quickly alerted me of the failure. Shortly after I plugged the SATA cable back in and rebooted. The RAID bios also identified the failure. I then booted into Windows, launched the RAID utility and watched as it rebuilt the array. Everything went smooth and I now feel very confident about my server.

References

My adventure in considering to upgrade to a gigabit switch

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:48:56 +0000

So I recently built a RAID 5 system to be used primarily as a media file server. I transfer large home video files over my network to this machine on a continual basis. Since both my server and personal machine have gigabit nic cards in them I thought it might be a good idea to get a gigabit switch now that they’ve come down to reasonable price points.

So today I saw my local Fry’s ad and saw an Airlink Gigabit switch on sale for $29.99. I started to do a little research on the switch and came to find out about “jumbo frames” which is a feature that some switches had to increase speed that this router lacked. The network cards also need to support this as well as the switch for it to work.

I tapped on my friend Will’s shoulder to glean more info on “jumbo frame” and here’s an excerpt from his email reply:

“Jumbo frames allows a larger chunk of data to go through each frame so there’s not so much start-and-stop, CRC checking, packet unwrapping, etc and you get more throughput- like when running Xmodem with it’s 128byte frames vs. Ymodem’s 1K frames back in the old days.”

This was a great analogy and helped me understand the benefits quite easily.

So I started to try to determine if both my machines (Dell 400sc server & Dell Dimension 8400 personal machine) supported “jumbo frame”. Well both systems have integrated nic’s on the motherboard. I quickly found out that the 400sc did support it. But trying to determine if the 8400 did was another story.

I started by googling for the info which was very difficult to find but ultimately found this posting which was the closest I could get but still no answer. So I had to dig further.

I wondered onto the dell support site which led me to the driver download page. From here I downloaded the html manual which once I opened it in a browser I searched various pages for the word “jumbo”. Upon reaching the introduction page I saw that under features the following line was listed:

“Jumbo frames (up to 9 KB) (only for the BCM5702 device)”

Ahh…getting warmer. So I try to see if I can determine the device number from wandering into the device manager in windows. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the info in there. So I also read in the html manual about the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite 2. So I ran that little utility and voila, under the hardware tab I see that my device is the “BCM5751″. So based on this I’m pretty sure that my nic doesn’t support jumbo frames.

Ok, that took a while and was a bit of a pain but I got my answer. Now think I’ll hold off and buy a gigabit switch that supports jumbo frames. It looks like a good candidate that’s been on sale for ~$35 in the past is the SMC 8505T. Of course now I will have to buy another nic for my Dell 8400 to support it, but oh well.

Decisions…Decisions….

It’s funny, I haven’t even weighed or tested the benefits of moving to gigabit in the first place (although from what i’ve read the performance gains appear to be good for my situation). Yet I find a way to further complicate things with this jumbo frame functionality. This is a case where trying to keep up with cutting edge technology can be a curse and ignorance can be blissful…oh well.

7/29/05 Update
I found this great article that explains Jumbo Frames

NIC’s with Jumbo Frame Support
D-Link DGE-530T
SMC SMC9452TX
NETGEAR GA311

Netgear KB Article on Jumbo Frame Support

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101539.asp