[mythtv-users] Minimum hardware recomendation

Simon Hobson linux at thehobsons.co.uk
Tue Jun 23 18:54:41 UTC 2009


David Brodbeck wrote:
>Simon Hobson wrote:
>>  With the original
>>Mac, they managed to make it fanless by putting the power supply 
>>(and video board) vertically up one side - so the heat it produced 
>>generated convection and drew cooler air in the vents on the other 
>>side of the case and across the logic board.
>
>I had one of those "toaster Macs."  The convection cooling didn't 
>turn out to be a good idea; the analog board tended to develop bad 
>solder joints from the heat.  There was an aftermarket fan available 
>for them to fix the problem.

I don't recall a fan kit for them. I know I repaired a number of 
failures which I put down to a design/manufacture issue rather that 
any problem with the convection cooling. The mains connector on the 
analog board (the combined PSU & CRT driver up the left hand side), 
and the connectors at both ends of the logic board to analog board 
cable had large copper (or brass) pins. I regularly saw bad (dry) 
joints on these connectors - some of which would have been to down to 
insufficient heat getting into the pins during wave soldering, and 
some were down to thermal stresses during use.

So I'd say most of the faults I dealt with were down to having large 
copper or brass pins and the differential heating caused by their 
thermal mass. These days you rarely see such large terminals on a 
PCB. Yes, a fan would have reduced the temperature variations, but it 
wasn't the high temperature it self that caused the problem - not 
that they did get all that hot.

Back in those days I was technical director of a small Apple dealer, 
so I saw a few.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.


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