[vdr] AW: How to get the VDR box silent

["Stephan Bieker" <stephan@bieker-online.de>]

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: vdr-bounce@linuxtv.org [mailto:vdr-bounce@linuxtv.org]Im Auftrag
> von Ondrej Wisniewski
> Gesendet am: Montag, 20. Januar 2003 09:49
> An: vdr@linuxtv.org
> Betreff: [vdr] How to get the VDR box silent
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I will be starting to assemble a VDR box soon, but in order to
> install it in the
> living room it should be quite silent (this would also help a lot
> to convince my
> wife of this project (-; ).
>
> I think that the only really noisy parts of the box will be the
> cooling fans of
> the power supply unit

Then why not choose a psu without a cooling fan? I use a passive cooled psu
and i'm quite happy with it.


and the main processor. Now I read in a
> recent issue of
> the CHIP magazin that you could use a PIII 1.2GHz without fan if
> underclocked to
> 600MHz. Unfortunatly this seems quite a waste of processor power
> (which you pay
> for of course).

This would be a great fault. If you only need the power of a 600 MHz PIII,
why don't buy another cpu, which is much cheaper and stays cool the same.
Why use a PIII, why not a celeron?

If you do not have anything in your hobby-box that you could use and you
want to buy new hardware, you have to decide, if you want to watch divx over
your dvb-s card or not. If not, i would buy a nice epia board, passive
cooled and cheap.
If you want to watch divx over your dvb, you must have _at least_the power
of a 1 GHz Intel, better more power. I use a 1,1 Celeron (Mendocino) and it
is the minimum for watching divx with a good quality (in my environment).
But more CPU Power will produce much more heat and more heat means more
noise. You have to decide.
I personally would like to have more cpupower but i dont want to have more
heat/noise.

> Does anyone know of a less expensive CPU that will run without
> active cooling ?

Buy a epia board with a C3. Buy the passive cooled one (800MHz?). But expect
not too much power from it. Almost everything will go fine but _not_ divx
over the dvb-s. If you have a nice graphics card with a good tv-out and
framebuffer support, you could try to use divx with mplayer over
framebuffer. I _believe_, this _should_ work too but didn't see it myself.

And finally, don't spend too much ram to your box. 64MB is enough. I tried
256 ram but will switch back to 64. Its not worth the heat it produces.

> How did you deal with the noise problem ?

I bought a "mediaportal" which is a fine piece of hardware for a pc in a
living room. It doesn't look like a pc and it doesn't make noise like a pc.
And 3 PCI slots on a 810 Intel board with integrated sound, lan, graphics, a
passive psu, room for one 5 1/4'' and two 3,5'' devices with integrated
infrared control (which is lirc capable with light modification) and only
one silent fan for the whole box is exactly what i needed.

Gruss

Stephan



-- 
Info:
To unsubscribe send a mail to listar@linuxtv.org with "unsubscribe vdr" as subject.