Hi team.
Grimmy here.
New to LibreELEC, But not to Kodi, Infact I've been rocking Kodi in some form since it was purely an Original Xbox based piece of software.
Bit of a background story here...
(But if you can read through this the build candy shows up later)
Over the many years of tweaking my system, from multiple Xboxes pulling media in my windows desktop, to a deadicated windows "Server" box, a period of xbmcbuntu, And currently openelec on 4 seperate PCs built up from parts purely for the task. I've messed around with hardware, scripting, skinning, The early days of PVR, Central Databases and the bane of my existence... ATi videocards running on *nix platforms.
I'll touch on aspects of my entire nextwork as this progresses, But a quick outline is:
3 x HP SFF desktop units. Ex business lease. All these machines are dual core 3 gig Intel boxes running upto 16gigs of ram, a SSD of some description and a Nvidia graphics card.
1 x intel 3gig dual core with 8 gigs of DDR2, An SSD and my media drive array. (currently 2x4 TB WD Greens and a 2TB Green)
1 x intel quad core 3gig box, with a laptop HDD hanging out the front and intel graphics onboard. (This machine was a test bed for the xeon 771 to 775 Mod I'll be using for this build)
Several windoze laptops, some android phones, some gaming consoles, couple of SOC controlers for IoT type automations, and beer. (OK not really beer, But. everything is better with beer)
I've built plenty of machines, Pulled apart more than I've built. You could say messing with hardware is my hobby.
Decided a couple of months ago to build a nice powerful machine for serving media to my kodi devices.
Requirements.
It has to have more than enough testicular fortitude to handle anything I throw at it in any container all the way up to full HD as well as leave enough headroom to deal with serving media up to the network
It has to be semi future proof. I don't want to have to gut this machine for at least a couple of years. Would be nice if I can leave the hardware alone until 4k becomes more consumer level available.
It has to be FAST.
As a result of being a user of Kodi for over a decade, I have got a reasonably sized libary. And anyone with a larger libary will tell you this is where SSDs and lots o' rams really does help.
It has to be quiet.
This machine will go in the living room. With the other Home theatre equipment. A loud machine will wreck the experience.
It has to be pretty.
This normally isn't something that bothers me. I'm quite happy to hide machines in closets with empy wide open 5.25 drive bays (Cus who has Rom drives these days) But this machine will be on full display in the living room.
So...
ONTO THE BUILD.
Parts List.
Case = NZXT H440
Have you seen this case?
I think it's purdy. Has room for 6 3.5" drives (11 if you can use a drill and tape measure) as well as a couple of 2.5" drives.
AND NO 5.25 DRIVES! I've honestly wanted a nice clean faced box with room for plenty of storage for many years and the H440 delivers.
Mobo = Gigabye EP43-USB3
I wanted a 775 based mobo with 4 DDR3 slots so I could pack it full of ram relatively cheap. I wanted atleast half a doz sata ports for storage drives, And enough PCI-e slots to get raid, and TV cards on, And the chipset had to be compatable with quad core xeons using a 771 to 775 hack on the LGA/Socket. The mobo/cpu was the first part of this build I decided on and the rest was built up around it.
RAM = G.Skill Ares 16gb (4x4gb sticks)
This was a fluke purchase, I already had the Mobo, And this went on sale at my local supplier at almost half price. And it was the same colour as the mobo. It was destiny by this stage, this mobo/cpu/ram combo simply HAD to go together in a white H440 with colour coded everything.
Cpu = Zenon quad core 3.6ghz (SLBBA Stepping, 1333mhz FSB)
I had previously experimented with a 771 to 775 swap in another gigabyte mobo to great success. that's a 3 gig quad air cooled on a 1333 FSB running in an always on box with Openelec. This time round I'll be using an AIO liquid cooler for ease of set up and OCing the FSB upto 1600 for a core speed of 4ghz. Everything I've learned to understand about a 771 zenon and clocking them makes me 99.9% confident this machine will quite happily run at ~4.1 stable without breaking a sweat.
Video = Nividia GT 710 2gb Silent
I wanted a passively cooled/silent card. I wanted a card I wasn't going to have to replace in a hurry, But Wasn't going to be difficult to replace in the future. Also, I didn't want to have to configure Legacy ATi drives in linux ever again. (Current me looking out for future me) Now. I know support for ATi drivers is pretty good now, I also know that there is NOTHING at all wrong with ATi cards, But spending several agonising days trying to set up lubuntu on an ATi 2400HD many years ago as part of a previous sandbox subject has left my giving Ati in *nix the middle finger. It was a baptism by fire of terminal windows though, Which ultimately led me here to LibreELEC, So I guess it was worth it.
OS Drive = 2x Sandisk mSATA 32gb SSDs in Raid 0 on PCI-e sata III controller
There is a little bit of theory here that I'm testing. In the real world Striping SSDs doesn't really amount to any speed increases. But it's actually cheaper to use 2 msata sticks and a PCI-e card than it is to buy a SSD of the same size for me currently. mSATA still uses the same speed interface as any other SSD, and raided certainly won't hurt the performance. And running them on their own controller takes that task off the mobo and well away from the sataII interface that will serve my media drives.
CPU Cooler = Coursair h55 all in one liquid cooler
It's quieter than a HSF. It's more effiecent than a HSF. I've never messed with liquid cooling before and wanted to get comfortable with the idea of water the easy way before tackling building a custom loop.
Media Storage = 2x WD 4tb Greens, 1x WD 2tb Green
I've always had good results with WD drives. All the drives I've ever had die on me are segates or toshi's... But my best friend swears by segates and will never touch another WD drive again after his experience of failures with them. There's no raid or redunduncy on this set up. All of my media (DVDs, BluRays, CDs, even cassettes and records) are all backed up the old fashioned way. As original media. You really can't beat the smell of vinyl. 
Currently 1 4tb hosts movies, the other TV shows, and the 2tb holds everything else.
Other bits and pieces
Thermaltake riing fans
Shakmods sleeved power cables and combs
