[mythtv-users] Via Epia sp and hdtv
glen martin
glenm at locutory.org
Fri Feb 3 20:01:05 UTC 2006
James Dastrup wrote:
>On Friday 03 February 2006 12:29 pm, Shane wrote:
>
>
>>Hello list,
>>
>>I am looking at setting up an ota hdtv machine using either
>>the air2pc card or a pchdtv-3000 card. I'd like the
>>machine to be fanless
>>
>Any particular reason
>you want it fanless? If noise is your concern, you can get a
>nearly-quiet machine going with a diskless front-end, upgraded CPU
>fan with voltage reducer, and a quiet power supply.
>
Right. I'm partway through an attitude shift on this. I've been aiming
for the last 18 months at smaller, quieter machines based on the EPIA
boards with sexy little boxes. The realization I eventually came to is
the very very low compute power of those boards, and a suspicion that
the larger EPIAs with little fans (necessitated by little boxes) weren't
so good on the power-to-noise ratio.
As an experiment, then, my latest machine is a mid-tower box, quiet PSU,
and completely integrated mATX mobo with fanless northbridge cooler. It
is very very quiet. I oversized the PSU (Seasonic S12-430) to get a big
heatsink, PFC and good components, and as a result the PSU fan runs
around 900 rpm. The cpu cooler is a Coolermaster XP-90 with Nexus 9cm
fan running around 12 or 1300 rpm. There is one 12cm exhaust fan running
well under 1500 rpm. No intake fans, because the two exhaust fans pull
enough air past the single drive (which is a Barracuda, so very quiet
and low-power). Add it all up, roughly no noise. Only noticeable noise
over other background is the disc stepper. And the mobo temp trends
about 2-3 C degrees above ambient, cpu temp between 30 and 35 C in a 30
C room (35 C under load). Drive runs around 23 or 24 C.
But, it is a big ugly case. A smaller case could also be made to work,
but interior airflow will then merit attention.
glen
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