On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 01:01:56 +0000 (UTC)
Jim H wrote:

you can buy truely silent PCs nowadays and it'll use less electricity
that way too.

Truly silent? Most 'quiet' home computers are still pretty loud! After a
lot of work I've got my main pc quiet enough now, quite a bit quieter than
most spinning CDPs but far from silent. It's still audible at night from a
meter away.

I said 'can buy', not 'most'

and that doesnt mean expensive.

look at the Via M series - my webserver here (see sig) is on a Via M6000.

it is a *SILENT* machine. it has:

256MB RAM
4GB HDD
64MB USB flash disk.

the harddisk is spun down most of the time. it has *ZERO* other moving parts except for a DVD drive (for when I get round to making it play DVDs as it lives under the telly). Its PSU is an external 'brick' with no fans, feeding a voltage converter inside the machine on a small PCB, which feeds an ATX connector for the mobo.

It runs linux, so once its cached any files it needs, they sit in RAM and the HDD can go to sleep. the USB disk is for any data that needs to be written, as the HDD is mounted read-only (except when updating the websites it hosts).

It also runs a Quake3 server.

I'd challenge you to beat its noise output with ANYTHING else :-)

My main PC is a shuttle XPC which *never* steps its fan above the slowest seting and is about as close to inaudible as a PC with a fan and HDD can be (seagate barracuda harddisk is actually quieter than the very quiet fan, and blindingly fast).

Te Via M6000 is capable of playing DVDs with its video systems onboard DCT acceleration. it does this pretty well. mp3s are easy, it can decode about 10 simultaneously no problem ;-)

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