It’s been a while since I’ve overclocked my PC, and it’s generally frowned upon to even think about overclocking a HTPC (with which I wholeheartedly agree), but this is newsworthy stuff. The concept is essentially the same as the last time I cranked my Pentium 733s up, have a mess with the bus clock because the multiplier is locked, but […]
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There is a lot of noise and rumor out there on the interwebs, so I don’t tend to give them all equal footing, but when the guy who introduced me to Intel’s Broadwell NUC at CES last year tweets about it… I sure hope they do have one coming, would love to see how it does with madVR. We’ve been […]
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When I go motherboard shopping, there is one thing that makes it first on the list of must-haves – Intel NIC. So it was awesome to see that the ASUS B150 Pro Gaming/Aura for Intel Skylake CPUs includes the I219-V. The price is right @ $129 and there’s lots of good stuff like M.2, USB Type-C and DDR4 support, but […]
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Stress is difficult. Sometime almost impossible to deal with, and when that happens you’re forced to break, or bend, if you happen to be a CPU. Thankfully there doesn’t appear to be a “gate” associated with what is turning out to be quite an issue for some third-party HSF suppliers (see the Ars article for more detail and links). With […]
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With Broadwell’s lackluster desktop release leaving DIY builders out in the cold, I’ve been a bit detached from following the progression of the platform. This has changed with Skylake, and its full release for all users – not just mobile. Might just be time to modernize that aging HTPC :). Early this year we compared AMD’s $150 quad-core FX-8320E […]
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Discrete IR On/Off are a critical part of my home theater setup. Without them, I can’t include an “On” command in my startup macro for the HTPC which leads to all sorts of “training issues” with the other users in the house. So I was pretty upset when Intel killed the feature in a recent BIOS release. Fortunately they were […]
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I mentioned in the review of the Intel NUC5i5RYK that the Consumer Infrared (CIR) wasn’t working in OpenELEC, and it looks like Intel has turned around that issue pretty quickly with the latest (247) BIOS release. There is a pretty big caveat though, because just like when they fixed this issue the last time it broke Discrete On support. Which […]
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The Intel Compute Stick caused quite a stir when it was announced at CES 2015, and it’s easy to see why – Intel managed to stuff an entire Atom based PC into an HDMI dongle. The STCK1A32WFC model includes an Intel Atom Z3735F processor, 2GB of DDR3L RAM, 32GB of storage, 802.11bgn Wi-Fi (Realtek RTL8723BS), and Bluetooth 4.0 built-in for […]
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When it comes to sleek small form factor (SFF) home theater PCs (HTPC) Intel pretty much perfected it with their Haswell based NUC systems–offering an excellent media experience in a chassis with built-in IR, the potential to add HDMI-CEC, and optional hard disk drive (HDD) all from a quiet, low power system. Seeking to build on this success they recently […]
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Haswell D54250WYB based Intel NUCs included a HDMI-CEC exposing Custom Solutions Header (aka HTPC Header) on board, but there were two pretty major issues with the implementation. The first, and most important, is that there just isn’t space in the chassis to put the adapter that was available. The second is that the 3.3V pin droops when current is drawn. […]
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