MythTV and the quest for the silent PC - 1

I have a series 1 TiVo. My wife loves it. So I am no stranger to Personal Video Recorders and the advantages they have over watching live TV. Although the TiVo is the next best thing to a great divorce attorney, it has its limitations. It is not trivial to add extra recording capacity to a TiVo. Nor is it possible to customise or expand its features, I wanted to upload all of my kids DVDs so that they could just watch them via the TiVo. This is not easy and at the risk of 'breaking' the TiVo, I leave it well alone to do what it does best, record live TV.

Media Center PCs sounded like a great idea to me. I never took the time to look into them closely because at the heart of every Media Center there must be a PC, running a resource hungry Windows OS which requires decently specified hardware. Until recently, to me, that equated to the constant noise of a computer running in my living room - totally unacceptable. The TiVo runs an 80mm fan and it is only discernible when you are right over it.

Along came the book Practical MythTV, co-authored by a friend, and my interest in building a PC (albeit Linux) based PVR has been re-ignited. My knowledge of Linux is limited, I can spell it. My experience of MythTV is about the same. But this book is aimed squarely at someone of my limited experience. So, having purchased the book, I feel comfortable following the bouncing ball to make my own MythTV box.

But there is still the problem of the noisy PC. So what's making all* the noise? The fans. Initially, I thought my utopia would be a PC that was liquid cooled, no fans, running into a big reservoir. But this looks complicated, expensive and needs a pump, another source of noise. I want a self-contained system that is reliable. And kid proof.

So the next step in my logic(?) was the totally fanless PC cooled entirely via convection. I had seen examples of fanless power supplies but recently I found the TNN series from Zalman which uses a fanless power supply in conjunction with heat-pipes to channel away the heat generated by the CPU, VGA and Northbridge chips. These pipes run to large heat sinks that form the case of the computer. Now the noisiest part of the computer are the HDDs and the DVD. Unfortunately, an example of one of these is not going to be a welcome sight in my living room. They are large and not conducive to 'sliding in' to my home entertainment system. And, they are not cheap.

There are few real pioneers, and I was not alone in my quest for a quiet PC. I stumbled across a site called Silent PC Review where the author/s were definitely waging a war against noisy components and the false claims of their manufacturers. They were measuring the noise levels of different components in order to perfect their own systems and in so doing, they were making very useful recommendations on choosing the correct hardware, not the best marketed 'silent' hardware. They have a recommended list (seems to have last been updated late 2006) which has influenced my selection of hardware. And it amuses me to hear of people under-clocking their CPU's rather than the over-clocking, which seems to get the most marketing attention.


*HDDs and DVDs are also big contributors