On 18 December 2011, at 03:07, Grant Edwards wrote: > ... >>> ? I absolutely dread going to >>> back to MythTv with a big, hot, noisy PC sitting next to my TV? >> >> I bought an eMachines 1401 recently - it's not as perfectly silent as >> the PlayOn (which is fanless), but it's *very* close. It's an AMD >> atom-equivalent, dual-core, mini desktop PC, about 7" on a side and >> maybe 1" thick. Right now, powered on with no load just to judge it >> for this conversation, I can hear it if my ear is a foot away from >> it, but not 2 or 3 feet away, not against the normal background noise >> in my apartment (clock ticking in the kitchen and so on). Right now >> its hard-drive is louder than its fan (which is shifting so little >> air that I can barely feel it, even putting my hand an inch from the >> grille). I think that if you load it up with an emerge then the fan >> will ramp up a bit, but I doubt if you'd notice it when watching a >> movie. > > There are some platforms that are getting pretty decent, but they > still cost 5X as much as a set-top-box box, draw 10X as much power, > and are about 4X larger. They're probably approaching "tolerable", > but compared to something like a Roku or SageTv box, they're still an > embarassment. > > I used a Mac Mini for a while as a MythTv frontend, and it was quiet > enough that it wasn't noticable unless the room was dead silent. It > would have been OK if I had been able to get DVI output working.
You're absolutely not doing the current generation of atom-type mini-PCs justice. My 250GB eMachine cost about the same as the PlayOnHD STB does, maybe 10% more, except the PlayON comes without a hard-drive or wifi. I took great pains to describe how there is *technically* a little fan noise from the eMachine, but I'll believe you can hear the difference in real-life after you've proved it. Neil has told you the same thing about his Revo - those are considered the go-to off-the-shelf HTCP front-end these days. Indeed, they don't have optical drives, and indeed you can spend a lot of money if you want to put an ATX mainboard in a fancy brushed-aluminium Silbverstone case. But if that's what you want, an STB wouldn't be meeting your needs, anyway. On the matter of noise and power-consumption, the difference between set-top-boxes and atom-type mini-PCs is so insignificant that I can't believe anyone splitting hairs over the matter has tried them both. Stroller.
