I bought a cheap router for $20 shipped (2 actually, one for my parents’ house). It supports DD-WRT and I did load it on. It has dual band support and AC support. I configured it to be an access point. I do want better throughput since I find myself moving photos from the ultrabook to the primary storage.

The router is a Trendnet TEW-811DRU. It runs very hot. I’m underclocking it by 20% and it still runs hot. I’ve taken the thing apart and plan on replacing the 2 heatsinks with larger ones and will use thermal paste. Right now the transmission rate is miserable. Worse than first generation WiFi. I suspect heat is the problem.

If I can get the thing running stable, I want to also mod it further with external antennas replacing the tiny little internal ones it has now.

I need to find replacements for both heatsinks. The big one is 1 1/2 inches by 1 1/2 inches. The small one is 1 3/16 inches by 3/4 inch. There are antenna kits on Amazon from between 7 to 13 dollars.

Update 2015.08.12

I put in replacement heatsinks from some old video cards. Added thermal paste. And only could get them mounted with twisty ties.

It ran nicely with the cover off. Connectivity was much more stable.

The replacement pigtails and antennas came. I drilled 2 1/4″ holes and got the antennas in place. It ran OK in initial testing.

A few days of use turned up some substantial problems. With the cover on, it runs WAY too hot. The heatsink might be extracting heat from the chip but it isn’t getting dissipated. It is just getting trapped inside the case. Temperatures are in the 70s. Celsius. Open the case gets the temperature to a more reasonable level.

But the connectivity, while mostly stable, drops down every so often. Not good for streaming TV. The application complains about low bandwidth and stops playback. Speeds are quite good and I am getting good 5GHz connectivity and range. But stability is either a heat issue or firmware issue.

I want to try getting more ventilation for the case and maybe a USB powered fan.

I saw a post mentioning component out for HDTV and decided to pursue my desire to get fancy HDTV out on my current TV. Looking into it, the XFX 6800xt card I have will probably not work with a component out adapter. The old Ti4200 will not have enough pixel shader power to do anything for me. This leaves me more stuck than I would prefer. It isn’t that I am close to pursuing such a upgrade but that this video card that would otherwise find use will not be useful now is annoying.

So today I ran into the first time, well second, that my current ‘media center PC’ had problems with playback of something I was watching. Honey and Clover II at 1280×720 encoded with h.264. The computer just could not keep up. I was trying it on my desktop too and it had problems even when I did not have the noise reduction turned on. I will eventually, and maybe soon, have to upgrade my TV and the computer I use to output video.

This is not something I can afford now but at least I kind of know my game plan. I do not know if FFDshow can use 2 CPU cores so I expect to need a moderately fast one. It will also need to be a modern 3D video card. Pixel shaders are being used by at least the renderer. I can also take advantage of h.264 decoders that use the video card in other ways too since with a TV upgrade I will not be using a video out but rather monitor out. So that means my next TV will need to be able to accept a computer digital output directly. This also means 1920×1080 is the resolution I want.

Such an upgrade will allow far greater control over how good my video looks. I can use all sorts of post-processing now.  And fancy renderers. And the resolution will be sick. But processing power will be key. For both the processor and the video card. Core2duo suddenly looks appealing…