I am building a computer of some left overs after all my experiments. Of course it has to be silent. To make it cheap I built the HD silencer myself. It was inspired by a clever colleague that has done this with his hard drives for a long time.
All you need is some rubber bands and four pins of some kind.
It works very well!
I have finally put a Zalman VGA silencer on my GeForce. To keep it cool enough I have mounted a GlacialTec fan that is running at approx 1800 rpm. Works quite well. Completely silent and 30-40 degrees celcius on the GPU.
I have started a complete rebuild of the HTPC.
The black case is abandoned and all the stuff is moved into a Cooler Master Stacker. A huge case. Lots of space to work in and very easy to cool with big silent fans. I will place it inside a well ventilated cupboard so I don’t have to see it in my living room.
Because of a reference in an article in the norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, I felt I had to do a short update of my page… 🙂 You can read the article (in Norwegian) here: Aftenposten – PVR
I am now running the following software on my PVR:
Operating system: Windows XP PRO SP1
The main PVR-functionallity: Beyond TV 3.4.4
Main menu and navigation: myHTPC
Remote control configuration: Girder
Video and DVD player: ZoomPlayer
Music server: J. River Media Center
Music remote control: NetRemote
Picture Viewer: IrfanView
EPG-Data: XMLTV
The only visible frontends are myHTPC, BeyondTV and the NetRemote GUI on my PDA. All the other software run invisible in the background serving their needs to show pictures, play music and movies.
Here are some new screenshots.
As part of my ongoing experiments I have bought a Hauppauge PVR-250, and installed my old license of SnapStream PVS 3.3(Now called BeyondTV 3.4).
I run this together with myHTPC to get the music, picture and video archive funcionallity that I am used to from ShowShifter.
I have also installed J.River Media Center 9.1 and a remarkable piece of sofware called NetRemote (www.netremote.org).
Through this I can control my music collection from my old HP Jornada 568 PDA over WLAN. Look at this cool remote:
This is the setup of my HTPC. A NAD programmable remote in the front. HTPC in the upper left space of the rack.
Front. As on the back of the case: the very small ventilation holes have been modified with a power drill. Filter from a vacuum cleaner…
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Back. The very small ventilation holes have been modified with a power drill.
The extremely messy inside…. Please note the 300GIG Maxtor HD laying carefully on a bed of cables in the lower left corner. I am not going to move the box, and this way the HD makes less noise compared to if it was fastened in one of the drive bays.
…and, it serves as a self-destruct mechanism if somebody should steal my HTPC… 🙂
The 160GIG Seagate Barracuda is in one of the 5 1/4-bays mounted in a NoVibes drive kit. It is completely silent!
Case: NoiseControl Desktop Black
Mainboard: Epox EP 8RDA3+
CPU: AMD Athlon XP2000+
CPU Cooler: MIST Silent Twin
512 MB Ram PC2700
Screen card: MSI Geforce4 Ti4800SE-VTD
PSU: Enermax 350W Modified by NoiseControl
Case fan: GlacialTech
Hard drives:
Seagate Barracuda7 160 GIG
Mounted With NoiseControl NoVibes
Maxtor 300 GIG 5400RPM
DVD: Pioneer Slot In SCSI DVD-304
Adaptec AIC-7850 PCI SCSI Controller
Floppy drive
Vantex Nexus Temperature Monitor and fan control
RedRat3 IR Blaster
Evation IRMan IR Reciever
Ruwido InfraBoard IR Keyboard and mouse
Software:
ShowShifter
Girder
TVHolic
XMLTV
RedRat3 Command Line Utility
Running video input from a Motorola Di5000 digital cable set top box. Taking RGB out of the Motorola Box, converting it to S-Video in an RGB-to-S-Video converter from JS Technologies and sent into the video input on the MSI Geforce4 screen card.
Running ShowShifter with the following settings:
Recording: PICVIDEO Quality 18 720×576 25 fps
ShowShifting: PICVIDEO Quality 18 704×576 25 fps
Recompression: Windows Media Video 9 – 720 x 576 – 2,5 Mbit/s Deinterlace, Audio 96kbit/s
Music from my CDs: Windows Media Audio Lossless
eirikso 