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A Truly Silent Desktop PC
boris writes "The first in a series of turnkey systems seem to be coming through the fence from Hush Technologies. The systems weigh in a little expensive but look to be incredible quality. This is according to the review over at HEXUS.net who have a heap of photos up of the unit as well as an article. Is this finally the step to having a true PC in every living room? HTPC here we come!" These EPIAs are everywhere now; we mentioned the M-100 the other day; less-expensive ready-built systems (in various configurations) are available from SolarPC, too.
Looking over the specs this would be really quite however apart from the hard disk/CD Rom access. As such me being a geek would like to see a versions that could boot over the network and run everything from Ram. OK prehaps its over kill but if you remove all the mechanical bits then your should have somethnig truly quite and very reliable.
I know for a fact that the Via MB are good. I bought one from Mini-ITX and have had it running solidly for about 2 months. No crashes. Nothing. Very Impressed
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
If you're going to have no drive, the best solution is probably something like the NCD thin clients.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I host hexus's webservers :-)
- now I'm starting to get worried
www.tetracite.com
The machine looks great and the hardware seems to be extremely well put together but the review misses out on a few key areas.
It's acknowledged that the unit would look great in a lounge or on a hi-fi rack. But nowhere is the video output from the composite and S-Video outputs mentioned.
How easy would it be to get a remote control up and running with the unit? What's the sound quality like? Can the unit drive a high end sound card with the power supply that's supplied?
These are the questions I want answered.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
We are having major server problems at the moment. Something is up - we will fix this ;)
But a C3?
I can't imagine apple addicts find the comparison to an iMac flattering. Any color you want provided you want silver or black.
And at those prices it seems like you're way better off rolling your own, and either stashing it with the help of longer shielded cables, or one of those wireless setups.
from heux's site
;)
;P
We are having major server problems at the moment. Something is up - we will fix this
yup. it's called a damn good slashdotting buddy. you better have some fire extinguishers ready to fix your "server problems"
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
... Jaheseus Christ that looks good.
Most often you don't get good-looking !and! silent at the same time.
Schweeet!
naah sig schmig
like the jet takeoff sounds my delta 38's make. Keeps the critters and neighbors away!
Minor problems, he says. We'll show him "minor", won't we, boys? Muwaha-ha-ha-haaa.
Coax SPDIF and 5:1 is enough for you?
Actually it'd be something like...
In Soviet Russia...the PC silences YOU
You can hear a faint whir from the fans if you place your ear next to the system, but otherwise they are completely silent.
Furthermore, they are extremely inexpensive. The latest deal on slickdeals.net was a $340 Pentium 4 2.53GHz system with 256MB PC2700 RAM, a 16X DVD-ROM or a 48X CD-RW, 30GB hard drive and 32MB Rage (in an AGP slot so it's upgradable) Slickdeals went so far as to say "You cannot build your own system for less then this."
I see no reason to spend more money on an underpowered EPIA silent system when a Dell can be had for significantly cheaper.
Found one
Managed to get this before the site disspeared
ntroduction
Possibly the area of greatest interest in the Computing world at present is the Small Form Factor (SFF) PC. They are perfect for a multitude of uses from a replacement for your main pc all the way to a Home Theater PC (HTPC). They have great flexibility due to their size, allowing many new designs to be considered. New to this market are Hush Technologies and they have approached the SFF with one thing in mind, total silence.
They have created a completely passively cooled MiniITX based PC which does away with most of the sources of noise in a normal system and encloses it in a beautifullooking aluminium case. Let's have a look at how good it is in the flesh.
What are the specifications of this PC?
* Via Epia-M 9000: Featuring a 933Mhz VIA C3 CPU
* 256MB of Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM
* 80Gb Seagate Barracuda Hard Disk
* TEAC DVD/CDRW Combo drive
* Morex 55w Power Supply (PSU)
* Dimensions: 37 x36 x 6cm (w,d,h)
* Case material: Aluminium
* Form Factor: MiniITX
The specifications of the system are interesting, the inclusion of the TEAC combo drive is great and the large hard disk allows plenty of storage. I'd prefer 512MB of RAM but 256MB is adequate for the majority of its intended uses. The hard disc itself is renowned for its low noise. It's not totally silent but a lot better than many fixed disks out there. It sacrifices some performance for this but is generally no slouch. Hush provides plenty of options so you can specify the right system for your needs.
I think I should start this review by explaining just what MiniITX form factor motherboards are. The form factor was originally proposed by VIA to be an ultra small form factor, smaller than the FlexATX and MicroATX form factors that were the smallest at the time. The original MiniITX boards were feature rich boards with a CPU soldered onto the board. This was cheap to produce as there was no discrete packaging cost for the integrated processor.
The specifications of the MiniITX form factor state that the board may not be bigger than 170mm x 170mm. As you can see this is tiny when compared to the normal ATX standard.
VIA also aimed to have very low heat output from the MiniITX so it would be more suitable in systems like the Hush. Some of the VIA EPIA series models are passively cooled but unfortunately these are the less powerful models. The higher powered boards require a small heatsink with a 40mm fan and these fans can often be quite noisy so Hush set out to combine the faster EPIA models with a passive cooling system.
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This looks pretty cool, but I'd like to know - just how compatible and reliable are these C3 processors? I've seen them advertised in cheapo laptops in a number of places - are they some sort of mobile solution? I've also seen them mounted on a couple of all-in-one motherboard solutions. Anyone have any experience with these?
Well, I've been thinking along these problems myself for a while... The hard drive noise is the only noise left in my bedroom system. (No CD, no Fans, just massive cooling fins...)
Even with the hard drive masked tightly for sound, I can hear it (especially when it wakes up from sleep... the spin-up sound is unmistakable in a truly quiet room)
Instead of an expensive flash-ram based IDE hard drive, is there a way to boot from a USB Ramdisk? A 64/128MB ramdisk outh to be enough to boot the O/S, load the drivers and contact the data that's out on the network. Perhaps a cheap USB2IDE converter somwhere out there could allow the box to boot from the $100 ramdisk? Conversion can be done the OTHER direction, but I couldn't google a way to hook the USB device to the IDE cable...
....with its scsi disks and four fans, but I've gotten to the point where I can't sleep when it's off. I actually can't hear the drives most of the time over the fans.
It's much quieter than my ceiling fan, though, which I've had on the last couple of days because it's been warm.
Whenever I need silence, everything but the iBook goes off.
The Mini-ITX machine reviews are interesting. I've been meaning to get one to put in this dead Apple IIgs I've got.
I haven't tried it but I know that my main machine can boot from a CF Reader. I might try putting Linux on a CF see if I could boot the system off it. If that works might give Windows a try. Drop me a mail to rghf@65535.net and I will let you know how I get on :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
No, the Dell Precision workstations are not "completely silent." They may be stunningly quiet; I don't know, I've never heard one. But "completely silent" is different. It doesn't mean that there's minimal sound, or that the sound is well muffled. It means that no sound is being generated. I have a stack of computers sitting around... the only two that approach "completely silent" are an iBook (using ramdisk, fan off, optical drive not in use) and epia (solid state hard disk, but the damn switching power supply makes an almost-audible noise).
I appreciate that for most people "damn quiet" is good enough. Heck, even for me it is. But "completely silent" is an absolute, and it should be used that way.
I've had this sig for three days.
You'd think that creatives would be the ones Apple would identify as wanting the quiet to think and contemplate.
However buying a PC feels like a real step backwards for me. I am totally socialised to using Mac's in music and now that Logic is no longer supported on the PC it is even harder to consider the switch.
The sooner PCs get silent (like the blessed iMacs) the better...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
cuz someday when I have sex, I want to be able to hear it too.
I've been watching computers waiting for a combination of:
- Small form factor
- Very Low Power consumption
- Low Price
Much of this has been driven based on the realization that, with the exception of gaming, there is really no practicaly need for the incredible power consumption and heat dissapation of the high end COTS systems. When you consider it, the COTS systems today are very poorly designed because they are entirely dependant upon high speed fans to keep themselves from self distruction. This makes for an a-stable product which happens to be horribly loud and in a social sense, isn't scalable (you can't have 4 of these sitting in a room).Following this new realization that no one really needs a multi GHz processor for surfing, email, servers, and most all of their coding then the idea of a 30 Watt silent processor has some real appeal.
VIA, with thei EPIA and the Mini-ITX motherboards are poised for some real advances on the user community. While not as power independent as a notebook PC, they can be arguable as portable and certainly more convenient for the desktop cube-ville environment.
The other avenue for computer users to move in is the LSTP thin-client workstations like the jammin products. These are small devices with USB, PS/2 ports on the front. This is a new direction
Not intending to get prophetic here, but I really believe that there is need for a product which has a thin-client architecture with the goal of providing only interfaces:
- USB ports, 2-4
- Firewire
With the possibility of providing a single floppy drive or CD-RW and S-Video ports as well. But nothing more is really needed at the user desktop interface anymore. Unfortunately I haven't really seen anything like this at a sane price. I did see a few products which are mini-ITX motherboards installed at the back of flat panels for a single unit. Very wonderful, but not for $1500!!! Everything else would be retained at a single point of access at the server or at a "super station" which might have additional devicees (like CD-RW, S-Video)These are all really excellent devices. Now if someone would please sent me the $300 necessary to buy one I would be very happy! I have a lot of noise in my office.
First Impressions
First impressions count for a lot and with the Hush I wasn't disappointed, the system came in a well packaged and protected box. Opening up the box for the first time I was very surprised when I took the Hush out, it was a very solid piece of metal giving an impression of excellent build quality. The cooling fins on the sides are especially sturdy chunks of aluminium.
I've seen some of the nicest and well built cases in my time but this was something else. This PC would would look perfect next to a video or DVD player. The colour of this particular example wasn't something to write home about, but it was bearable and seeing as you get a choice of colours it's not really an issue. Overall I was very impressed by the system and had good hopes for the performance of it.
The Case
People who know me know will know I'm a case person, that I'm a sucker for a nice looking aluminium case and with the Hush I'm blown away. The pictures of the case really don't do it justice, it's the highest quality case I've yet come across and that includes all the Coolermasters. The fins at the side are very solid and they make a very entertaining noise when you run your hands across them that can get addictive. At the front it's very clean looking, nothing destroys the clean lines unless it's essential to the function. In terms of switch gear and LED's there is only the bare minimum. The power switch is a Bulgin vandal resistant number with blue lighting and those of you in the Modding community will know that these are some of the best looking switches out there. The button action requires a firm push and the switch feedback isn't the greatest but the blue glow the switch makes up for it in spades. The switch means that no power LED is required as the blue glow shows instantly that it's on. This is quite important as the case is so silent, you cant tell its on by listening. Above the switch is a tiny hole for the hard disk LED which is red in colour, I'd have preferred a blue LED but that's just me being fussy.
From the pictures you can see that the optical drive at the front is not your normal 5.25 drive, rather it's a laptop style one taking up a lot less room, thus allowing the case to be lower in profile. The drive is painted to make the drive fit in perfectly with the case and it's very good to see that Hush have thought of these little details, many manufacturers would just throw a beige or black drive in without thinking.
In terms of case access on this system, things are different to nearly all cases. The top panel is held in by 6 bolts. These aren't normal bolts but have two small holes on the head. They require a special tool to loosen them but that said, it's very easy to loosen them and Hush provides the correct tool with retail versions of the system for those needing/wanting to tinker or just look at the insides of the system.
On the bottom of the case there are four very sturdy looking feet with small circular rubber pads on the base. This means you can put the case anywhere without fear of marking the surface. If you have multiple Hush PC's you could even stack them on top of each other.
The Back of the Case
Turning the case round to look at the back you can see the ports are located in a nice ATX blanking plate, there is also a PCI slot (Note there is an option to have two), an extra 2 USB Ports and an extra 2 firewire ports. At the right of these is the input port for the Power Supply. Again, as with the rest of the case, it's very neatly laid out and well built. You can see that this is also Hush Serial Number S001 its always nice to see you have the first of something.
Power Supply
Again as with other parts of this system the Power supply isn't your normal type. In keeping with the passive cooling ethos Hush have used a Morex 55 watt power supply. This consists of an internal circuit board with no cooling and an external laptop style brick which connects to the case via a small connector and then to the plu
Now with the VIA EPIA M-9000 being the basis of the system it's not going to be great as a gaming rig, so I wasn't expecting huge power out of this system. Here at Hexus we have recently reviewed the EPIA M-9000 in a full and complete review so for a more specific review of the board look at it here. The specifications of the board mean that its aimed at being a complete solution containing on-board graphics and on-board sound along with lots of other goodies.
What are the specifications of the Via Epia 9000
* Processor
* VIA C3/EDEN EBGA Processor 933Mhz
* Chipset
* VIA CLE266 North Bridge
* VT8235 South Bridge
* System Memory
* 1 DDR266 DIMM socket
* Up to 1GB memory size
* VGA
* Integrated VIA CastleRock AGP graphics with MPEG-2 decoder
* Expansion Slots
* 1 X PCI
* Onboard IDE
* 2 X UltraDMA 133/100/66 Connector
* Onboard Floppy
* 1 x FDD Connector
* Onboard LAN
* VIA VT6103 10/100 Base-T Ethernet PHY
* Onboard Audio
* VIA VT1616 6 channel AC'97 Codec
* Onboard TV Out
* VIA VT1622 TV out
* Onboard 1394
* VIA VT6307S IEEE 1394 Firewire
* Onboard I/O Connectors
* 1 USB connectors for 2 additional USB 2.0 ports
* 2 1394 connectors for 2 1394 ports
* Front-panel audio connectors (Mic and Line Out)
* CD Audio-in connector
* SIR connector
* CIR connector
* Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Ring
What is Mini ITX Form Factor?
I think I should start this review by explaining just what MiniITX form factor motherboards are. The form factor was originally proposed by VIA to be an ultra small form factor, smaller than the FlexATX and MicroATX form factors that were the smallest at the time. The original MiniITX boards were feature rich boards with a CPU soldered onto the board. This was cheap to produce as there was no discrete packaging cost for the integrated processor.
The specifications of the MiniITX form factor state that the board may not be bigger than 170mm x 170mm. As you can see this is tiny when compared to the normal ATX standard.
VIA also aimed to have very low heat output from the MiniITX so it would be more suitable in systems like the Hush. Some of the VIA EPIA series models are passively cooled but unfortunately these are the less powerful models. The higher powered boards require a small heatsink with a 40mm fan and these fans can often be quite noisy so Hush set out to combine the faster EPIA models with a passive cooling system.
Gaming Performance
: : : : : : : : : : : : : :
Now I thought what would happen if someone wanted to use the Hush as an occasional gaming rig, how would they get on? I tried the Hush out in Quake 3 Arena 1.32 which is going to be a major test for any on-board graphics. Playing at the very lowest resolution available, the game was playable but on a large monitor or it's going to look horrific at 640x480. It was a bit slow but only when there was lots of action on the screen. I then tried out some timedemo's to give it a big test and I used very intense demo's where lots happens and here are the results:
* Fastest (Resolution: 512x384) = 17.7 FPS
* Normal (Resolution: 640x480) = 13.6 FPS
* High Quality (Resolution: 800x600) = 13.6 FPS
So these are all well below the 30fps threshold so it's not going to be any more than an emergency gaming rig. To test it out further I fired up 3d Mark 2001 but the results were far from sparkling:
Performance Conclusion
In summation the performance is not going to win any awards, anything that requires serious CPU or graphical grunt is not possible due to the lack of processing muscle. It's going to be ok for DivX or DVD playback however.
The colour of the case is difficult to describe being somewhere between silver and brown. Its not the nicest colour I have to say, but it's bearable. That said there are many colour options open to you as you can see from this pic taken by Nigel Prescott at Cebit. To give you an idea of the colour of this specific hush it's the 3rd from bottom on that picture. Personally I would go for the black or the silve and which ever you prefer the most, they are certainly the most striking of the options.
Pricing Structure.
Note Prices in pounds approximate and include VAT.
Prices as of 1st April 2003
* Hush Mini ITX PC - Via Epia-M 9000, 128MB DDR RAM,
40GB Seagate Barracuda HDD, TEAC Slimline CD-ROM.
Features 933Mhz VIA C3 CPU, VIA CLE266 Chipset,
32MB Integrated VIA "CastleRock" Graphics with MPEG
2 Decoder, 4 x USB 2.0 Ports, 2 X IEEE 1394 Firewire
Ports, S-Video out, 6-channel audio, 1 Full length
PCI slot, 10/100 Base-T Ethernet, TV-Out, Serial,
Parallel, Mouse and Keyboard
645 Euro's (£446.49)
* Colour option - Silver or Black
Free
* Upgrade to 256MB RAM
25 Euro's (£17.31)
* Upgrade to 512MB RAM
80 Euro's (£55.38)
* Upgrade to 1GB RAM
POA
* TEAC DVD/CDRW Combo Slim-line Upgrade
90 Euro's (£62.30)
* Upgrade to 60GB HDD Seagate Barracuda
25 Euro's (£17.31)
* Upgrade to 80GB HDD Seagate Barracuda
40 Euro's (£27.69)
* Upgrade to 120GB HDD Seagate Barracuda
80 Euro's (£55.38)
* Windows XP Home Pre-installed
100 Euro's (£69.22)
* Windows XP Professional Pre-installed
175 Euro's (£121.14)
* Delivery - Germany
25 Euro's (£17.31)
* Delivery - Europe
55 Euro's (£38.07)
* Delivery - Rest of World
POA
Conclusion
Pro's
* Looks very nice, would look great in the lounge
* Very well built
* Quite light and easy to carry
* Completely passively cooled
* Cooling is most efficient
* Well laid out internally
* Comes pre built so easy to setup
* Small so it doesn't take up much space
* Blue power button looks excellent
* Some nice colour options available
* Quietest solution around at present
Con's
* System performance not great
http://saveie6.com/
PCs, like women and children, should be seen, not heard.
Ever been to the Silent Woman bar in Merrie Olde England? The sign outside is a woman without a head.
This looks like the option to use for a homebrew PVR solution. The only thing missing is a TV card, but you can add that in the PCI slot that is available. It even has an MPEG2 hardware decoder. Would 933 MHz be fast enough for encoding, though?
Cheers,
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
It's just a shame the EPIA-M's onboard mpeg 2 decoder still has no linux.support. It's not at all obvious that this is the case looking at VIA's website. And there are a lot of people upset about this on the VIA forums.
It's been done before. It's called a G4 cube. I have one. It's silent. It's fast. It works.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
They're just interface standards and numbers.
I want details on singal to noise ratio - picture quality, sound quality. What does the picture look like? Does the display have a sodding black border round the edge?
How is the SPDIF output created - does it support DTS?
Just listing ports tells you nothing.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Remember the PowerMac G4 Cube? Aside from all of its brouhaha on price, lack of expansions, etc., it was 8 inches square and was a fanless convection cooled machine (and still is, for those of us who still use them!), and 1-2 years before any of these fanless mini-itx form factor machines.
It really is perfect as an iTunes console/DVR at the side of the TV, but priced well above using one for that purpose at the time.
As evidence of a near-identical form factor, folks have managed to cram mini-itx motherboards inside its case.
Similar to these mini-itx style boxes, the G4 Cube had internal hard drive and CD-ROM noise, but with NetBoot (or some optical FireWire repeaters and a hard drive in another room) you could run the sucker completely silent.
The only fan that was in Apple original designs was the video card fan for the ATI Radeon graphics cards (Rage 128s were fanless). Unsupported Radeon upgrades were fanless. Most upgrades these days to honk up the processor to a 1GHz+G4 single or dualie add in an 80cm fan at the base of the unit to push air through. Similarly with GF3s or other video cards put inside this case...convection alone isn't enough to cool the chips. Fans and noise will probably be the price of powerful machines in small form factors for some time to come given that minimal heat dissipation is not a primary design goal of high-end CPUs and GPUs.
looks like a laptop missing a few bits in a slighly bigger funckier box?
Another review can be found on the this website (bear in mind that they sell the Hush though). A comparison of the M and V series boards, including comparative benchmarks for video playback, can be found here.
Personally I intend to wait until Hush produce a new model based on the M series.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
For about $20, you can buy a CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter and use it with a Mini-ITX board in place of an IDE drive. You can then use a 512M CF card as your disk--plenty for installing a pretty usable Linux system.
The first thing that comes to mind are the older style pizza boxes like the Mac LC III for example.
While one can be critical of that style, not everyone has the space for your typical full tower. But in this current generation computing I have to ask, "why not get a laptop?" But that's just me personaly.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Thin client is a MICROSOFT term for a proprietary terminal. Thin Clients are built to Microsoft's specifications and are intentially made to be ill-suited for adaptation as X terminals. That's two reasons not to buy a thin client. NCD is a company which has always substantially OVERPRICED its hardware and which has failed to offer support for its products for any use except as a locked-in terminal. That's a third reason not to buy an NCD terminal. NCD is doing so badly as a company that it was delisted from the NASDAQ last year. That's another reason not to buy its products. NCD is infamous for overpricing its products.
The SolarPC is significant for all the obvious reasons, not the least of which being that it is the product, and the price, that NCD should have created the precursor of ten years ago.
AFAIK, Dell makes no guarantees that their systems are silent or even quiet. The Dell I have is quite noisy, actually. You are only guaranteed a silent PC if you build it yourself or buy it as such.
There's a rather similar PC with much more current hardware (P4, >2GHz): SignumData's FutureClient. See here. The problem is: It's vastly more expensive than the Hush model. Getting rid of all the heat costs you...
I really wish someone would make Mini-ITX boards using Pentium-M chips. They have roughly the same power budget as the C3s (ca. 10Watts max for ULV variant), and as various notebooks proove you can make the motherboards just as compact. With Pentium-M based Mini-ITX boards you could do all the cool things that Via's Mini-ITX allow you to, except at up-to-date performance levels.
One of them is a full blood assembled-from-spare-parts steed hidden in the cupboard by the toilets that talks to me through an old X terminal (absolutely noiseless) and an old Tosh laptop that's noisy like a quiet 1997 laptop but that I can't hear above the ambient noise level in the bar I usually use it in.
I'm constantly chasing noisy equipment in my surrounding, and have been doing so for years because I suffer from hyperacusis and chronic tinnitus. Those are my time-tested solutions to the problem of noisy PCs, and I bet it's a lot cheaper than real silent PCs, and I'm pretty sure people who truly can't stand noisy computers have already devised their own solutions too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well, afaik, you _must_ buy the AGP card from dell, as the slots is put in backward. Hehe.
That slickdeals.net computer is pretty good for that price. But dammit I hate mail-in rebates. Sometimes it takes so long to get the rebate, you forget that you're getting a deal. Good deals like that always make you jump through some hoops just to save a buck.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
is a dead PC.
Then again, if the entire *case* is a heatsink, and everything is shockmounted, it might work.
But, you'd still want to kill it at some point. . .
Use Fujitsu 2.5" drives: Fluid dynamic bearing, 4200rpm, practically silent.
If you want completely solid state: compact flash cards have a standard IDE interface, they just need a pin adapter - voila, solid state harddisk.
As far as the computer is concerned it is just another IDE device and will boot from it as normal. Even in the over-priced UK this comes in at under forty pounds. Less money and much less hassle than trying to boot from a USB drive.
&:12 Am less than a hundrud coments and the site is slashed. We shoud use a distributed file systum for the web somthinc like freenet but faster. Sinsce at the moment freenet makes it seam as though its 8 years ago and I have a 14.4
I've got a PC at home booting of CF at the moment, compact flash is ata-compliant so all you need is a dirt cheap ide/cf connector. No need for BIOS support, etc.
/tmp and /var and make sure you aren't swapping to the card or every time a program starts everything will slow to a crawl.
Of course, its awfully slow if you just have the filesystems on the card, instead you need to play around with using a ramdisk for
I just got a Seagate Barracuda from endpcnoise.com, to replace the Maxtor my Mac came with (which sounded like a jet engine), and it's quiet as a mouse. The only noise now is the fan in the power supply. VERY satisfied.
c-hack.com |
That sucks! That that machine is not a gaming platform we all know since Via came out with the wholle Epia thingy, so what's the point in testing a Game? What about Mpeg encoding...what about puting a tunner to that thing?...what about maybe getting Myth or Frevoo intalled? or Snapstream? (for that matter) I'm really looking forward for small footprint noiseless form factor to use as a PVR and Via is in the right direction, but so far grossly underpower. This review is not giving any subtantial information.
Anyone knows how compatible with Linux these Hush machines are? -js
"I don't know, I've never heard one."
That's because they're completely silent!
You can get a similar system put with P4 (up to 2.53 GHz) from:
Signum Data
That make more sense to me as a desktop, as you get much more CPU power. But I admit that it might look better without a floppy drive.
An easy and neat way of adding an IR receiver to the front would be a nice touch, too.
for most of my work, I use a laptop. I've got a linux box under my desk at home, amnd use that for backups and file storage for all but important/critical files that I might be working on.
Can anyone tell me what a desktop/tower configured PC can offer over a laptop for 95% of regular computer usage?
My laptop can do everything I need of it, and it's smaller, lighter and quieter than a tower. and it's mobile...
the only REAL benefit a tower configuration has for me, is that it allows upgrades more easily, rather than having to be completely replaced when it becomes obsolete.
just my tuppeny's worth
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
Hi gents, I've just been told that we got slashdotted , I see you have been making server admins quake in their boots as usual.
:)
I've tried to read any questions people had , the main one I see is that I didnt address the TV out function , I've linked to our full review of the epia 9000 as this contains the infomation etc , I didnt want to go over old ground.
I've review lots of things now and this was the first thing to come through the door that blew me away. Even the pc hating girlfriend liked it.
Re the hard disc a IBM will never be as silent as the Seagate , I've used those utitilties they just effect seek noise not the annoying whine.
Any questions just ask I will try to answer them
they wont be able to mask the sound of you beating off in your room quite so well.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
If you eliminate the fans, or put utterly silent ones in, what the frell are us techies who depend on white noise as a relaxation aid supposed to do? How can you possibly expect us to fall asleep in our chairs without that nice, ongoing, semi-pneumatic 'whirroosshh!' to mask out the noise of the couple getting it on in the supply room next door?
;-)
Criminys, some manufacturers just take all the fun out of tech-work...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Just for grins I tried comparlng the Mini-ITX with this in similar HW configurations and they ended up costing about the same. The Mini was a hair lower but still in the same ballpark.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
For those that like numbers, the Hexus server is a dual xeon with a few Gb RAM and SCSI disks. Or at least it was, you heartless people have killed it. Dave won't be happy.
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
My old amiga was so quiet, the only sound was the 50hz hum from the mains transformer.
I built a PC for my father. The requirement was: it has to be almost dead silent. Now, he's working on an Athlon XP 2000+ with a Radeon 8500 and you almost have to look for the power-LED to tell if the thing is running. Also, the "whole" thing (wasn't a whole PC, but almost) came at about EUR750-800; today I'd guess you could get the parts for at least EUR150 less.
All stock compopnents, a VIA KT400 mainboard, the 2000+ CPU, 512MB of PC333 DDR-Memory and the Radeon 8500 wth the stock fan. The CPU is cooled by a Thermaltake SK-7 copper monster with a 1500RPM Papst fan on it. The PSU is a 300W Blacknoise. HDD is a Seagate Barracuda V. All that in a leftover tower case without an additional casefan is almost inaudible, sufficiently fast even for most if not all games and the CPU temperature maxes out at 51 deg. C.
The system has a good-quality video signal, is extensible and was actually affordable. The only downside is that it's not really small, but you could easily stuff it inside a mini-tower and keep it well-coled with a 1500RPM case fan. If you're not looking for something small and stylish, that's the way I recommend.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
We use Dells where I work and while the Dimensions most of us use are damned quiet, they're not quite silent. We've noticed they are getting slightly louder over time (18 months) which is presumably just wear and tear on the case fan, and even now they're still very quiet for PCs.
When we first had them one of the fans had a bad bearing and Dell sent an engineer out to replace the fans on all the PCs we'd just bought, which took them back to being near-silent. You can't hear them over the traffic outside and general office noises unless you put your ear on the case. So yes, for most situations these machines are going to be more than quiet enough for most people, though the cases don't look as pretty as some of the Mini-ITX based ones.
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH
I think you meant to say that IBM drives can be made to run quietly rather than silently, unless the amount of noise that they make is truely zero (which generally is true when the drive is spun down or turned off, but I don't think that is what you were referring to).
Thats pretty steep. Lets do the math.
a Via EPIA-M 9000 mobo + cpu can be had for about $110.
Add on 128mb ram for $21.99 from crucial.
A 40gb HDD at todays prices, $70.
A slim cdrom drive, $40.
Which gives you a grand total of $260..Hell lets throw on an extra $40 for misc cables and crap and make it an even $300. 645 euro comes to almost 720 USD, which means you are paying $400 for a case?
Thanks...Ill pass.
Its actually not even a shame its a catastrophe since I wanted to build a movietank out of this but the DVD-Performance is really too bad if you do the harddecoding way. Looks like I will stick with my ps2 for watching dvds for a while then.
for a decent review + some photos of the hush machine. you can even buy one from them if they catch your fancey.
There are so many loud transformers out there these days. It seems no one can make a switching transformer that's quiet either. I've got a nokia 8310 and its noisy. I can hear the power supply in the phone hum away at 4khz or what ever its doing. The only time its worse is when I charge it and the transformer in the plug pack and the internal switcher supply start at a bit of argument. I can't sleep when its doing that.
...unless you run the DVD.
I added a Seagate Barracuda 80GB drive and a GeForce 3, and a Panaflo fan (Silent) in preperation for the 1Ghz upgrade I'll be putting in. Incredible machine that was way ahead of it's time.
Since people seem interested in near-silent PCs for their home theater: The Heatsink Case. This sucker is so well designed that the internal temp goes up when you take off the lid. :) Unfortunately the guy has had trouble getting production ramped up enough to satisfy his many customers...
Captech (Swedish) is a swedish company building silent PC's. They have won a bunch of awards and they are really impressive. The noise pressure level is below 17.5 dBA at the operator's position. Oh, an English version is available also.
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
It looks nice for sure - but the specs... are lacking. The reason they can put the VIA proc. in the case w/no fan is simply that it's a "smaller engine" that generates less heat. They haven't done anything "revolutionary" here. The have just put a low power processor in a closed case with enough sinks on the side to disapate internal heat. Apart from surfing, office, music and possibly watching a DVD the proc in the machine isn't good for much. As for our enthusatic posters question "Is this finally the step to having a true PC in every living room? HTPC here we come!" No - it isn't. This will nto be the path for faster processors, they generate too much heat.
The only truely quiet pc, is one that is off. [/zen]
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Cool... Didn't even think of those little guys (and I have two sitting on my desk, haha)
Thx man...
Most of the articles I've seen about these small form factor and/or silent PC's seem to focus on the noise factor for living room use, since the most obvious use of these boxes is as a mp3/DIVX media player.
Well, I think that focus is misguided. I have a ShuttleSV24, the first tiny PC that Shuttle made. It's great, but the power supply fan is really annoyingly loud (recent Shuttle mini-PC's apparently have made great strides in this area).
It doesn't matter though, because the system is asleep 99.99% of the time... it's set to sleep after 5-10 minutes of inactivity. I just tap the keyboard to bring it out of sleep when I want to use it, and it goes to sleep by itself when I'm done. Perfect! So the noise doesn't matter... it's more than drowned out by the mp3/DIVX's I'm playing even at low volumes.
Now, sound output in PC's serving in desktop/workstation roles... now THAT'S a worthy topic!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
We have wireless mice, wireless keyboards, even wireless networking... what about some decent wireless monitors? And I don't mean vnc... running a desktop over a network... or Microsoft's stupid portable monitor with a CPU built into it... but a simple flatscreen lcd monitor.. that has a wireless receiver on it, and a dongle plugs into the graphics card with a wireless transmitter. I don't see how the addition of such a wireless connection could add all that much to the price of a monitor..
Then the PC can be anywhere in the house, noisy as hell, and monitor/keyboard/mouse all in another room.
Same for the Dimension 4550 that I just got. Very silent although not completly. Either that or I can't hear it over the roar of my other machines.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
The new chipset from intel (Canterwood) does this.
Have a look at this
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
I'm not surprised this thread comes up every time, if asshats keep dissing the topic as junk.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Have anybody tried this out on the Hush or something similar? And was is enough to watch TV and encode a stream, etc?
The MythTV FAQ have some info about CPU usage:
A PIII/733Mhz system can encode one video stream using the MPEG-4 codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.
The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost encode two MPEG4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.
A PIII/800Mhz system with 512MB RAM can encode one video stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.
A dual Celeron/450Mhz is able to view a 480x480 MPEG4/3300Kbps file created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.
A P4 2.4Ghz machine can encode two 3300Kbps 480x480 MPEG4 files and simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.
The review mentions the Hush comes shipped with a MPEG-2 decoder, clearly an important paramter in this equation.
I just built a system very similar to these, and it's a blast, but there are some problems. One is that the Morex 55W power supply seems to have some issues, particularly at boot-up, that can result in a hung system. Another is heat. The EPIA boards don't generate a lot, but they do generate some, and other components (e.g. hard disk) do too. VIA does not recommend running the M-9000 fanless; that's precisely why I bought an ME-6000, and the case does have two (very quiet) case fans, and I've still had a couple of lockups that might be attributable to heat. Other users at VIA Arena using the same mobo/case combination have reported very similar problems. Overall, there seems to be a growing feeling among the community of people who've actually bought them that systems built around these components might not be silent and stable at the same time. Pick one. :-( Maybe the next generation will be capable of running silently without these stability problems, and it's fine for a hobby project, but I couldn't really recommend this type of system for regular use.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Actually the original iMacs were more silent than this. Original iMacs with the CRT screen were cooled with a number of heat syncs and by convection; the heat simply rose out of the back of the case. You couldn't hear the hard drive unless you had really good ears and tried to listen, and the only time you could hear anything was when a CD spun up.
So lets see... that would put this whole project, what, 4-5 years behind?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Every Apple II was completely silent, with those wonderful milk-carton-sized switching power supplies.
The coolest voice ever.
Funny now that the recent G4s are SO LOUD that Apple is offering a power-supply trade-in deal for $20 to help the noise. I have a newer model that came *with* the new PS and it's still louder than earlier G4s or any PC I've ever had. Plus it rattles. We just bought twenty dual-1.25GHz G4s and about 1/4 of them rattle like mine.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
http://www.DisklessWorkstations.com/
Jammin
Had no hard disk. No cooling fan.
I remember when a high school buddy said he got a new IBM to replace his old Amiga. He turned it on for me and said, "Hear that? That's power."
http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/hush/
please note that mini-itx sells these things so the review may be biased
Very cool link... Might be worth checking out that motherboard. (thx)
I picked up a 120G Seagate Barracuda IV for about $140. This drive is impressively quiet. I leave it running at night, and I can't hear it at all. I've had it running 24/7 for about eight months now.
The box makes less noise than my iMac, and it works well as a webserver, mailserver, printserver , and fileserver. It doesn't have the brushed aluminum look of the hush PC or the newer MB/CPU, but it's equally quiet and cost about $200 less.
here
The original iMacs had fans (my mum has one), it was a year or so later when the fan less ones came out (my auntie has one).
aedan
I saw these things at the last FOSE expo in DC and was impressed. You stick a card in a PCI slot and then use Cat-5 to connect that card with their silent box which holds a PCI video card, USB, PS2, and line/mic in/out. You can then stick the box something like 100 meters away from where you are actually using it. Probably not for gamers since no AGP video, but good enough for a living room computer terminal and noiseless.
We are thinking of using em for some tight or dirty spots where it is inconvenient to stick a computer box and where it would be inconvenient to have someone hit the reset button (computers that control scientific equipment in a big hall).
Link at http://www.avocent.com/ddd
If you want quiet, and still want a top performing machine check out Muffled Computing's products. http://www.muffledcomputing.com I got a couple of there mufflers and now my system is quiet and overclocked.
an almost-audible noise
Yeah, I hear that in a lot of Pink Floyd songs
my other penis is a vagina
I've been using a Shuttle XPC System for several months now. They're the ones using heat pipes to conduct heat from the CPU to a radiator and fan mounted on the rear of the chassis. The larger fan, with speed control, is much quieter then normal CPU fans. It's quiet enough that I'm now looking at acoustic noise specs when selecting a new hard drive, something I ignored in the past. They're pretty spiffy looking boxes too, though I had to take a Sharpie to the blinding blue power LED on the front so that it wouldn't scare the neighbors.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'm using the same configuration but with a travelstar notebook HDD. It's very quiet but not silent.
I was doing a network boot for a while, but I got sick of fighting for hours to get clear fonts and multiple streams of audio to work under Linux. That ended my latest attempt to use Debian on the desktop. Besides, I can serve X to XFree86 on Cygwin without any trouble.
I'm going to try to find a bendy or very short PCI riser to get a DVD card in the PCI slot of my machine... that will solve my video issues.
Check out everymac.com's iMac specs. The G3 iMacs (AKA "slot-loading") running at 350 MHz and faster had no fans. The only sounds they ever make are from the hard drive and the optical drive. And they started at $800 for a complete system (including monitor). I love my nearly-silent iMac...
We have one sat in our office... it's amazing. Really, really quite. Can't give any opinions on performance, but it's beautiful and nearly silent.
I appreciate that for most people "damn quiet" is good enough. Heck, even for me it is. But "completely silent" is an absolute, and it should be used that way.
I agree. I've seen reviews of heatsink/fan combos that are rated in the 40db(A) range sold as 'silent'.
Well damn, that is nothing like silent.
I've spent a lot of money on various fans, replacement heatsinks, fan controllers (A DigiDoc5 and Zalman ZM-MFC1), and some acoustic dampening material from Quiet PC. This gives me a quiet, powerful machine for regular use, and I can crank up the fans if I want to play some games. It's not quite silent - but it certainly is very, very quiet. I can't hear a thing at the moment, although I have the window open so I can hear the noise of the birds singing outside. I do only live in a village though, so it's not like the background noise is akin to being next door to a motorway..
Back to my point though - if something says 'silent' it should emit no noise at all. I shouldn't be able to hear a thing if I leave the PC on overnight for it to be silent in my mind.
I think the only way to achieve this is through using very large heatsinks and heatpipes to get the heat outside of the box. Then, the naturally cool air in the room (cool in comparison to the high temps inside the case) should be enough to keep everything cool enough.
Getting into quiet/silent computing can be dangerous though - you really notice the difference when you go back to noisy computers! If you use someone elses PC for example, or you're at a library/school and have to use the computer, it sounds incredibly loud and offputting.
And that is exactly why Apple should re-release the G4 cube. If they keep the specs where they were when they canceled it with the possible exception of adding Bluetooth and other more modern options, they would have a pretty good media hub that doesn't cost too much and runs with no fans.
As long as they only use lower end G4s or the PPC 970 clocked pretty low, they should be able to get away with convection. As long as they don't use too many newer parts, the price should be low enough to rival iMac sales.
I would love to get a silent PC... only that I don't want to validate the x86 architecture, but a saner, RISC one.
Is there any option short of buying an used Apple Cube?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Do people really not know how to write anymore? Do people even bother to read over what they wrote, before they present it?
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The MSI NForce2 motherboard also supports USB booting.
...is beyond me. I had one of these (C3 "800"mhz, earlier system without native MPEG2 decoding, which I don't care about anyway because I can burn MPEG2 to SVCD and stick it in my DVD player...).
It was miserable at DivX decoding. Anything beyond a 20-minute pretty-low-bitrate TV cap was unplayable. I couldn't watch a DivX movie on it to save my life. Was it a quiet box? Sure: I had it turned off most of the time.
It is however might be too expensive for normal home user (but Scott McNealy says he uses it at home :) ). For office they are great!
Yoshi's box featured quiet electronics, sound proofing, and testing in Dolby Labs quiet room. His homebrew quiet computer registered 8 to 14dB. Humans start hearing things at 10dB! For reference, a typical PC creates 38dB.
Check out the link fro some practical ideas on how to make your PC quiet.
Sorry to burst your bubble PC fans, but the G4 cube is as quiet as this thing claims to be. Its got fanless operation and a super quiet hard drive. If you want the ultimate silent computer, grab that, a processor upgrade and a few sticks of ram. Oh, and I think we all know it crushes this piece in the looks department as well.
COMPLETELY silent, by definition means NO FANS.
Just because you can't hear it over your power-sucking air conditioning does not mean its silent.
Remember the Apple II? When the floppy drives weren't running (if you were lucky and rich enough to have floppy drives), I don't believe there was a single moving part on the machine. Can't get much quieter than that.
We really have to start thinking more like the Japanese. They are using our PC standard only because it's been forced down their and everyone else's throats. Sony, for example, wants nothing more than to discard horribly inefficient form factors and are constantly challenging how we define a PC.
Anyways, one of the side effects of us Americans always thinking big is that we end up with big ass power supplies and fans. If the Japanese designed the PC, it would be very silent, very manageable, tiny, and just work.
Imagine the sound of a beowulf clus.... ok, nevermind
A IBM microdrive (compactflash) should be quiet enough. Granted, it has moving parts, but who cares? With 2 GB you can do a lot of things.
unfinished: (adj.)
Tiny, well-designed, fanless little box - NatSemi GEODE chipset. PCMCIA, CF, USB, serial, parallel, TV-OUT, sound. I run the pebble distribution of linux (along with a stripped down X) on a 126M CF card, mounted readonly/noatime - it's monitoring the house's energy use. I guess it's about equivalent to a Pentium II, but I'm not playing games on it.
It was under $400, I think.
Ok, so let's spend a few hundred $ extra for a dead-quiet PC while noises made by air conditioning/heating, fridge, creaking house, etc. are frequently much louder.
I don't get it... I have an HP inkjet printer which has sat in the garage for over 2 years, and I'd be suprised if it would perform well on the cartridges in it. It seems totally reasonable to enforce the expiration date, because otherwise you have people bitching about the quality of the prints, or that their cartridges just don't work.
;-)
Printers are hardly the only place that this happens. Take, for example, the O2 sensor in your car. Most cars these days have the computer turn on the "sensor" or "check engine" light after the O2 sensor is around 50k to 60k miles old... Even if it's still working.
This has been going on for well over a decade -- my '87 VW and '86 Nissans both worked like this -- strictly on mileage.
At some point it's just reasonable to say "You need to replace this".
If you aren't going to use a full printer cartridge after 2.5 years, you really need to evaluate wether a printer that uses a perishable ink is a good deal. This happens with all perishable things... If you buy a gross of condoms to save 30%, you'd better make sure that you aren't going to lose half of them due to "spoilage".
I don't think a reasonable person would find this opressive.
"We're going to switch to Lexmark printers because of this. It sounds like they have the same problem, though."
Ahh, it all becomes clear. This article was inspired by unreasonable people.
Sean
"No, the Dell Precision workstations are not "completely silent." They may be stunningly quiet; I don't know, I've never heard one."
Ok, the Dell Precision is NOT completely silent. There you have it folks, you heard it here first, from someone who, well I don't know, has never heard one? Thanks.
I seriously prefer the NISVARA utterly silent computer:
http://www.nisvara.com/
My name is Jonathan Vos Post, I've posted here before (but I'm not on my home computer and can't remember my nick and pswd). I'm not part of that company, but I've seen it and interrogated the CTO. I think the NISVARA ought to be test-driven before anyone buys the newer competitors. Or maybe someone at Slashdot can do a comprarison benchmark?
You took that pretty hard.
Dell employee?
Remember this little thing called the Tualatin? The 800MHz version topped out at 12w, and could run circles around even a 1GHz C3, not to mention the sickly EPIA.
Go and buy a Tualatin Celeron ( they're up in the 1.3 or 1.4 GHz range, be sure you get one with 133MHz bus ) and clock it down to 66MHz bus. You'll stil have a machine capable of decoding DVD in software ( a Celeron 400 could do this without breaking a sweat ), and it can be fanless.
What is the world coming to that some company can pass off a crappy CPU with no OOOE and a half-speed FPU as "efficient"? Christ, if you pumped up the speed of the C3 such that the power it used was the same as a Pentium IV, it would still get it's ass handed to it performancewise.
IT IS JUST A WINCHIP FOLKS. Don't be fooled by the smoke and mirrors.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I can't decide whether I'm just being pedantic, or disagreable, but:
silence is not an absolute. Unless you are in a vacuum. At some level, random vibrations -- hell, even thermal noise -- can be thought of as sound.(*) The point is that you don't need a moving part to generate sound.
Silence can be defined as a relative mesurement, tho. You define a threshold floor, and everything below it is silent. In a typical room -- say my kitchen, when the damn fridge compressor isn't making a racket -- you're looking at 26 dB ish.
There are CPU fans out there that are rated at 27 dB. Add a case, and that fan is silent, relative to the background noise of my kitchen. In summary: a noise is silent relative to the enviroment if it can't be detected (huge hole in reasoning, here: detected by what?) in that environment.
(*) there was also the case of the video card or system bus that made a sound while a window was being dragged. The conclusion was that there either was a loose wire that was deforming under induction, or else the random ions in the air itself were being affected by the bits flying down the bus.
...and solid state powersupply.
All PC power supplies are solid state, as have virtually all consumer-electronics power supplies been for the last 30+ years. Solid-state just means that a piece of equipment doesn't use vacuum tubes.
I think what you mean is "moving-part-free" or more specifically "fanless."
You have to put your head next to the case to hear it purring softly while doing an updatedb (heavy disk activity) for example.
I'm afraid it's not disk access noise us sound-types are bothered by, but rather the din of the whirring disk.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
So before I go and scope one of these out on E-Bay - will the off-the-shelf unit (with the Rage 128) play back most video formats in full screen (TV res - not 1024x768) at a watchable framerate? How's one get video and 5.1 out?
There's more to the epia-systems than the low-power CPU. Most notable is the ITX form factor.
HD noise is always going to be a bit of a problem, my solution that I plan to use on my setup box is a CF Card IDE reader, with a 1GB CF card!
No moving parts no noise, a little low on capacity but more than enough to hold the OS and the important things.. Most of the data will stream from my pc/server!
Only draw back is speed, they aren't the fastest things, apparantly newer readers / cards will do 5MB/sec though which sounds good enough.. A gig of ram could be easily installed to compensate for that.
EPIA and EPIA-M support network booting so you can run them entirely diskless. For a thin client the base fanless EPIA is fine and you might also want to buy a not so cute case (eg the cubid) and not connect the rear fan.
Another silent setup is the lex lite which uses CF or laptop disks and is a good deal smaller than the Hush (but not fanless for 933Mhz)
Nope. I just find it amusing that someone is clearly stating the facts about a product they have never used.
When this becomes available to the anonymous cowards of the world, I'll be able to stop importing those Russian vacuum tubes to keep my Tbred running.........
As the review says, the VIA mini-ITX motherboard crams in lots of built-in devices, like Ethernet, IEEE 1394, audio, MPEG2 decoder, and NTSC/PAL output. If you want to run Linux on it, you might want to check out the device driver issues on the VIA Arena Forum on the subject.
It is nice, however, that Hush Technologies sells Microsoft Windows as a separate line item.
"There's more to the epia-systems than the low-power CPU. Most notable is the ITX form factor"
So?
ITX is amall, but its only a few centimeters to a side smaller than MicroATX. Hardly enough to get upset over, either one could fit into a low-profile hifi style case.
Face it, VIA is simply forced to create a non-existent market for their processors, because they stupidly bought the two worst processors on the market, and even had to shelve the Cyrix line due to performance scaling issues.
Their earliest MicroATX boards were Socket 370, and purposefully didn't have Tualatin support at a time when Tualiatins were still popular, all so they could get some press on the otherwise unimpressive Ezra core C3.
Their biggest sellers today? Pentium 4 MicroATX boards, which cannot possibly accept their crappy C3.
So now, once again, VIA is out to sell us the very same chipset as the older MicroATX DDR266 Socket 370 boards with the same crappy chip, only in a smaller format with no upgradability. Gotta sell those underclocked Winchips...errr, I mean, EPIAs.
Once again, VIA is trying to convince us that we all need to replace our DVD players with Media PCs that can't quite play DVDs, that we all need to replace our Tivos with Media PCs that can't quite do real-time TV encoding.
Convergence is the wave of the future. RIGHT NOW, it doesn't work without giving something up. I'll keep my DVD deck, thank you.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Silent PC? WTF for? The usual computer gamester, mp3 boosted mega bass moron couldn't hear a 5db drop anyway. Anybody that doesn't disable windows or even kde sound events deserves to have a rattle hiss and hum box PC, and wouldn't hear harmonic distortion diffs from a PC sound card anyway. So whats all this about a silent PC. Who cares. If sound and design quaility were a real issue to PC hardware manufactures, then the PC would not be the P iece of C rap that we all love to hate!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
you know nothing you marxist cowtowing bitch. i want to fuck your ass with a hot curlin iron and cook you in boiling oil fuckerhead.