Note the (red) passively cooled video card and (black) sound card.
Thanks to Erin, I now have a “cooler” GeeXboX machine. In exchange for some computer help (video card and external hard drive installation, which, of course, took way longer than it should have), she gave me her old Shuttle PC. I’ve seen these before and they are great small form factor computers, although I don’t know much about the reliability of the components and noisy they are. I believe they use proprietary form factor motherboards, which is an advantage over Mini-ITX, because the later limits your choice on motherboards, processors, and other components. This leads to the questions “how good are Shuttle motherboards?” and “who makes Shuttle motherboards?”.
This little guy came with a chassis, motherboard, Athlon XP 1500 MHz CPU, 512 MB RAM (1 stick, DDR400), an IDE DVD-ROM, and a proprietary small power supply (output in watts?), onboard video, audio, and NIC.
Add to that the fact that my Radeon 9250 AGP and Sound Blaster Live! PCI cards both fit inside! The mobo has exactly one AGP slot and one PCI slot. Although the mobo has onboard sound and video (with a S-Video output and 2 VGA outputs, oddly enough) I’m sure my cards are better without having to find out what’s onboard. Plus, I’ve heard that the CPU isn’t “hit” as much when you use cards instead of onboard, so this should improve performance.
Pretty small chassis eh? Although it’s difficult to see, the “radiator end point” of the CPU heatsink is the metal piece on the left, between the chassis and chassis (LED) fan.
Not that it really matters, but it’s much more cosmetically appealing than the other GeeXboX computer (a standard mid tower). Also, the other motherboard and CPU is my brothers (although we share most of our belongings), so if and when I ever move, this GeeXboX machine can come with me. So, um, that makes it portable too.
Initial tests went great with the exception of a .wmv file I tried to play (a GeForce 8800 demo). It lagged almost to the point of freezing the video. I’m not sure if this is because I need to download better Windows Media decoders as part of a custom .iso from the GeeXboX generator. I’ll try that out this evening. Update here, it didn’t help. 02-23-2007 Update, it’s because that video is 720p =) glitch and I are interested in seeing if more RAM will help. That video is a good “baseline” to see what exactly helps performance. Not that there’s much realistically that I can change besides adding more RAM.
I’m already thinking of what I can do to make it passive, or at least closer to passive. In the BIOS, there’s an “ultra low” fan speed setting that makes it the least noisy, but my goal is silence rather than quietness. This leads to the question “how hot do these Athlon XPs get?” Can they be passively cooled? Would there even be room for one of those massive CPU heatsinks? What I’ll do is attach one fan at a time (CPU, power supply, chassis) and see how much noise they make individually. I think the chassis fan is the loudest of them all. 02-23-2007 Update, I disconnected the (small, 4400 RPM) fan that’s for the nForce 2 chipset. Thanks to glitch for the recommendation that it’s probably not needed, especially since onboard video is disabled and I’m using an AGP card. The temperature increase of the motherboard and CPU was very minimal – only a few degrees C. They’re still under 40 degrees C which should be very cool, although I’m not sure what the ideal temperature of an Athlon XP is. I also swapped out the chassis fan with a spare LED fan (2 colors, pink and purple) of the same size. This fan seems to be quieter and it adds to the whole “cool factor”. It’s not obnoxiously bright – you can only really see it if you look at the PC from the back. Sitting on the couch with all the lights off in the living room, there’s only a faint glow reflected against the wall, so it shouldn’t be distracting to the video viewing experience. I unplugged this fan too and watched the CPU temperature increase to 60 degrees C, and that’s when I plugged it back in. I’m sure it’s still safe but until I do more research I didn’t want to risk anything. It was a lot more quiet though, with only the power supply fans running. Oh, one more thing I noticed last night. The CPU actually does have a passive heatsink! Through a few “pipes” the heat is channeled up towards the back of the PC, where it looks like a radiator. The said chassis fan mounts (easily, I might add) on that radiator to push the heat out of the PC. About the power supply, once I find out how many watts the system (CPU, video card, sound card, DVD-ROM) needs, I may get one of these passive power supplies. That would mean 2 less fans (which the current power supply has) and less heat (so maybe I can get away without the chassis fan).
Now that I have more horsepower, I can potentially run Windows MCE 2005 at 1080i, but there are three issues with going that route:
1. Is there enough HD content to justify it? Most of the video files I have are at low resolutions, so would it even matter that I’m running at 1080i instead of whatever my S-Video output is running?
2. My HDTV is not a widescreen, so when I run video at 1080i, a few inches from the top and bottom are chopped off. This results in a smaller picture, although the quality is higher, of course.
3. Hard drives are noisy, and one would be required for MCE, which is another reason to run GeeXboX, as it boots from a CD and runs in memory.
4. I would need a video card with DVI out, and a DVI cable (AGAIN!). I just returned a video card and DVI cable to Fry’s, for the second time, as part of this project (well, related projects, I should say) after I spend time trying to get GeeXboX to run at 1600×1200.
So, in conclusion, I think I’m going to stick with GeeXboX mainly because of the lack of HD content that I’m interested in, i.e. modern TV shows. HD n0rp is nice but doesn’t warrant the time and effort alone.
Note the small chipset fan (which is now disconnected) and the passive CPU heatsink above it. The mobo is easy to access by removing the DVD-ROM/floppy tray (pictured on top).
