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Building a Quiet Media Room PC
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech just come out with a new Media Center PC build-it project. This one takes advantage of Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Rollup 2 and uses a fanless graphics card, four tuners--two standard TV and two HDTV, the Creative Labs DTS-610, which lets you bypass some DRM, and a good-looking SilverStone LaScala chassis that fits in your media rack. The new system is way more versatile, and maybe more importantly, a lot quieter than any previous media PC DIY boxes. One drawback: We're still waiting for the cable and satellite companies to get it together on CableCard, so the system has to do without."
$2,315? Sounds a little steep for me. I'd rather buy a 42-inch plasma TV.
Apple is supposed to roll out their Media Center Macs with everything you need, sans fifty-button remote. As an added bonus they'll look nice.
Pick up a fanless mini-itx board, get yourself one of the snap-on DC/DC converter kits from mini-box.com, or similar, put it in a nice box and away you go. I've made 3 of these so far and they work great, and are acceptably silent with quiet drive.
If you want to go to the next level, boot the mini ITX board off compactflash and NFS mount your media off a server in the basement. This is what I did to get around some heat issues. Works like a CHARM.
Fast enough for a great MythTV box, not sure why this is such a revelation.
..don't panic
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a geek forum too. If you think otherwise, you haven't been paying attention....
I went through this same process when putting together a system for my MythTV box.
MythTV allows for your frontent (display system) to be seperate from your backend (receiver cards, storage, transcoding - commercial removal, etc.). So you can make a big, cheap, powerful, loud system to do all the heavy lifting, and make a scaled down front-end as quiet as possible.
But, if you need to put them all in one box, you should consider power/heat in all components. Here are the main points in mine:
- Athlon64 CPU. Lower power requirements in general, and Cool 'n Quiet feature to slow down the processor, make it much better than Intels.
- Large Heat Sink + Fan. A large copper Zalman HSF runs very quiet. In my system, with cool 'n quiet enabled, the fan actually turns off most of the time it's not doing heavy lifting.
- Good case, designed for quiet operation. The Antec Sonata has a fairly quiet power supply (the newer unit has the single large fan on the underside of the PSU), and a large case fan. The large fans run slower/quieter and still push a lot of air.
- Quiet HDD. I prefer Seagate Barracuda. This used to be hard to find, but now it seems most HDD manufacturers are making quiet drives with fluid bearings. The Antec case has rubber connectors where the HDD attaches to cut down on vibration noise. If you can use network file storage, using a 2.5" drive will cut down even more on power/noise/heat/vibration and size issues. (Taking it even further, some people use a flash based system, or network boot, to eliminate spinning disks completely).
- Fanless Video Card. The Nvidia FX5200 can be found fanless from many places. It supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux (XvMC) and works well with MythTV.
Throw a Hauppage PVR-500 Dual SD tuner card in there, with a couple HD3000 cards from http://www.pchdtv.com/ and you've got a great MythTV PVR.
I second the cable-extender thing... though it's actually cheaper to go with Cat5 for extending most things. You might need shielded cable for VGA/DVI/USB (stuff with a bitrate >100MHz), but PS/2 and audio and IR can definitely go a long long way over the cheaper Cat5.