[mythtv-users] Power Heat Noise

[William Powers]

Here are some suggestions, based on my experience:

The Athlon XP 1800+ Thoroughbred is, more or less, the coolest running 
CPU in the entire AMD line and it has more than enough power to run a 
spiffy Myth box.

A very quiet CPU fan for the Athlon is the CoolerMaster DP5-7JD1B-0L.

A very quiet power supply is the Fortron FSP300-60PN.

All of the above are available from newegg.com

If you need a case fan or two, I recommend the Directron Silencer from 
www.directron.com.  The little rubber anti-vibration fan fasteners that 
they sell also work well.

Seagate hard drives are famous for running quietly.  Go ahead and set 
the acoustic management to the quietest settings - seek time shouldn't 
be a critical factor on a Myth box.

Just my 2 cents - but I did manage to get my Mythbox down from "Force 3 
Hurricane" to just barely audible from a foot away; if I hadn't, the 
rest of the family was going to evict it from the living room.

Bill

Colin Andrews wrote:

> I've been following the mythTV project for over a year now and 
> I'm finally taking the leap to put together a mythbox.
> 
> I want my system to be small & quiet & look nice in my living 
> room. Cost is also an issue. I'm not looking to build a high end 
> gaming system, just something with enough power to use for 
> recording & watching tv. I've been using the recommendations on 
> this page at KnoppMyth project: http://mysettopbox.tv/basics.
> html, and I'm pretty set on a microATX form factor.
> 
> My first question(s) is about heat and therefore noise. I'm 
> liking the nforce based motherboards with integrated graphics & 
> tv-out. I know that AMD cpus tend to run hot though. I'm also 
> wondering if the NVIDIA integrated graphics is also an added heat 
> source (relative to other integrated graphics chipsets). A 
> celeron based system might run cooler and I'm willing to go that 
> way if need be. I haven't been able to find any nice microATX 
> intel motherboards with tv-out though. Has anyone out there had 
> success making a reasonably quiet nforce based mythbox? Failing 
> that, can anyone recommend an intel (or via, sis) based microATX 
> motherboard for making a reasonably quiet box?
> 
> Second question is about power. I'm liking this case:
> http://www.directron.com/cstr100.html
> Looks nice (imo), good value, and it's aluminum so that should 
> help with heat some. The big problem is that it only comes with a 
> 180w PSU. I'm wondering if I can run even a minimal system with 
> that power output. They don't list the detailed specs on the 
> raitings for the different rails. In general I'm finding it hard 
> to estimate the power requirements of a system ahead of time. 
> This is mainly because I'm not finding published specs on power 
> requirements for most of the components.
> 
> Here's the current sketch of my system components:
>    * MicroATX nforce MB (ASUS A7N266-VM or A7N8X-VM)
>    * 512mb DDR ram (single dimm)
>    * 80gb IDE drive
>    * Haupauge 401
>    * Matrix Orbital LCD (maybe)
>    * IDE DVD-Rom drive (I could skip this, if need be)
> 
> Any bets on whether this would run on 180w? I'm betting it won't. 
> I already have a question to Directron sales to see if they'll 
> upgrade this power supply or sell me the case without one.
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