Posted 10/14/08 at 12:00:00 PM by Will Smith

We love to have tons of cool electronics hooked up to the big living room TV -- who doesn’t? But, if you’re like us, your significant other is less keen on seeing all that awesome black plastic and shiny metal, and you probably did the same thing we did: Went out and bought an overpriced, crappy piece of mass-produced furniture that has doors. Doors! And what do those doors do? They create hot pockets of electronics-killing heat that will shorten the life of our precious gear. All to keep the wife happy.

Fear not, heat haters. We put the Maximum PC brain trust to work in assembling a quick, quiet, and easy cooling solution for, well, just about any cabinet you’re willing to cut a hole in. We tested our solution with two of the hottest pieces of hardware we could find: an Xbox 360 and an AppleTV. With both boxed turned on, and with the door closed, the internal temperature of the cabinet quickly hit 130F. But after we mounted our heat-triggered fan, we saw the internal temperatures hovering a scant degree or two above room temperature. Want to find out how we did it? Hit the jump!

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30

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cooling, fan, hardware, hack, htpc, blowhole, overheat

Posted 07/09/08 at 02:09:13 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Gizmondo and Crunchgear report that Acer's new Aspire X1200 is loaded with multimedia features in a slimline mini-PC form factor. Featuring nine USB 2.0 ports, a full-featured Flash memory card reader, and an HDMI port, the X1200 is ready to connect to your home theater system. It also features AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processors, 4GB of RAM, DirectX 10 support, and PCI Express v2.0.

For a complete feature rundown and available configurations, see me after the break.

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4

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amd, pc, Desktop, HDMI, Acer, multimedia, consumer electronics, htpc, Aspire, X1200, GeForce 8200, Purevideo HD, Athlon X2

Posted 07/07/08 at 09:49:21 AM by Paul Lilly

While SSDs continue to come down in price and up in performance, hard disk drives keep ballooning in size. And just when we thought we were becoming spoiled with storage space, Hitachi hits us with a humdinger by announcing plans to release a 5TB hard drive by 2010. That's FIVE freaking terabytes in a single 3.5" drive, or half the storage capacity of the human brain, claims Dr. Yoshihiro Shiroishi from Hitachi. In more concrete terms, 5TB equates to about 5,000 hours of video, or more than a million songs. Throw two drives together and you could store a human brain's worth of porn!

Hitachi's pledge trumps an earlier prediction the company made back in October 2007 when it said 4TB of storage would be likely by 2011. Instead, Hitachi will employ Current-Perpendicular-to-Plant Giant Magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR) magnetic read heads to pack an additional terabyte than initially anticipated, and a year sooner than predicted. CPP-GMR will make it possible to achieve data densities of 1TB or more per square inch, paving the way for even larger hard drives.

Home theater buffs will undoubtedly herald Hitachi's announcement, but what about everyone else? Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns in terms of hard drive space? Post your thoughts in the comments section.

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storage, Hard Drive, HDD, hitachi, terabyte, Home Theater, hardware, ssd, 1tb, build a rig, 5tb, cpp-gmr, perpendicular, htpc