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Moving up to the H61 boards & slimmed-system HW Questions & Musings...

Well, with the help and EXTREME assistance of Grant, I've joined the Super-Slimmed cMP/cPlay world. That plus his foray into memory timings have made for some significant improvements in my unit's sound… dare I say a 'breakthough' level of improvement?

Given that and also given that I've not gotten any further on MoBo Mods with the older G31 boards both Grant and I have, I've decided to move up to the H61M-S2H series Mobo (which will force me to do some MoBo Mods).

But both of these have left me with some questions... And a few musings...

1. For a die-hard Juli@ user, the GA-H61M-S2H board is the right one, correct? And according to JackWong, I want the 1.2 revision, not the 1.3?

2. Rick, I know you had commented about the trials of getting an adapter to use your old processor cooler on the new socket. Did you ever find one or did you resort to buying a new cooler?

3. I know several of you have DOMs now... And more than a few have SSDs. And I bet even more than a few have both DOMs & SSDs. My question is what configuration has turned out to be the best optimization of the tradeoffs for a super-slimmed system with no networking? Small DOM, midsized SSD, larger HDD? Small DOM, larger HDD? I'm leaning towards the first of these, but that means that I have to turn on both sets SATA inputs in the BIOS & will mean a slightly larger driver & Windows footprint. I wish I could buy a sufficiently large SSD to hold my music, but those are still, sadly, out of my budget! What I can afford is a small DOM for the OpSys, a medium SSD (128Gb - 256Gb) for my favorite music, and a 1TB or more 2.5" HDD for the rest of my music. I'd power all from a separate 5v supply initially and split it into multiple supplies later.

Then on the musings side... First I was not fully prepared on how disabled the Windows setup is with a 'Super-Slimmed' system. I had been looking for a wireless mouse that I could use with a PS/2 port... But without the CICSREMOTE, it is just a mouse. So I'm currently using a PS/2 keyboard, separately-powered of course, and using the keyboard commands. I've been looking at ways to do a better command input with remote capability using the keyboard... I was going down the path of hacking a keyboard and using a remote board with relay outputs to select the different keys. Key combos would require a little circuitry to enable, but was all doable. But talking with the owner of one of the companies that made the relay-output remote boards, he turned out to be an audio buff who did a lot of work setting up fancy HT systems. He had a better suggestion... Get an older IR-connected wireless keyboard, use a learning remote to learn the signals for each of the command keysets, make sure it's a sophisticated-enough remote that you can program multiple key outputs into a single remote key press, and voila', you have a remote-control for a cMP! Brilliant idea! And much cheaper & easier than the path I was taking.

I have some IR-connected wireless keyboards on the way to try out.

2nd musing... I can recommend the daily thought-posts on various aspects of Audio and the Audio Business by Paul McGowen of PS Audio. You can see them here: http://www.pstracks.com/category/pauls-posts/ and there's a somewhere on that page link to subscribe to them as I do. In one interesting post a few weeks ago (http://www.pstracks.com/pauls-posts/software-jitter/6180/) Paul was talking about 'software-induced jitter'. Hmmm... Where have I heard of that before? And the interesting thing was that from a hardware manufacturer's perspective, their solution was to increase the power supply count and reduce the potential for interaction between various sections of their transport's & DAC's circuits. Hmmmm... That suggests some JackWong-ish additional MoBo mods based on his separate-powering of the memory!

Finally, I have been very remiss in reporting the current status of my extreme Juli@ mods... And will stay that way for a bit, need to leave the house for awhile, but will try to get that update posted later today or tomorrow!

Thanks for all the work, all the answers, and all the fellowship!

Greg in Mississippi

Everything matters!


Edits: 05/27/12
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