3. The Case And Hardware, Continued

The rear exhaust fan

The m7580n includes 4 active cooling fans. The CPU cooler, the PS fan, the exhaust fan, and the Video card fan. The fans generate a surprisingly low amount of noise. I was pleased to find that that even under a heavy, sustained load the CPU (encoding video) cooler m7580n did not become kick into higher RPMs and become noisier.

The m7580n motherboard

The m7580n houses an ASUS A8M2N-LA micro ATX motherboard. The board is based on the new socket AM2 by AMD, which allows AMD 64 bit processors to utilize memory with faster clock speeds. The m7580n comes equipped with 2 gigabytes of PC2 4200 RAM and a Geforce 6150 chipset. The CPU cooler has an oversized heat sink that keeps the Athlon 64 4400+ cool.

Passively cooled Northbridge

I was pleased to see that the Northbridge was passively cooled. There's nothing like a noisy Northbridge fan to ruin a perfectly good PC.

PCI slots

The m7580n has three PCI expansion slots. Two of the slots are already filled by the TV tuner and the modem. And the third is rendered useless with the PCIe video card installed. Any addon card that was installed into the PCI slot next to the video card would cut of the air intake of its fan. Fortunately, not many people use 56k modems anymore, there is at least one expansion slot. That can be used for an addon card.

The rear ports

The Asus A8M2N-LA motherboard sports a rather basic set of rear ports including the 8 channel audio, USB, Firewire Network interface and USB 2.0 ports. I was disappointed to find that the NIC was only 10/100. A gigabit network card would make this computer much more attractive as an HTPC since media files tend to be very large and moving them over 100 base T is a pain. Upgrading to gigabit using an expansion card would take up one of the 2 usable PCI slots which would bump your TV tuner or the 56k modem out of the computer.

I noticed that there was a cap over the onboard video connector that says "do not remove" I'm pleased to say that it's the first thing that I removed for this review. I've always considered it to be my responsibility to look under panels that are labeled "Do not remove"

One day I'm sure I'll regret it, but so far it's been a very satisfying practice. Under the "forbidden" cover was a standard VGA connector belonging to the Geforce 6150 IGP. The 6150 had been disabled in the BIOS, but after re-enabling it I was able configure it to be used as a secondary display. I can understand why HP capped the 6150 off, since a novice user could easily become confused and plug their monitor into the 6150 instead of the more powerful 7300LE. On the other hand, it's nice that HP did not remove the 6150's connector completely, as it provides a way to setup a dual display on the m7580n. The 7300LE only has a single output and would not be able to handle dual high resolution displays on its own.>

Video card and tuners installed