The Gonzee Box spec - Rob's media center rig

spec.md

The Gonzee Box

One motherfucker media center rig.

Philosophy

A lot of home theatre enthusiasts build rigs that are super quiet, slick looking, and low power. This is not that rig. When I built the Gonzee Box, I wanted to fulfill three main requirements:

• Desktop power underneath my TV - I needed to transcode HD streams on the fly, power AAA games, and never chug on visuals.
• Extra processing capacity - This thing needed to be able to play ultra-high bitrate 1080p content while serving as a processing node for my sabremetric regressions, CI builds, and other general computing chores.
• Scare the shit out of visitors - Anyone seeing this under my TV for the first time needed to assume I was some sort of evil wizard.

Spec

I built this thing back in the fall of 2009, so the spec is now fairly antiquated. It'll still kick the shit out of any Mac mini or off-the-shelf HTPC, though.

• Proc: Wolfdale 3GHz E8400
  • Low wattage for a desktop proc, but crazy overclockable
  • Dialed up to 3.2 GHz, it's still pretty stable with air cooling
• RAM: 4GB Mushkin Blackline
  • Sacrificing cas for capacity here - 4-4-4-12 timing not an issue for the rig's primary uses.
  • Dual channel keeps the north bridge unclogged while working both a stream and some other processing task
• Mobo: Zotac GF9300-D-E
  • The crown jewel of this rig - HTPC form factor with an LGA 775 socket.
  • Onboard Nvidia Geforce 9300 GPU, gigabit NIC, wifi radio and strong driver support for all on Linux
  • Mini-ITX is about the size of a 45 record. This shit is small.
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB
  • Good balance of spindle speed versus platter density.
  • SATA II interface gives 3 gigabit pipe - Handbrake sails on this fucker.
• Case: Silverstone Grandia GD05B
  • I started with a Rosewill Mini-ITX case which lasted about two years before the 150W weenie power supply finally self-immolated. Still love the monolith look, though I had to dremel the shit out of the guts in order to fit the heatsink.
  • When the Rosewill's PSU dirt-napped, I swapped out for the Silverstone Grandia. It's definitely too big for the rig - the interior is more spacious than my bathroom.
  • Still looks intimidating as hell.

Software

• OS: Ubuntu Maverick
  • None of my Precise upgrades went well, so the box is still hanging back on a pre-Unity desktop
  • VNC enabled so I can control from laptop / iPhone
• Usenet: SABNZBd
  • A bazillion clients for these things. Can queue up anything from anywhere.
  • Great post processing tools for getting downloads sorted into their proper homes for XBMC / Boxee libraries
  • Written in Python, as Jesus would want it to be.
• Media Center: XBMC Eden
  • Really the only choice for an open source media center right now.
  • The team has grown a lot in the last year and their diligent effort on development process is producing higher quality, more frequent releases.
• Media Center Backup: Boxee Beta
  • Discontinued from the New York startup (and my former employer), but you can find it on the Pirate Bay.
  • Plays Flash, and still has a lot of my old apps that I still use.
  • Still adore Whitney Hess' design here. Remains my favorite 10 foot experience.
• Remote: HippoRemote Pro
  • Best damn remote on the iPhone. Period.
  • Fully programmable
  • Support for VNC and XBMC / Boxee gesture
• Miscellaneous stuff
  • Celery - Most of my distributed processing goes through Celery, naturally. Mostly my nightly baseballs stats crunches using pandas.
  • BOINC - These aliens aren't going to find themselves.
  • MAME - I have most of my ROMs in here. Still struggling to get the Xbox controllers working like they should.