Now computers tend to be more and more silent, even servers (have a look at latest Dell ones) become noiseless. I had a quite peacefull mini-computer (EPIA M9000 + Cubid 2699) during more than one year, but it wasn’t really fanless (1 8mm noisy fan, 2 short-life 8mm case-fans), though quieter than desktop-computers … I’m not the only one to complain about that computer, some people put Zalmann heatsink on the CPU, but personnaly i wasn’t convinced by that option. And it was time to bring a wind of change out there :-)
So i bought a real fanless computer which looks very eye-candy no ?
- MV823A motherboard
- VIA C3 1Ghz
- 512 MB RAM
- VIA CLE266 graphic chipset
- S-Video input and output
- Weight about 2 Kilos (passive cooling has a price ?)
- 2”5 20Gb HDD
Of course 20Gb is not enough when one wants to store and play his huge music library so i put a 3”5 big HDD (tough not as silent as i would) in a FireWire/USB2 combo box, connected to the brand new machine. Linux runs fine on it, once patches from EPIAWiki are applied on the kernel.
Well now the only annoying thing with the machine is that i tend to forget to shut it off since i can’t really hear it without putting my ears on it :) Well yeah, there is a nice blue LED lighted when the machine is on, it’s the only normal-human proof.