[mythtv-users] Fanless: What about VIA mobos ?

[Marko Nurmenniemi]

David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2007, at 3:37 PM, lanas wrote:
>>   But, these CPUs are low end.  I'm presently running MythTV on a Asus
>> Pentium board (which has an issue with AGP bus so I can't use an AGP
>> video card with TV out) with 1 GB RAM and the live TV images are  
>> choppy.
>>
>>   How then, can a slower VIA CPU and lesser RAM fare regarding the
>> choppiness of live TV feed ?
> 
> I have a VIA motherboard with a 1 GHz Nehemiah M10000 CPU.  It serves  
> in a combined frontend/backend.  Live TV works fine.  However, I'm  
> using an MPEG2 capture card, so the load of encoding the recorded  
> video doesn't fall on the CPU.  I'm also using XvMC acceleration for  
> playback.
> 
> I don't think this machine would have the CPU power to do live TV  
> with a frame grabber card and MPEG4 encoding, but I haven't tried  
> it.  It will play back MPEG4 without a problem, but MPEG4 playback  
> isn't accelerated and consumes about 40% of the CPU.
> 
> But, this is *not* a fanless system.  With M-series systems you have  
> to go below 1 Ghz to get fanless operation.  It is, however, fairly  
> quiet and very compact.  Overall, to my ears, the noise level is  
> about equivalent to a VCR with the video heads spinning.  Most of  
> that noise actually comes from the case fans -- I'm using a very  
> slender case, which means it needs smaller, higher speed fans.  A  
> larger case that could accommodate a bigger, slower fan would be  
> quieter.
> 
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> 
Not exactly true, I have an 1G VIA in a Hush box which uses heatpiping 
technology. No fans, no airflow in the case at all. Very quiet. Only 
noise is coming from the HD.

It serves as a frontend and is doing Live-TV just fine. Needed the VIA 
display drivers (Fedora) before it dropped the cpu usage to anything 
sensible.

I have also another 1G VIA below this one, from that one I replaced the 
stock fan with bigger one and run it slower. Stock was 40mm new is 60mm. 
This is also doing fine.

Both are connected via VGA to television and run native resolution 
1280x720 of the TV.

-M