[mythtvnz] Advice/suggestions for quiet HD setup

[Kerry Baker]

I agree with you there.  While the holy grail of quiet systems is no fans,
from what I have read about this mobo it still needs some sort of cooling.
I'm thinking along the lines of a large, slow case fan inside a M350 case
with lots of vent holes.  I think I can still make it pretty much silent.

It looks like the main issue with the mobo is that its picky with RAM.

Kerry

>
> I think it's worth noting that passive cooling of certain chips may get
> you
> variable mileage depending on how you do it and it's hard to predict
> performance before trying it. For example I have a fanless system with an
> NVidia 9400 chipset. This came with its own moderate heatsink but under
> the
> stress of playing HD video it got way too hot and it would go into partial
> thermal shutdown (video will stop playing smoothly once this happens).
> Meanwhile the CPU was running cold because it handed off just about all
> the
> work to the 9400 (even 1080p MPEG4 uses like 5% CPU). I fixed it my simply
> running a heatpipe to the case's main heatsink and now it runs at like 40
> degrees lower with no reliability issues.
>
> I suspect that the standard heatsink on chips like this might be fine if
> you
> have a system fan to remove ambient heat but with completely fanless you
> usually need to pipe out the heat for high performance things like HD
> decoding.
>
> --
> Rick Hudson
> http://www.kpo.org.nz/
> rick at kpo.org.nz