[mythtv-users] Power Heat Noise

[Colin Andrews]

I've been following the mythTV project for over a year now and 
I'm finally taking the leap to put together a mythbox.

I want my system to be small & quiet & look nice in my living 
room. Cost is also an issue. I'm not looking to build a high end 
gaming system, just something with enough power to use for 
recording & watching tv. I've been using the recommendations on 
this page at KnoppMyth project: http://mysettopbox.tv/basics.
html, and I'm pretty set on a microATX form factor.

My first question(s) is about heat and therefore noise. I'm 
liking the nforce based motherboards with integrated graphics & 
tv-out. I know that AMD cpus tend to run hot though. I'm also 
wondering if the NVIDIA integrated graphics is also an added heat 
source (relative to other integrated graphics chipsets). A 
celeron based system might run cooler and I'm willing to go that 
way if need be. I haven't been able to find any nice microATX 
intel motherboards with tv-out though. Has anyone out there had 
success making a reasonably quiet nforce based mythbox? Failing 
that, can anyone recommend an intel (or via, sis) based microATX 
motherboard for making a reasonably quiet box?

Second question is about power. I'm liking this case:
http://www.directron.com/cstr100.html
Looks nice (imo), good value, and it's aluminum so that should 
help with heat some. The big problem is that it only comes with a 
180w PSU. I'm wondering if I can run even a minimal system with 
that power output. They don't list the detailed specs on the 
raitings for the different rails. In general I'm finding it hard 
to estimate the power requirements of a system ahead of time. 
This is mainly because I'm not finding published specs on power 
requirements for most of the components.

Here's the current sketch of my system components:
   * MicroATX nforce MB (ASUS A7N266-VM or A7N8X-VM)
   * 512mb DDR ram (single dimm)
   * 80gb IDE drive
   * Haupauge 401
   * Matrix Orbital LCD (maybe)
   * IDE DVD-Rom drive (I could skip this, if need be)

Any bets on whether this would run on 180w? I'm betting it won't. 
I already have a question to Directron sales to see if they'll 
upgrade this power supply or sell me the case without one.