[plug] Motherboard/cpu suggestions

Brad Campbell brad at wasp.net.au
Thu Mar 18 13:34:46 WST 2004


Adam Ashley wrote:
> actually you dont need anywhere near that grunt, not to mention your
> going to have a hard time cooling it adequately yet still quiet enough
> not to interfer with the sound. I use a mini-itx M10000 board as my
> htpc. does dvd and divx just fine, all it has plugged in is the dvd
> drive, boots over the network from my file server.
> 

Interesting point. I have a Cooler Master Aero-7 (The blower fan unit) that I have removed the 
supplied fan from and screwed a thermo-controlled 80mm case fan to (It has a really nice solid 
copper heatsink). You can hardly hear the cpu cooler at all. With the thermo-controlled PSU and the 
slow fan on the cpu cooler, if I unplug all the hard disks and hard drive bay coolers then the 
machine is barely audible, but with 2 Supermicro 5 bay hotswap racks each with a 50cfm 92mm fan in 
it it howls like a banshee so it must be moved.

I was thinking along the lines of the mini-itx but they are *really* hard to find up here and I'm 
not really impressed with the support for the cle266 yet. I had a couple of epia-800's back at home 
and they are great boards, just a bit underpowered for what I need.

I'm thinking of going for another Athlon with a quiet psu, no hard disk and a thermo cpu cooler 
along the lines of what I have now. With a gigabit crossover to the server it should be quick enough 
to do what I need to do (Play dvd's and movies from the server and shunt files to and from external 
boxes over firewire and usb2)

I don't know about the hardware accelerated graphics output on the VIA board, but one of my 
requirements was to be able to run my LCD and my Projector at the same time, and for a decent output 
on the projector I really need to run the tvtime deinterlacer and that is really cpu hungry. Perhaps 
the hardware accelerated mpeg decoder on the cle266 does decent de-interlacing, I'm not sure.
I have already made a number of expensive errors while building this machine due to insufficient 
research on my part, I'd like to limit my trial-and-error expenditure from here on in :p)

Regards,
Brad



More information about the plug mailing list