[mythtv-users] Current SFF Frontend of choice

[Matt Garman]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 9:14 PM, DaWorm <daworm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are these fanless?

They could be.  Mine is not; the only fan is the CPU fan, which can
only be heard if you put your ear right up to the case.  I might be
able to get away without a fan using a "T" series CPU (e.g. i3-2100T).
 Or, if I used a bigger case I could then use a massive heatsink and
go fanless (I have mine stuffed in a Habey EMC-800B case).

You can have silence without being fanless.  But you can easily go
fanless if you give up on size (big case + monster heatsink), or if
you spend the big bucks on one of those fancy cases that act as a
giant heatsink.  But you can get the best of both worlds (small, low
price) if you're willing to have a single, slow-moving fan---and you
still get silence.

> On Feb 23, 2012 12:39 PM, "Matt Garman" <matthew.garman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:13 AM, William Powers <wepprop at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Of course, opinions will vary but if I were putting together a new
>> > frontend
>> > today, I would put a G620T with the OEM HSF on a mini-ITX board and use
>> > OpenGL playback with the integrated Intel graphics
>>
>> I second this.  I'm running an i3-2100 on a mini-itx motherboard in a
>> small case.  Power consumption is less than 20 watts at idle, and so
>> far, I haven't had any playback issues.
>>
>> > The only trick is that I had to remove all trace of the nvidia driver
>> > and I
>> > had to patch and recompile the Mesa rpm's from instructions I found on
>> > this
>> > list. Hopefully the distros will pick up the upstream patch very soon
>> > and
>> > make the latter unnecessary. The advantage to using OpenGL on Intel
>> > graphics
>> > is I don't need a discrete NVidia GPU that adds 10 or 15 watts at idle.
>> >  With a pico-PSU it should idle under 20 watts and use an extra 5 to 10
>> > watts during HD playback.  Plus you don't have to deal with NVidia
>> > proprietary drivers.
>>
>> I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but if you're using
>> CentOS: the maintainer of the elrepo mesa package has incorporated
>> said patch.
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>
>
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