[mythtv-users] Advice on Building a Quiet MythTV Box?

[Florin Andrei]

Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> 
> The first thing I'd like a MythTV box (that I would build) to be, is
> to be quiet.  Completely silent if possible.  Does anyone have any
> advice or experience in doing this?
> 
> Is using SSDs (Solid-State Drives) instead of a Hard Drive an option?
> (Anyone have experience using them?)

Whoa, that's pretty extreme. It might be doable, but the obvious 
question is: is that a real requirement?

 From a practical perspective:

1. Get a fanless graphics card. There are tons of cards out there. Get a 
cheap old card that's passively cooled. This is nothing special.

2. Get a motherboard with everything embedded (sound, network, etc.). 
This will keep the wattage low, and the noise too.
If you find a mobo that also has a decent graphics card embedded (that 
works well enough for MythTV) then that's even better and it obsoletes 
item #1 above.
This is nothing special either.

3. Get a low-power ("green", etc.) CPU. Find a decent fan for it, if the 
original fan is not quiet enough. Turn on cool-n-quiet in the BIOS, turn 
on cpu frequency scaling in the OS, and all that stuff.
I've an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 that's sitting at 30 C (86 F) when idle, 
auto-throttled at 1000 MHz. I can't hear the fan at all when idle, and 
when it's not idle it's drowning in the sound coming from the speakers 
anyway (and it's pretty quiet even then).

4. Get a low-noise power supply. There are some out there that are 
actually fanless and completely silent.

5. Get a decent quiet hard drive. Nothing special.

6. Make sure the case is not a skimpy little thing that rattles and 
vibrates from the supply and the disk.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/