How Neuros Built Their Nearly Silent HTPC 199
JoeBorn writes "Neuros has a blog posting discussing how they created their latest 'thin' HTPC to be nearly silent. Instead of using a net-top architecture (Atom or the like) they used a full 2.7GHz CPU and put their effort into making that nearly silent. The article talks about their efforts on fan selection, placement, control, and vibration dampening. This route was chosen to 'give more headroom' for CPU-hungry apps (web and otherwise) including Adobe Flash. Their solution costs $279; is this an appropriate trade-off for a device powering your TV?"
Damping, not dampening. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Damping, not dampening. (Score:5, Funny)
My good sir,
I request more information on these devices called "vibrators" and how they may become dampened. A quick search through the literature seems to suggest that the female of the human species uses it a kind of cleaning device. I give you my sincerest thanks in advance.
John C. Cluelessicus
Director of Research into the female sex,
Local Dungeons and Dragons fan club
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Judging by the style of writing I expected the signature to read:
Dildongo Longo
Central sperm bank of Nigeria
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Yeah, you don't get SPAM from them, you get something much less desirable.
Re:Damping, not dampening. (Score:4, Funny)
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Haha, cleaning device, what a douche bag.
It doesn't look like the moderators like you today, better sit on that one for a while.
Identity Theft! (Score:2)
This is clearly identity theft of Mr. Cluelessicus; prepare for black suits to come and get you.
This man is rich, he's known anywhere around the world.
What about power? (Score:5, Insightful)
An HTPC is likely to be left on 24/7 for recording, etc. Being power efficient is important under those circumstances.
what is the power use of a cable card tunner? (Score:2)
what is the power use of a cable card tuner?
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
Power = heat. Their very first point in the article...
1. Low power components: (45W CPU, no optical drive or HDD, nothing extra) less power means less heat generated in the first place, thus less for fans to need to remove.
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I'd love to RTFA, but the site is down.
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It's part of their power-saving plans.
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Shouldn't be 24/7. Modern S3 sleep is very efficient and works well with timers. Using Windows as an HTPC with sleep enabled will let the PC go to sleep, wake up to record, and then sleep again.
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Don't trash it, send it to me. I'm not "mainstream", and I like Neuros products.
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Would love to send it to you. Send the addy
Oh wow ! AC asks for addy but how to send ?
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500, USA ?
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I would love to capture shows on my HTPC but TimeWarner encrypts everything.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about power? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were me I would probably build it around something like this as the dual core Sempron only uses 64w but still gives them decent performance.
The Aspire Revo (or another Ion-based solution) can do 1080p H.264 via VDPAU under Linux or presumably under Windows as well, costs $199 with HDMI, VGA, 6 USB, 1GB RAM and 160GB disk, and GigE. And probably draws under 30W peak for the whole system... I guess, maybe a whiff more while the disk spins up, but since it's 5400 RPM, that's probably not a big drain either. The only fan in the whole system is a tiny CPU fan. Since we probably won't have to deal with any more arduous video codecs for several years, the Revo nettop is probably the best bet on the market right now. The only thing it's lacking is IR and as we all know you can add that later. So if you REALLY care about power, you'll use Atom/Ion or later Atom/Tegra, which brings full system power consumption down below the TDP of your chosen CPU.
Re:What about power? (Score:4, Informative)
Here is why I don't care for the "pre builts" like the Revo: Sure it can handle the media now , but what about in the future?
Are you expecting a new HD video format in the next four to five years, the typical lifespan of a piece of consumer electronics? By the time you need to upgrade the video card you'll want to upgrade everything else too, because you'll be able to get twice as much CPU for half the TDP.
When building an HTPC I MUCH prefer having a PCIe slot so that the box isn't ham-stringed later on down the road.
Hamstrung.
It also gives them plenty of upgrade options, as they could later on go for one of the 95w quads (Which is what I personally have, an AMD 925 and it is VERY quiet) if they need more processing power, or if they get a larger display or need more transcoding punch they can have me slap in a 5xxx series later on.
That costs almost as much as buying the Revo in the first place, between parts and labor! It makes far more sense to just buy another PC and leave you out of it.
The problem I find with pre built solutions is they too often end up like laptops-throw aways.
And what will be done with the CPU and video card pulled OUT of the machine? It won't be worth building anything around them; they'll be throw-aways. The Revo barely uses more material than the CPU and video card you suggest upgrading. Meanwhile, the Revo makes a dandy hand-me down, can probably be resold for at LEAST $75 meaning that it will pay for itself handily, and meanwhile uses far less power, saving money on a daily basis.
I prefer to make sure the machine can keep doing the job for many years, which means it needs the ability to change with the times and grow as their needs grow.
I've been using an Xbox for many years. The Revo is more powerful compared to the mainline PC now than the Xbox was when I started using it as a media player, with XBMC. The Xbox was $70 (IIRC, at the time I bought it used) which made it a better deal, but the Revo is still a better deal than expecting people to pay for CPUs, video cards, and labor, when they could simply swap in the Revo and install some live distribution which includes XBMC or MythTV, as appropriate.
For me it is all about providing value to the customer and keeping the machine for as long as possible (because money don't grow on trees around here) which means expandability and plenty of options.
For you, it is all about milking the customer for hourly charges, to pay your bills. That's okay, but don't pretend it's better for the consumer. It would be better if they could simply buy a Revo preloaded as a media center, and they could sell it or use it as a low-end PC when they're done with it. They could have another media player in the kitchen, for example, connected to a sub-$100 LCD. But really, installing Ubuntu, adding the XBMC PPA, installing xbmc-standalone, and setting the login for a user session to XBMC is not very difficult.
silentpcreview (Score:5, Informative)
silentpcreview.com is where users should go. the linked story isn't any different from the many forum posts describing silent systems people have made
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It's pretty easy to make any non-gaming system completely silent. Just get a giant heatsink, a 120mm Nexus or similar fan for it, and a fan controller, and put it in a nice vibration mitigating case like an Antec Solo. silentpcreview.com is definitely a great source of information for making it all work.
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Even gaming, if you aren't massively overclocking a good tower heatsink is good enough to run with little air flow. The main issue is the video card, however one would not hear the video card typically over sound unless the ambient temperature is high. There are of course aftermarket parts for the video card as well.
Another issue with any system, not only game systems is the sound of the hard drive. Many hard drives, especially older hard drives become loud over time. It doesn't matter how much you dampen t
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Even gaming, if you aren't massively overclocking a good tower heatsink is good enough to run with little air flow. The main issue is the video card, however one would not hear the video card typically over sound unless the ambient temperature is high.
The Arctic Cooling Accellero S1 is an excellent passive cooler for many graphics cards. A few years ago at least, when I got mine for my ATI HD3850.
For most games, you really don't need the latest power guzzling high-end graphics card. I'm a gamer and I'm quite happy with this setup (although I stay away from high-powered FPS games).
Another issue with any system, not only game systems is the sound of the hard drive. Many hard drives, especially older hard drives become loud over time. It doesn't matter how much you dampen the vibration. The best results depend on getting the right model (some Samsung and WD are popular right now if I'm up to date)
They were when I got my machine, at least. And there's the WD Green Power line that's quieter and uses less power (funny how those two often go together) than most harddrives. F
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Once you put a fan in it, it's not silent. Even underclocked 120 mm fans with good bearings make some noise.
When I built my htpc 9 years ago, finding a suitable fanless power supply and silent drives were the major hurdles. The second is easily solved without searching nowadays; the first still requires a bit of digging.
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Technically yes, it's not silent, however most are aiming for quiet not so much perfect silence (good fans running in 800rpm are relatively quiet). It's possible to do silent, however you run up the price sometimes in aftermarket parts doing that. Once you get fanless then you notice the sound of the hard drive, so you put in an SSD instead, etc.
The ghetto method to do perfect silence is to put the computer in another room, for example in the closet of an adjoining room then run an hdmi cable (to the receiv
Re:silentpcreview (Score:4, Informative)
There's silence and then there's silence. I've built a half-dozen system for my little project recording-studio and none of them register over 20dB. With a little baffling, they don't register at all anywhere near the microphones or audio monitors.
And they're really nothing fancy, built mainly in rack-mount server boxes with some additional soft stuff inside. I've got a new i7 system that has a lot of horsepower and it's still right around 20-25dB. SSDs were key because the loudest thing were the rumbling hard drives. Still pretty expensive, though.
On the other hand, my wife does fluid dynamics modeling (other side of the house) on an HP workstation that sounds like a '67 Harley Shovelhead in comparison. I'm going to have to get her a pair of those ear protectors the guys who work on airport runways use so she doesn't go deaf.
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This is true but the barely there air movement noise my Noctua 120mm's make when running for example is so slight that the high pitched squeel of a powered up electronic device is noisier.
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If you have a good speaker system, and a taste for Black Metal or similar, you should be able to use unmodified 1U servers, 15K RPM fans and all, as "comparatively silent" set-top hardware.
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The only 1U server that wasn't horribly loud that I've ever seen was a Cobalt, and they had gimpy processors. Not long ago I sold an IBM eServer 325 and it was probably louder at full fan (which it pulled on every cold boot for a couple seconds) than my former Cisco Catalyst 5000, 8U and full of fans. This is typical, because servers usually have full-power componentry, and poor airflow, meaning they have high-speed fans.
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Going completely fanless is often overkill. A decent fan at minimum power will hardly make any noise.
If my computers much quieter than my TV, my Stereo system, and all my consoles, I really don't see the point in crapping out over a power supply.
DVD drives are the biggest problem, which is why I just always copy the DVD to a hard drive before playing it.
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Some HTPC cases are compact. With all the components in a limited space the temperature of the components can rise more than systems built into larger cases. The ambient temperature in your environment may also be lower than what other people are using their system in.
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
"This is one slashvertisement I'd like to read", I thought to myself, but I was disappointed, because I expected lots of pictures and details, which I didn't get.
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Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Fatal error: out of dynamic memory in yy_create_buffer() in Unknown on line 0
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 10747904) (tried to allocate 77824 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/modules/webform/webform.module on line 1029
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Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 11010048) (tried to allocate 77824 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/modules/pathauto/pathauto.module on line 182
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 4718592) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/modules/img_assist/img_assist.module on line 730
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 10747904) (tried to allocate 2 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/modules/webform/webform.module on line 688
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Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 11272192) (tried to allocate 59 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/includes/menu.inc on line 211
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 4456448) (tried to allocate 5 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/modules/image/contrib/image_attach/image_attach.module on line 132
I gave up hitting refresh after so many memory errors.
Try the Coral Cache until their server comes back to life:
http://open.neurostechnology.com.nyud.net/content/Silent_HTPC [nyud.net]
Re:Oops (Score:4, Funny)
Hah, the coral cache has cached the error!
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Posting anon:
A Silent HTPC
Tue, 04/06/2010 - 22:13 -- Joe
We've just released a practically silent Neuros LINK v1.2 [neurostechnology.com] (codenamed "Phantom") and figured some of you would be interested in the process.
Of course, there are easier ways to create a silent computer, the easiest being a net-top solution, with an Atom processor or the like. We've decided not to go that route with the LINK simply because we didn't want to make the sacrifice on CPU horsepower. Sadly, as we all know, there are still plenty of web apps
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3. vibration dampening neoprene mounts dampen any vibration before it causes noise. Vibrating sheet metal is a great source of very annoying noise and strategically placed vibration dampeners are very important.
If your case has issues with vibrating sheet metal, then it's not a very good case. Good HTPC cases are made of aluminum so that each surface can be much thicker while still keeping the weight down.
4. Intelligent Fan control: We implemented the PWM (pulse width modulation) scheme to control fan speed throughout the system so that the fans would spin down (in a coordinated way) under normal use and only spin up when needed under heavy load (or in a closed cabinet where airflow is limited).
This is purely my opinion, but I have found that disabling any system that changes the fan speed on the fly leads to a less annoying HTPC. Although it might be slightly noisier all the time, the ramp up and spin down can often be more noticable. It's also possible to hit a boundary temperature where the fan sp
The Full Article (Score:5, Informative)
We've just released a practically silent Neuros LINK v1.2 [neurostechnology.com] (codenamed "Phantom") and figured some of you would be interested in the process.
Of course, there are easier ways to create a silent computer, the easiest being a net-top solution, with an Atom processor or the like. We've decided not to go that route with the LINK simply because we didn't want to make the sacrifice on CPU horsepower. Sadly, as we all know, there are still plenty of web apps and inefficient video streams that require CPU cycles. Instead, we architected a full power PC to be silent (or silent to an excellent approximation anyway) Click more to see what it took, or if you just want to buy, go here: [neurostechnology.com] we're good with that too.
1. Low power components: (45W CPU, no optical drive or HDD, nothing extra) less power means less heat generated in the first place, thus less for fans to need to remove. Although its a 2.7GHz CPU, the Sempron 140 still only consumes 45W, so we felt that was a nice tradeoff between performance and a manageable amount of heat.
2. Better Fans: We employed large, expensive, 120mm fluid dynamic bearing fans that are about as quiet as computer fans get. In fact they are pretty much silent save for the air they move.
3. vibration dampening neoprene mounts dampen any vibration before it causes noise. Vibrating sheet metal is a great source of very annoying noise and strategically placed vibration dampeners are very important.
4. Intelligent Fan control: We implemented the PWM (pulse width modulation) scheme to control fan speed throughout the system so that the fans would spin down (in a coordinated way) under normal use and only spin up when needed under heavy load (or in a closed cabinet where airflow is limited).
5. Elimination of most moving parts in addition to reducing power (and heat), the elimination of optical drives and harddrives means the elimination of the noise they generate. The flash drive used on the LINK is obviously silent (certainly to the unaided ear anyway)
6. Intelligent fluid dynamics of the entire system. One of the obvious benefits of controlling the whole system is that we have access to architect all the assembled parts when together, not just individual pieces. Thus we were able to replace the 70mm CPU fan with a larger, quieter 120mm fan that generates enough excess airflow that it can be used, in conjunction with a well placed power supply fan, to draw air to cool the north and south bridge chipsets of the motherboard well. If you open the case of the LINK, you'll find the components form a carefully developed airflow channel that covers the CPU, GPU, memory and power supply. Although the power supply is capable of running passively without a fan at all (it only operates at maximum ~40% of capacity in the LINK) we placed another fluid dynamic bearing fan to draw air into the power supply because it aided in creating the airflow channel needed. It also gives more headroom in case you do want to expand the LINK.
Although not obvious at first glance, there are a host of important details that were necessary to reduce noise levels to the level you'll find in the LINK. As one example, open the LINK case and you may notice there are standoffs that separate the main fan from the case by 10.5mm This distance was arrived at through careful research and testing. Place the fan too close to the case vents and turbulence is created that generates audible noise, too close to the heat sink or other components and you disrupt the airflow channel and not only generate noise, but also adversely affect the cooling.
So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means nothing to you, put a different way, sitting on the couch 6 feet away, its probably less
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
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> So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically
That may sound low, but as geeks should now, dB is a unit of acoustic power, which is only a very rough indication how loud it is perceived.
If you are so much into technically details, why don't you give the sound level in Sone? That would make a lot more sense - and the number would be impressively low, I assume.
silent HTPC and silent site (Score:5, Funny)
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Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1048576) (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in
- it's so silent, nobody can hear it scream.
Atom (Score:5, Interesting)
I know I've posted this on every single discussion involving the Atom ... but I have to say it again:
The Atom processor is amazingly powerful. The Atom 330/510 are dual core, 2 threads per core processors @ 1.6ghz. They are fucking amazing. And if your apps are well developed, and they can take advantage of multicore machines, it's a very powerful platform. I've seen some netbooks (based on Atom 270, single core, 2 threads) with windows that just crawl at doing just about anything but basic web browsing. But that's because windows sucks, not because Atom sucks. Try getting an Intel mini-atx Atom 510 based mobo and put 4 gb of ram in there. Using the embedded GMA intel card, I can run compiz at full speed @ 1990x1200 with all visual effects turned on, plus chrome with 30 open tabs, while gcc is compiling something on the background and still have a great performance. One of the appliances I develop (security) is based on an Atom 330, and we can run 16 ffmpegs encoding MPEG4 video @ 720x576 just fine. And you can run the 510 essentially fan-less by just adding a slightly better heatsink. It uses very little power, it runs very well, and completely quiet. For a completely silent machine, all you need to do is get one of this mobos in their 12v version, add an external laptop power brick, remove the fan and add a better heatsink. Or just use the 270 version (single core, 2 threads) that is completely fanless out of the box.
Noone needs a fucking 2.8Ghz dual core processor just to run flash video, all you need is a better OS and a little optimization.
BTW: This Intel mobos I'm mentioning are mini-atx and retail for ~$80, processor and everything. That is, mobo+cpu for 80 bucks. Nothing beats the Atom.
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I am playing back 8 720x576 channels at qmin 1 qmax 1 on that machine. How about that?
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As others will say - offload the video. My Atom n270 with 1gb ram can comfortably play 1080p video. CPU load average might hit 20%. Video is handled by Nvidia Ion.
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If you look at Neuros' previous product in the same vein, it was a totally silent, totally fanless, passive-cooled-in-a-plastic-box type of affair, based on some embedded ARM media SoiC. Why did they switch to an x86 board whose processor sucks down more power than their entire previous design?
Because, being a fairly small outfit, they can't control the m
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My understanding is that this product has been in development a while, and that GPU accelerated flash has been, at best, a roadmap item for much of its history.
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Re:Atom (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I used the right word, I am encoding.
I use a card with 8 SAA7134 chips that deliver 25 FPS (PAL) @ 720x576. That's 8 V4L devices delivering MJPEG video. I do motion detection on all 8 channels, and re-encode that as both Theora AND FLV at the same time. So I have 16 motherfucking ffmpegs doing encoding. The motion detecting daemon delivers raw video to all 16 ffmpegs, 8 output Theora and 8 output FLV. So, yes, I am encoding 16 videos at a time.
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Awesome, just fucking awesome... I never realized the Atom had *this much* power
Atom is derived from Pentium M, which had by far the best TDP of its day; the chip has been further optimized for power consumption and process-shrunk substantially. At the same time, they have SSE3, and enough core to actually do it, so it's screaming fast on workloads which can take advantage of same.
(and with that I mean processing, the rated power-use is like 8 watts)
7 for the latest and greatest. AMD Geode pulls about 7W for a slow x86 chip :)
They should be at least 10 times more efficient as most desktop processors.
That's probably a fair guess. If the atom has enough power for what you're doing (the multimedia encoding thing is an extreme exam
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...like what the other guy said about ethernet.
What you put in front of the TV is not necessarily the thing you are going to transcode or commflag with.
The whole beauty of not using a Tivo is that you can separate functions like this. The monster Quad Core with 8TB doesn't need to be shoehorned into a silent HTPC case.
It can noisily go about it's business in an entirely different room.
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And each core is about four times slower than my 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo. No thanks!
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Noone needs a fucking 2.8Ghz dual core processor just to run flash video, all you need is a better OS and a little optimization.
Hehe... I need a 3.5ghz quad-core. But I actually encode H.264 in realtime from time to time.
Those Atom 330's and D510's really are affordable, and quite powerful. They come close to Pentium D's in performance, but without the 100+ watts power consumption.
A lightweight OS with efficient multiple-core usage (*cough* Linux) can make good use of them. They're a tad weak in Vista/Win7, but still better than anything single-core.
P.S. Did you mean 1920x1200?
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Actually, it's 1980x1200.
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Many displays have unusual resolutions, and a weird aspect ratio (i.e not 4:3 or 16:9). The display I was talking about is an LG Flatron W2243S. It's native resolution is 1980x1200, that is an aspect ratio of 1.65 instead of 1.77777 (regular widescreen or 16:9).
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Oh, and, also, there is only one defintion for HD: 1080p/i vertical resolution. Many people called DVD "HD" too, but that's not correct (DVD is limited to whatever resolution that norm uses, for example, 720x576 for PAL). There's a difference between saying something has a "high definition/very high definition/super-uber-amazing definition" (all coloquial terms) and the actual definition of HD which is 1080p/i.
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Wikipedia says 720p+ is HD. Microsoft and Sony seem to say the same for their consoles.
Since wikipedia lists resolutions up into the thousands, I'm going to say 720p+ is the correct definition of HD - not merely 1080p/i
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The only Flatron W2243S I could is the W2243S-PF which is a 22" wide screen with the standard 1920x1080 (ie 1080p) res. I couldn't find any display with a native 1980x1200, any references to that res I could find were typos. 1920x1200 is the standard resolution of most current 24" displays, which use the standard wide aspect ratio of 16:10. 4:3 is becoming rare these days and it's essentially goen from the low-end market, where 16:9 models are increasingly popular; but I think 16:10 is currently the most wi
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Fan = not silent. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Err... no thanks. I'd take an internal PSU with a bit of moving air before one of those humming laptop power bricks.
A good PSU is more power efficient, too. My NAS uses 2006 hardware(Via C7-M), but barely consumes 40w even with all those HDDs.
I am not impressed. (Score:2, Interesting)
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I, a 22 year old nerd, have been building fanless, high performance machines that are silent since the 90's. My first PC I built when I was 12 was silent.
Ok, but you left out one important detail. They are silent, but did they actually ever work?
Otherwise, my parents have an Apple II that has been silent since the 80's. Now beat that!
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There are power supplies designed to be fanless. In addition, you can use laptop HDs and CPUs; for the latter you generally need a specialized motherboard (usually Mini-ITX), but it's a great way to save power and hence cooling requirements.
"Laptop" CPUs are pretty much the same as their "desktop" counterparts, except they are the best picks of the lot to allow lower voltages, and you can usually undervolt them further.
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My tabulating machine doesn't have any fans. The relays and card punch solenoids make an awful racket though.
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I, a 22 year old nerd, have been building fanless, high performance machines that are silent since the 90's. My first PC I built when I was 12 was silent.
You're 22 now, you built your first PC at 12; it's 2010, that makes your first build 1999 at the very earliest. I'm not sure if that *really* qualifies for "since the 90s".
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I second your statement. There is nothing nerdy/impressive about trum4n (982031)'s math skills.
Comparison to other systems? (Score:2)
I am already using a "Mac mini" for my HTPC solution and it is pretty much silent. While I don't claim this to be the yard stick to measure by, I would be interested in seeing how quiet this computer is in comparison and how other HTPC oriented solutions compare, especially ones with non-netbook processors. I did look at buying the Shuttle X27D a while back, but it ended up being about the same price as the mini for the same, or reduced, features. I also looked at putting my own together with a mini-itx mot
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I agree. My mac mini is pretty much silent. Unfortunately the cheap external hard drives that i have attached to it are not.
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Easy to fix with a lower cost ssd and network storage solution.
Another issue is ram, 4gb seems a nice number.
Wasted money on fluid bearing fans (Score:2)
I find fans with ball or "fluid" bearings to be noisier than sleeve/bushing bearings with more noticeable tonals than broadband noise. They are only preferred because they outlive the cheap sleeve type fans. If you compare fans across a given size, you'll find that the noise level is proportional to the cfm/rpm irregardless of the brand.
So the important thing for a quiet fan is go big and go slow. Or for silent, go fanless. Use a heat pipe to channel the heat out to a heatsink on the back of the chassis
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I don't get it. (Score:2)
Why does it have to be silent? Sure quiet is nice but you're watching LOTR with the 7.1 Surround sound and you're worried about 30dB coming from your HTPC.
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How close are you sitting to the HTPC.
I'm nearing 40, my hearing is not as fine tuned as it used to be.
Further cost of Flash (Score:2)
The video you see in Flash is ISO H.264.
An AppleTV has only a 1GHz Pentium M and it does full-screen HD playback of ISO H.264 in its NVIDIA GPU. No fan is needed. No special engineering. Same as a DVD player.
The GPU on Atom systems, NVIDIA Ion, has hardware H.264 decoding that can play HD without much help from the CPU at all.
So in this device you're putting a much bigger CPU and an arrangement of fans in your living room to enable Adobe to continue to lock up ISO video behind their proprietary software vid
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Hepa (Score:2)
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Filters, every fan should have one. I wish there were standard 120mm mounted filters. Think about all the dust that DOES end up in your case and you'll realize it's a great way to filter the air. Also dampening is awesome.... get with it case manufacturers.
They exist, see here [lmgtfy.com].
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This is a problem which could be solved through the use of something called a "wire". There's no reason why your wireless receiver needs to be buried inside your computer.
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Yeah. If you have to operate an HTPC with a mouse or keyboard, it ain't an HTPC. It's just a PC hooked to a TV.
You can have those things hooked up, but the thing you should be reaching for 95% of the time with an HTPC is the remote control.
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If you do so, you will presumably need to choose the correct components to minimize noise. Luckily, for a fairly undemanding application(in IOPS terms) your bog-standard cheap 5400RPM drive will fit the bill nicely.
Or, because this is the sort of thing that geeks are likel
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Perhaps they are using something radical called a "network interface". I have heard that people at MIT are doing some radical stuff with what they call "ethernet" which would allow you to access files on one computer from another one which could be hundreds of metres away.
Another approach involves writing "recorded TV, downloaded content, etc" onto flash memory itself. You don't need spinning discs for storage.
flash storage is bad for video a ram disk is to gi (Score:2)
flash storage is bad for video a ram disk is to give a box a small live tv buffer / vod buffer with out a HDD but a SDD is to high cost / may burn out.
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I doubt a good SDD will burn out anytime soon:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html [storagesearch.com]
I'll sum it up for you, a 64GB drive constantly being written to at 80MB/s will burn out in approximately 51 years.
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The article is assuming you rewrite the whole drive but there is a faster way to destroy a SSD. What I have seen is that a 64GB SSD drive usually has 64GB available to the user, not 64GiB (this is how much it actually has flash memory). The difference in sizes is used for write leveling and reallocating faulty cells. So the fastest way to destroy this kind of flash is first write 64GB to it and then keep rewriting the same small area continously. The write leveling cannot use already allocated 64GB area, so
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I've got an HTPC operating off a 8gig USB flash drive. It actually downloads stuff to itself, and then moves it across the network.
I keep the NAS it uses in another room.(I wish I could actually get hellanzb working on the NAS instead.)
It does have a DVD drive, but I can't imagine how that would bother anyone unless they were actually watching a DVD, and there's not actually any way to play DVDs without, duh, spinning them.
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Home Theater PC. Always thought it was a stupid name myself. Mostly because "home theater" is an oxymoron in general. TVputer is what I usually call mine.