The new board.
My old SI-120, 4GB of RAM.
Installed, fanless Asus 8600GTS in front.
Nice and tidy side SATA connections.
Lower chamber. SATA cables are angled on this side.
Metal grill snipped, plastic front grill trimmed, Nexus fan in front.
Shiny!!!
The backstory:
Charlie wanted a new PC for his son Ari to play games, so I sold him (for cheap!) my old Albatron 925X that was previously in the Zalman case, along with the 540 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. I also gave him my XFX 7950GT graphics card, so that I could get one with HDCP and HD acceleration. I got a fanless Asus 8600GTS, which doesn't yet work properly on XP...
I assembled the new-old PC, powered up, fans, lights, everything OK, but no video. After trying 2 graphics cards, 2 PSUs and RAM, I returned the board to the store I had bought it from. The 3 year warranty expired in 10 days! After a bit of testing, they confirmed the board was dead, and offered me the Asus P5E, a 212 euro board!
Now my only choice was to give the Asus P5B-E to Charlie, the old 533MHz RAM wouldn't work on the P5E, so I had to redo the P180 HTPC. BUT, as I was leaving the store, I saw a P182SE on sale for half the price! It was a show piece, but didn't have any visible flaws. I got it and spent a whole day, but I'm happy!
Final configuration (for some time:)):
Case: Antec P182SE
CPU: Intel E6400 @ 2.4 GHz
M/B: Asus P5E
RAM: 4x1GB OCZ Platinum DDR2 PC6400
GPU: Asus nVidia 8600GTS
HDD: WD250JS, WD300JD, WD400KS, 2xWD500AAKS, 2 external Maxtor 250
DVD-R: NEC 4550, DVD-ROM: NEC DV-5800E
PSU: Antec NeoHE 430W
