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I was thinking about getting a little Small-form factor box to run something like MythTv, something along the lines of a AMD64. But checking out the Mac mini just makes me wonder about how I could get that going. Anyone think that this box could be a useful solution to that kind of project? I think the fairly standardized hardware would make that pretty simple to do, but being a non-mac person, I have no idea.

And damn - just in time to consider when upgrading my parents old machines. ;)

I've recently been looking at small / quiet form factor boards from places like Mini-ITX - I'm embedding an X terminal into my glass topped dining room table.

I've had it with desktops; time for the X table top.

Who remembers this?
Computer built into a Batman lunchbox.

Anyone got up-to-date recommendations on a PC box that won't look like utter crap on the TV cart?

Yeah, start here

This person made a bog themed case, though it isn't actually a cube.

Directions to build the thing: http://mini-itx.com/projects/falcon-itx/

There's a few of these self-build projects around.

Mini-ITX had a nice looking one (from the front at least) almost 2 years ago:
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/pictureframepc/

Didn't Mr. Gates put something similar in MSXanadu?

The scary thing is it works.

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/gingerbreadvillag e/

just to let u know mini-itx.com has an article about a realy computer covered in gingerbread http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/gingerbreadvillag e/

Just need to get an old drive enclosure some where (ebay?)

It could even run the drive health scripts itself....

You mention Mini-ITX cases, have you looked into the latest motherboards? These Nehemiah boards have an encryption chip built in that might be helpful.

Is there ANY available? What do people use, for heavens' sake?

What I mean by this is that I need:

• small, fairly cute case
• silent, no fan. This has to sit at a parents' house & act just like a consumer device.
• 2 PCI slots. Yes, TWO, damnit! I want one for Hauppage TV-out and another for a Hauppage digital-TV tuner.

I can't find anything that actually meets these requirements. My mother has a Mini-ITX machine in her study at present, something like this, but the fan noise is too much for the living room.

Mini-ITX.com sell Epia fanless motherboards with processor already mounted, and I gather that 600mhz or so is fine for a MythTV box, if one is using Hauppage cards' onboard MPEG hardware, but they all have only one PCI slot.

I can find riser cards to convert these motherboards to accept a second PCI, card, but the only case I can find that accept this hardware is pretty uninspiring.

So it seems to me that in order to build a decent MythTV box I have to do some modding of some sort, which I'd really rather not do. Has anyone solved this problem with an off-the shelf solution.

Is there ANY available? What do people use, for heavens' sake?

What I mean by this is that I need:

• small, fairly cute case
• silent, no fan. This has to sit at a parents' house & act just like a consumer device.
• 2 PCI slots. Yes, TWO, damnit! I want one for Hauppage TV-out and another for a Hauppage digital-TV tuner.

I can't find anything that actually meets these requirements. My mother has a Mini-ITX machine in her study at present, something like this, but the fan noise is too much for the living room.

Mini-ITX.com sell Epia fanless motherboards with processor already mounted, and I gather that 600mhz or so is fine for a MythTV box, if one is using Hauppage cards' onboard MPEG hardware, but they all have only one PCI slot.

I can find riser cards to convert these motherboards to accept a second PCI, card, but the only case I can find that accept this hardware is pretty uninspiring.

So it seems to me that in order to build a decent MythTV box I have to do some modding of some sort, which I'd really rather not do. Has anyone solved this problem with an off-the shelf solution.

Is there ANY available? What do people use, for heavens' sake?

What I mean by this is that I need:

• small, fairly cute case
• silent, no fan. This has to sit at a parents' house & act just like a consumer device.
• 2 PCI slots. Yes, TWO, damnit! I want one for Hauppage TV-out and another for a Hauppage digital-TV tuner.

I can't find anything that actually meets these requirements. My mother has a Mini-ITX machine in her study at present, something like this, but the fan noise is too much for the living room.

Mini-ITX.com sell Epia fanless motherboards with processor already mounted, and I gather that 600mhz or so is fine for a MythTV box, if one is using Hauppage cards' onboard MPEG hardware, but they all have only one PCI slot.

I can find riser cards to convert these motherboards to accept a second PCI, card, but the only case I can find that accept this hardware is pretty uninspiring.

So it seems to me that in order to build a decent MythTV box I have to do some modding of some sort, which I'd really rather not do. Has anyone solved this problem with an off-the shelf solution.

Is there ANY available? What do people use, for heavens' sake?

What I mean by this is that I need:

• small, fairly cute case
• silent, no fan. This has to sit at a parents' house & act just like a consumer device.
• 2 PCI slots. Yes, TWO, damnit! I want one for Hauppage TV-out and another for a Hauppage digital-TV tuner.

I can't find anything that actually meets these requirements. My mother has a Mini-ITX machine in her study at present, something like this, but the fan noise is too much for the living room.

Mini-ITX.com sell Epia fanless motherboards with processor already mounted, and I gather that 600mhz or so is fine for a MythTV box, if one is using Hauppage cards' onboard MPEG hardware, but they all have only one PCI slot.

I can find riser cards to convert these motherboards to accept a second PCI, card, but the only case I can find that accept this hardware is pretty uninspiring.

So it seems to me that in order to build a decent MythTV box I have to do some modding of some sort, which I'd really rather not do. Has anyone solved this problem with an off-the shelf solution.

I want to know how they managed to balance what looks like a very real cat on this case.

...in the form of personal computers casemodded to resemble cows. Spending too much time at the Gateway Corporation can do that sort of thing to you.

These have been around for a few years now in Europe. You can find a ton of stuff here that specializes in low power, low noise computers.

While I have not been using one of these for MultiMedia applications, I have been using them for mail and web servers. They are excellent machines, but I can't afford the Hush computers.

But I think that they are on the right track of making silent computers. We don't really need that much horsepower to check email and do 99% of our jobs

Horsepower is over rated.

Speaking of Mini-ITX, VIA is introducing a new Mini-ITX board. It's got built-in compact flash slot and other features that suggest it could be the heart of the device they are coming out with. Then again a few other mini-itx boards could be too.

Here's some links. Plenty of connectors visible.

The EPIA MS
Mini-ITX.Com Review

Hmm, that reminds me of... At the speed Yafray is rendering some simple models I have (at Low quality) i'll need one of those for the full picture. And this is on an Athlon64 using everything targeted for x86_64 with optimizations.

I guess I should provide the actual link to the page:

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/sx64

The guy did end up using it as his HTPC by the way.

If you have the sort of application which scales well across a parallel processing environment then even the rather underpowered Via Mini-Itx boards would do a good job.

If you had a cluster of Prescott P4's you could probably heat your house all winter.

Mini-ITX Cluster has some useful info: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/
But yeah.. what do you want the cluster for?

If I want something fanless, I'll get a Via board or vapor from TeamASA. If I want a game PC, I'll get an Athlon64 and put shitty WinXP on it. The Pentium-M might be a good middle ground, but unless you specifically want a Pentium-M, it won't fill either niche really well.

I'm with you! Is there room in R2D2 firewall for the projector?

Legos never got old, never! Especially when you can build computer cases out of them.

Constructs (though these don't seem to be around anymore.) I built tons of neat vehicles for my GI Joes out of these.

And I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Erector sets! You call yourselves nerds! Sheesh!

His point, though, was that one wouldn't build a cluster like this for performance, but for the technical experience and knowledge when under a strict budget (hence his suggestion that vocational schools might have an interest in this).

I would think, however, that commodity hardware would be a better idea; the total-cost for each XBox was around $180 (mod chip included), while an extremely low end system could be built for less (using old Durons, for instance, coupled with a few megs or RAM). It certainly wouldn't compare very well to most other clusters, but it would provide the builder with a lot of "hands-on" experience that would be difficult to obtain otherwise.

See this guy's Mini-ITX cluster for more information.

Build a nano-itx pc.

If all a machine is doing is encrypting, A64s and Opterons are a bit overkill. The VIA C3 C5P has an encryption engine that makes top-of-the-line processors look sad. I couldn't find results for RC4, but is a page from a review of the EPIA MII-12000 which shows AES results. First graph is EPIAs in software, second is a few Intel and AMD CPUs (software), and the MII-12000 in software (which gets creamed by the AXP 2500+ and the P4@2.4) and hardware (which totally obliterates everything).

When or if I get around to building a HTPC (college student with no parts budget)I want a box with an unfinished aluminum enclosure. That way I can anodize/die the case whatever color I please.

Being that I'm an ME student I could just build such a box from sheet aluminum, and that VFD can be had through the mini-itx comunity. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=9&curr ency=2

Check out the project I did over two years ago to provide my home with Network Attached Storage: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/tuxserver/

This is an awesome little machine that has been serving files to my home network for over two years with nary a reboot. Fast, stable, and zero problems with the software RAID5. I did have one drive go out about a year ago; popped in the replacement and the array automatically rebuilt itself.

One recommendation I'd make is use a journaled file system! I use ReiserFS and it is excellent for use in a software RAID.

Consider a modest homenetwork with a games PC, a mailserver/webserver and a firewall. With the exception of the games PC the other systems have to be on 24/7 to be really useful. Run a PC with a 300 watts PSU for one year and it costs you here, in the Netherlands, approx. 150 euros. I would want to change these always-on systems to low power boxes, think EPIA or a Soekris. A Soekris system runs normally on 10 watts. My TranquilPC uses about 25 to 30 watts. Its fanless, it looks cool and I play modest games on it - obviously not FPS games but it runs Linux just fine and functions as firewall.

I'm waiting for the industry to play catchup to my power concerns. Someday I'll be able to play those FPS games on a lowpower system.

Zarn

I found a place last year (sadly, out of business now,) that sold SE/30 compatible 16MB SIMMs for $5 a piece. I bought a few dozen of 'em. Now my SE/30 and my IIci are maxed at 128MB.

She (dana, the doer of this deed,) stated she wants to try it on a Mac II (16MHz 68020,) but it's lack of MMU (or FPU) probably prevents that. For that matter, the SE/30's lack of FPU probably dooms it, as well. (Although that would rock. Now I'm tempted to try it, though. Better than the Mini-ITX PC in an SE/30 shell. http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/mac-itx/)

I wan a Nano-ITX board myself... not quite out yet.

http://www.beareyes.com.cn/2/lib/200303/18/073/vi3 -b.jpg

No, just kidding. Here's the real Nano-ITX:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/subscribe.asp?s=8

Mini-box make some neato little ITX boxes which you could hook up to any number of storage solutions. Past that, I've had good success with Mini-ITX boards. I get the cases from Web-tronics, as the MITX ones are very, very expensive -- they're meant to make your MITX look like a CD player, pretty much, and I can do more without having to worry about cosmetics. MiniBox (above) sells snap-in MITX power supplies ranging from 60w to 200w. For the extra cool factor, use a Xenarc display or use something 'headless', e.g., LCDProc and Crystalfontz. (As I remember, the MiniBoxes come with their own little displays.)

Twice the speed, 8 times the storage, more expandable and cheaper? What's the appeal of the AMD device?

There are photos of a much cooler lego-box computer here.

One of these. The wonders of mini-ITX and people with far too much time on their hands...
-ReK

I often thought about using an old pc to use as a juke box, but they usually come with power supplies that run at 150W or more. I don't know what that would cost if I were to keep it on constantly, but I'm only home for 4 waking hours a day, 1 of which is dedicated to family guy/futurama.

So then there are the powersaving mini-itx http://mini-itx.com/ boxes that, fully assembled, will still cost more than $300, which I think is way too much for a juke box. So a sub $100 50W barebones would do the trick for me. Anyone seen something like that?

The OQO is really a wallet mini-ITX mod.

So, he took a big honkin' boom box, stuck a power supply, mini-itx mobo, a small hard drive, and a Linksys PCI WiFI adaptor in it. No other info available; picked that up from looking at the pictures. Not sure if this qualifies as a case mod (I mean, it's a computer, but it doesn't LOOK like a computer) or something else. Either way, it should have some kickin' sound output.

I've pondered, for some time, what would happen if large numbers of people had IPod-type hardware, with a WiFi or Bluetooth connection, and a public, read-only storage space available, and no encryption. If you could wander in-range of someone else, see what they've got in their publicly available directory, and download stuff that interested you, without even needing to know who exactly you got it from. Think P2P networking, without wires, without any way of figuring out who's distributing what. If the current P2P system didn't drive the RIAA crazy enough, this would REALLY push them over the edge. I suppose something like this is a logical first step in that direction.

Show me a modern PC, laptops included, that idle at less than 50 watts.

Ok, how about less than 50 watts at full bore operation??

Here

Coupled with a LCD monitor and you have much less than 50 watts WITH the hard drive power useage.

for 99% of what a computer is used for, those machines are more than enough. High end 3d games and other computational intensive tasks are that last 1%.

in any case startup amp draw is extremely little change from regular operation. the biggest draw is the HDD motor spinning up.

Anyone with a good and fast ampmeter knows this as fact.

CPUs like the Pentium III can be underclocked and underpowered to the point that they work just fine without a fan. The VIA C3 is a Socket 370 / P-III compatable processor designed for low power and fanless operation. Check out the mini-itx motherboards for examples of these in operation.

Most video cards don't need a fan at all, although passively cooled cards can still heat up the interior of your case. It's doubtful that you really need the absolute latest and most powerfull leaf-blower video card on your home server.

Hard drives and power supplies are the other big sources of noise. Hard drives noise is noticable because it comes and goes, while power supplies need to push all the heat that those passively cooled components have been producing out of the case. A well made drive seated on noise absorbing padding, rather than bolted directly onto a steel frame, can be reduced to a low, cricket-like chirping noise while large, slower case fans can take a lot of the load off of the PSU without raising noise levels significantly. Take a look around Silent PC Review for more on this topic, or just look for a retailer in your area who carries quiet PC parts.

I have been slowly replacing all the computers around my home with silent parts over the last few years, and the difference is stunning. Just last week I needed to replace a power supply and used a spare that I had sitting on a shelf -- It sounded like a jet engine compared to everything around it. If that's the kind of noise that's coming out of your server, then I understand your frustration. You don't need to turn to rare, high tech prototypes from military labs to quiet down your PC -- All you need now is to shop around a bit.

mini-itx.com - many of the projects on there are very inventive...

See mini-itx.com

Nothing in the top 30 or so informative/insightful comments mention this so i will:

The VIA epia seems like it might be exactly what you're looking for. Take a look here

They are a very tiny motherboard with a built in VIA CPU. The processing power should be ample for any small server tasks, plus its a tiny and very quiet computer which takes almost no power. Just add ram, a hard drive, a case, and a switch and you're ready to network ;)

I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We're both long-time FreeBSD users, so installing a *nix system is no big deal

one obvious solution is mini-itx. im currently using one of these guys for my www/mail server, and i love it. its just a little bigger than a cdrom drive, it only uses a 60w power supply, its totally silent, and very stable. i've been running this thing 24/7 with no problems for the last 6 months or so. and yes, both linux and freebsd run fine on these.