When it comes to the base motherboard and CPU for building a basic system, there really are not a lot of silent options. Quiet? Sure. Silent? Much harder to do or find.
After a lot of research, I settled on building a system around the Via ME6000 system board. This is a small Mini-ITX Motherboard combined with a paltry C3 600Mhz of processor. The C3 as I understand it is a relative of the old Cyrix Pentium III compatable CPUs. There are three aspects of this board that make it perfect for this project.
- The CPU generates so little heat that it does not need a CPU fan
- RCA style TV output connection
- MPEG2 Decoder chip on-board to handle full screen video playback
A little 600Mhz CPU has no real hope of running smooth standard definition video, although the lack of a CPU fan certainly fits the silent requirement.
The saving grace is that with XvMC enabled, the MPEG decoding chip takes over almost all the work of processing MPEG2 video for playback, leaving the CPU sitting around almost idle.
The ME6000 is priced very reasonably at around $150. I selected 256MB of RAM for the system...if I were doing this again I'd go with 512MB, but so far 256MB has not been a limiting factor.
With the motherboard and CPU selected, I now had a silent but capable foundation to start designing around.
Power supply and case were the next up on my list of things to tackle. Since the power requirements of the ME6000 system are so low, external DC "Power Brick" type power supplies are an option.
As you may know from your devices around the house that have "wall wort" or "brick" style DC power supplies, they are silent as long as you don't press your ear up against them.
Many of the options are basically build your own, where you buy the case, power supply, and sometimes even the motherboard to power brick connection wire separately.
I eventually lucked out by settling on a Morex Cubid 2677 case that includes a DC brick style power supply. This attractive Mini-ITX case is about the size and shape of the set-top boxes my local cable company provides. It looks more like a cable box or cheap DVD player than a computer.
Now two out of the three major sources of noise in a PC have been addressed; the CPU fan and the power supply fan.
Build a Silent MythTV Frontend
Hardware:
- Requirements
- Base System
- Disk
- Remote Control Options
Software:
