Ah, my brother has replaced my parent’s Home Theater PC with an Android TV stick thing. This is good news for me, if I can nick the HTPC: he is physically incapable of doing things normally, so while a Netflix/YouTube HTPC should be a cheap Pentium or Athlon box with a bargain barrel motherboard, I think he built it with a 6th gen Intel Core i3 and some MSI gaming ITX motherboard. Very fancy.
He goes through phases where he gets really into things like Mountain Biking or PC Building or Bread Making or Graphics Demo Programming or Photography and he does really well at it for 6-24 months and then drops it and (with the possible exception of photography) never does it again.
He and I are people who are on the exact same spectrum but at far distant ends of it.
Anyways, if I remember right it’s a very compact design but it has a decent little quad core and enough room for a GPU in the side
Got the box, it’s a pretty handy little thing.
It’s in the Coolermaster Elite 130, which is a moderately small form factor Mini ITX case. Not one of the ultra-tiny Console Cases you can get today, but still pretty compact. It’s small and low-key enough that you won’t get nervously tweeted about by any cute boys you bring home because they think you’re some kind of Gamer™, while still having room for a 3.5″ drive (or a 5.25″ device! who uses those!) and a long dual-slot GPU.
It’s also got like 50% mesh for ventilation, much like how I prefer any cute boys I bring home.
There’s a dual-core (but hyperthreaded) i3-6300 CPU in here, and 8GB of RAM, which is on the low side by my desires but entirely acceptable. The priority upgrade on this is a GPU, RAM and CPU can come later. CPU cooling is handled by a 120mm all-in-one liquid cooler because there’s no room for a tower cooler in here unless you use an SFX Power Supply. The local used PC parts forum always has a couple 6th gen i5′s up for sale so if I want to upgrade I can go there.
The current PSU is an ATX unit rated at 500W, and occupies a huge chunk of the internals. It should handle up to a GTX 2070 or an RX 5700 non-XT just fine, although keeping those cool is another thing. There’s a mesh side up against where a GPU would be pulling in air so it should have a pretty easy time of it. In general this case is surprisingly roomy.
The motherboard has got a WiFi card in it, and also supports NVMe, which is nice since I have one of those just lying around. It’s on the backside of the motherboard so I’d have to fully disassemble everything to get to it, but I’d probably end up doing that anyways in order to run the appropriate power cables and clean the thing.
It has been living in a home theater setup unopened for a couple years so it has accumulated Some Dust.
Love 2 See It. There is almost no dust filtering on this case. When I rebuild this I am taking it apart and cleaning it thoroughly.