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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
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.
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.
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
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.
Appears to be back. Apparently the content managment system they run there decided to back off for a bit :-)
:) (and rising)
Not suprising with a load avg of 78.29 / 58.63 / 42.64
Not bad really, knowing what a slashdotting is like. lots of mysql threads too.
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
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.
Ya you casually miss the fact that CF is not as durable as a real IDE hard disk. Try re-writing to a sector a couple of thousand times :-)
From what I recall most CF are guaranteed for something like 10^6 re-writes while a hard disk for about 10^9.
This is why CF is primarily used in taskings where you are not likely to have things like temp files etc... [e.g. mp3 player, camera]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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...
For most entertainment applications, the performance hog is MPEG2 decoding, particularly high-defintion (1080i30, 720p60) decoding. While MPEG2 was designed to use an asymetrical codec(i.e. encoding is a lot more computationally expensive than decoding, particularly if you're generating P and/or B frames), decoding still takes a fair amount of horsepower to do in real time.
Fortunately, and by design, MPEG2 decoding lends itself to hardware-assisted implementations. There are chips designed for set top boxes which can decode more than one high definition stream and drive a high definition display, scaling additional streams to fit in a PIP window. These chips can run with passive cooling (i.e. just a heat sink). While I can't elaborate, I work with them -- under Linux -- and often don't even use a heat sink.
Unfortunately, disclosing source code would be very problematic: licensed third-party code (I can neither confirm nor deny what kind of code, but think of all the "protection" schemes that are the bane of fair use and reverse engineering) is intermingled with home-grown stuff.
So, completly silent media PCs with even HD MPEG2 decoding are certainly possible, and exist today. But, the software to drive them is very much locked up, and reverse engineering is a bitch.
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.
because you'll still have to have a server somewhere to host your files or apps.
/home mounted from compact flash
This is what I did:
- E800 with 1GB ram
- boot Linux initrd off CD-R
- initrd loads 256 MB ramdisk from a image on the CD-R
- pivot_root to ramdisk
- CD-R spins down
-
No HD! The only motors running are the power supply and the C3's.
Plan is to set up another machine with more storage and muscle that can be activated by WOL for copying stuff off the compact flash.