How are you trying to remotely power it on?  Are you just trying Wake on lan?

That is rather hot, you probably don't want this making a lot of noise but what about getting an 80mm fan and screwing it onto the heatsink, then 7v mod the fan or try using something like a zalman fanmate spins at a lower rpm, it won't cool it loads but it might be enough to drop the temps down to more acceptable levels.

Not too sure about the boot times with a USB stick, I've never tried it before, but I know I had problems with the write speed on an 8gb stick I bought a few years ago.  Booting is predominantly reads but I know windows does a lot of writes when booting as well, could be the same issue.  My XBMC live boots up fairly quickly but that's using a hard drive, if you end up having to use a hard drive look at getting something like a 20gb laptop drive, small, cheap and fairly quite since they're usually only 4200rpm.

As for remotes/controllers, erm next question please.  Eventually managed to get my ATI Remote Wonder working with my install but took a bit of fiddling about but I can't remember much about it now.

Are you using XBMC Live?

XBMCbuntu has just been released, could be interesting. I've found quite a few of my USB sticks to have very poor throughput of data so could take a while to boot up. SSD should be quicker, shouldn't it?

I'm gonna be looking for a case very similar to the one you have.  As for on/off from IR, it probably can be done. Look at this http://www.instructables.com/id/Universal-IR-Remote-Power-Switch-for-PC/ that may be more than what you want to get into.

All my of gear for my setup is in a cupboard upstairs and I currently use an AppleTV with a Broadcom card in. It does everything I need but I might have to look into a more powerful pc, but at the same time I dont want to draw too much power.

The Ir receiver should have either two pins or a lead which connects to the motherboard connector, or at least that's how it works on the Antec Fusion, might be worth a double check?

Hero, always start with the simple things!

I inspected the circuit board on the front panel and noticed an empty socket, low and behold there was a small cable in the box that leads from it to a power cable adapter. Game on! Cold booting!

Game plan back on! I'll be ordering a non passive heat sink and an SSD shortly and hopefully all will be well.

CPU fan on order but I seem to have underestimated the costs of SSDs. I assumed there would be some old 8gb or 16gb models around at ~£20 but I cant seem to find anything < £40.

Might stick to a mechanical for now, assuming I can find one lying around.

XBMCbuntu looks interesting, it might make it easier to install my xbox controllers and emulators as well. Only question is around if its stable enough yet. I guess we'll see.

Depending on what you want from the SSD...

If you want something with no moving parts and little heat, and faster than USB, have you considered a CF card, and an IDE / SATA adapter?

8GB card will give you 60MB/s
4GB will give you 40MB/s

It's not as quick as SSD, but like I said, it depends on what you want?

The only real reason was for ~instant boot, I suppose CF is still better than a HDD? I think I'll trawl ebay for a while longer looking for a cheapish SSD.

OCZ Agility 3's are always popping up on Scan Today Only / HotUK etc just keep an eye out
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/60gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-475mb-s-80k-iops

Scan Today Only
60GB Corsair Force Series 3, SATA III SSD, SandForce SF-2200, Read 525MB/s, Write 490MB/s, 80K IOPS    £64.79
120GB Corsair Force Series 3, 2.5" SSD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, SandForce, Read 550Mb/s, Write 510Mb/s, 85,000 IOPS, PC/MAC    £113.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/OCZ-AGT3-25SAT3-120G-Agility-120GB-SATA/dp/B004Z0S6SO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329444861&sr=8-2

That's more than I want to spend really. Given I'll only need < 5Gb of space in total for XBMC Live all the current sizes seem excessive.

I'm hoping to find a second hand <20Gb SSD for ~£20, if not I'll probably stick with mechanical.

wired or wireless network ?


if it's wired, have you thought about booting over the network ?  just need a small usb stick to tell it where to boot from ?

I've never really looked into it tbh.... but it should be pretty quick with modern network speeds ?


cf should be pretty quick too, even 60meg/sec is as the same as some of the slower modern mechanical drives... but the cf has the bonus of almost zero seek time (like an ssd)