MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Looking for a silent PC for use in the living room, for both music and movies.
I have an old Asus barebones system, it's about 8 years old. Is it possible to rebuild old systems to run fanless and with hdmi out?
Or is it more hassle than it's worth and is it cheaper to just buy a new system?
Not looking to use Android or Raspberry Pi but sticking with WIndows.
Apple TV and / or Mac Mini (has hdmi out) will do this for you but to be honest most windows systems will run quietly enough. Maybe its my age but I canot hear my mini when the room is silent never mind when there is music/movie. I would spend the money on the tv/speakers and not a special build pc. There are good minis available second hand.
edit: I think the mini only runs the fan when required, my old windows pc used to run it all the time. Playing film/music is a low heat generating activity. Mini is small and fits easily under tv or in a cabinet, wireless keyboard and mouse. Mini can run windows partition if you want. Depending on wifi signal strength using Ethernet/ Powerline is good (I do this for speed/reliability)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-750-ti-passive-cooling,3757.html
DIY is a decent option with Nvidia's Maxwell, or wait a few months and just buy a premade one.
NB Based on my recent experience, you might want to experiment with spraying the heatsink black if the airflow is limited [better radiation of the heat]. TEST IT in your case with a paint you can remove!
Nvidia's Maxwell
Do I need such a high end graphics card?
I was hoping to get a passive cooled one that could still handle HD video.
No you don't need high end graphics card, there certainly isn't one in apple tv or my 2009 mini
[img] http://image.shuttle.com/ResourceCenter/Upload/1628/1628_WebImage_WebImage_201205101353_1 [/img]
I have one of these
http://us.shuttle.com/barebone/Models/XH61V.html
Running a low power I3 processor and using the on board intel graphics.
It has 2 tiny/silent fan that tick over. I've got a normal 2.5" drive in it and it runs as near to silent as I can tell.
Set up with Win 7 and XBMC. Outputs HDMI & DVI, optical audio and normal. The Power is via a laptop style unit so no PSU in the box for noise.
mikewsmith - That shuttle looks pretty good.
Does the onboard graphics cope with well with 1080p? Or do you run at 1080i or 720p?
Use an old laptop, much smaller and quieter in general. Depends on how good a spec you need...
I'm running full HD but normally only bother with 720 DL's - out put to a 60" Samsung LCD. Mine is 2 years old so not sure what the current version does. Should be some more google answers on the current board/outputs
I've got an aspire revo R3600
Single core 1.6ghz Atom +Ion chipset, was £160 about 5 years ago.
One inaudible fan (it runs 24x7), running as a mythtv box.
It'll happily record 2 1080p freeview streams whilst playing back another - hardware accelerated VDPAU playback.
Interested in above: I had errantly assumed I would have to bin my Revo for HD Freeview!
Q: Any suggestions/recc's for a stable Freeview HD tuner for a Revo?
Found this the trickiest bit 🙂
My tuner's a "PCTV Systems DVB-T2 290e nanoStick HD TV Tuner ", had mine since they turned on HD no issues at all. About £60.
USB, plug n play in Linux. You get the whole transport stream so you can record two channels at once on the same multiplex. Much better sensitivity/ signal than my old SD happague kit too.
I was using an old AMD athlon based system which worked fine for years until I got my new TV which didn't have a VGA input.
I looked into buying an AGP gfx card with HDMI but the options are extremely limited, they were going for silly money on ebay and IIRC you had to bodge the sound leading to potential sync issues.
Next I looked into buying a new m/board with HDMI, new CPU and RAM but all new boards are SATA only making my perfectly good IDE hard drive and dvd obsolete so basically I'd need a whole new system.
In the end I bought an old pentium 4 m/board and processor bundle off ebay for £30 which has both PCI express (for an HDMI gfx card) and IDE for my old drives. I also bought a passively cooled Geforce 210 new for £20 off amazon.
It works perfect, it's virtually silent, runs win7 and plays 1080p without issues.
Short version - its a waste of time and money trying to upgrade an old system to play HDMI unless you take a gamble on some ebay bits.
Intel NUC. Now that the second gen ones are out, there are plenty of cheap first gen ones that will still cope brilliantly with media centre stuff. 4" square by 1" deep. Takes standard laptop DDR3 memory, and mSATA SSD (or just boot off a USB stick).
I've got a couple of media player PCs and have others over the years. Even the Dell I have at the moment which isn't completely silent isn't noticeable. In summary my own experience says it's not critical.
And Fwiw the other is an old laptop with any unnecessary software removed and it does the job nicely (and silently as it goes)