This thread shares similar concerns with the following thread: Silent Computer

I'm planning to build a JukeBox in a year or so, a dedicated lightweight PC for music listening only. It will be connected to an external USB2 hard drive in NTFS containing 200GB worth of MPC, APE and FLAC files (mostly MPC) (I actually want to prohibit hard drive write access if possible) The main considerations are :

• It should be extremely silent.
• It should startup/shutdown fast.
• It should be as little as possible.
• It should not be very expensive.

I suppose it's a good idea to get a Nano-ITX motherboard with Via Eden N processor. Because it's entirely fanless and very small. There're prototype MoBo's at the moment but it'll take probably a quarter for Nano-ITX motherboards and cases to be publicly available. The system will be based on a fanless external PSU. And therefore the only fan in the system will be the case fan unless I could avoid it using a heatsink like design such as Hush Silent PC. It will be connected to my Hi-Fi through my USB soundcard Stereo Link and it'll have its own 14" LCD monitor.

I'd like to get a good looking case for this jukebox, something like Hoojum Cubit 3. I will build the barebone system myself because it's much cheaper that way and I'd have the entire control.

Now about the software:
It will probably be running Windows XP because I'll probably use WinAmp. I like my Waves DirectX plugins I use through WinAmp Adapt-X DSP plugin. They're quite CPU intensive (around 15% on an Athlon 2100+). I also like WinAmp MEXP library plug-in. If I were not to use WinAmp I'd probably be installing NetBSD+XFCE on it. I don't know if any CPU cooling software will support this setup but since it'll be based on the VIA CN400 chipset I assume the lightweight VCool will do the job.

My main question is: Is it possible to run the OS from some sort of EPROM ? So that it does not have to startup and I do not have to shut it down. I know there're lightweight Windows installations around like LitePC. Is it possible to use some sort of a USB memory based drive that automatically captures whatever is in the RAM before the shutdown and copies itself back to RAM during bootup? Does anyone have experience in this area?

What are your suggestions in general?

Hmmmm. I'm not sure about the copying from RAM (and back) functionality, but you could consider booting the OS from a Compact Flash card (no seek noise).
Problem is, you might be forced to purchase a motherboard that comes with a Flash reader, since I'm not sure most BIOSes will allow you to boot from a card reader. My L7S7A2
does, but I'm not sure if that means anything since the board comes with the reader.
Of course, the read speed of CF is going to be substantially below that of a real hard drive so fast boots are probably not in the cards (no pun intended).

A hard drive like this one will give you negligible noise and excellent speed (therefore quick boots) in a low-profile, low heat output chassis.

The C3/Eden platform is very low power, but the performance also suffers, especially for what you pay.
Don't count on running winamp plugins to their full potential with a C3/Eden, it's FPU performance is roughly on par with a Celeron (II) of 2/3rds it's clock speed.

An underclocked and undervolted (you can overbus though, provided the RAM can take it and the multiplier is unlocked) Duron will absolutely wipe the floor with the C3 in any application you care to name, even granting the C3 a 300MHz clock speed advantage, which isn't going to happen (a duron 1.4 can be found for <$40, declocking it to 1GHz and dropping the voltage to 1.45-1.5V will still give you a massive advantage in speed).

VCool appears to be athlon-only, BTW.

Great post Audible! I was just thinking about the Compact Flash bootup. One can install XP Embedded on a say 256MB CompactFlash card as a logical drive and boot from that. It makes me think it should be much faster compared to a hard drive. Is it not? Even if it is not, it is probably a limitation with the Compact Flash cards and one might be able to circumvent using a bootable USB memory module.

The Eden-N and newer generations will have a stronger FP unit AFAIK. But as you say, other alternatives are AMD Duron and Transmeta Efficeon. VIA has three families of them, Antaur for notebooks, C3 for low power desktop and Eden for fanless extreme low power. And now there is Eden-N for somewhere in between C3 and previous Eden series. I guess Duron and Efficeon stand at a much higher rate of heat dissipation, and therefore would require a fan, which is not entirely necessary for a jukebox.

Great concept atici.

I don't want to come across as a Linux zealot (because I'm not) but there are many Linux distributions designed to be used for media box/appliance type applications. There are also some that are designed to boot and function off usb memory key type devices as the main OS disk, so you can then use your other harddisk(s) for music storage only, which would be pretty cool for this I would have thought.

Also are you going to consider some sort of remote control for this baby?

Best of luck with it in any case, and I look forward to reading about your success on HA when the time comes...

The company I work for make display controllers for the screens in betting shops. Our next-generation equipment is based upon nat semi geode processors, which are x86 compatible. They're fanless and the reference motherboards are like 2*5 inch square.

We run linux on them, but they're fine with xp. They also have usb2/vga/etc risers, so would be fine with your external hard drive. We boot them off smartmedia cards with a custom linux distro.

Highly recommended if you have a bit of time and are prepared to sacrifice performance for sheer size and convenience.

I've been interested in the idea of a jukebox for years and until recently I had considered building the smallest custom PC possible, but because of component costs I have now decided to use my XBOX as a jukebox. Although It doesn't have USB2 or firewire, it does have ethernet and the ability to install a large hard drive.

The other benefits are quick boot-up, relatively quiet and an abundance of free software to play your large music & video collection.

I have spent the last two years encoding my entire CD & vinyl collection and very shortly (after tweaking with MP3gain) I shall relax a while away from my PC and listen to my collection from my xbox.

Has anyone done any listening tests comparing sound performance between an xbox and a PC with a decent sound card?

I don't think it would be faster at all - compact flash and most nonvolatile memory are heavily limited in the speed of reads and writes, and have a pretty finite lifetime in terms of writes (which shouldnt bother you in this application of course).
Quoting SimpleTech's PR for their compact flash cards:

It occurs to me that if you were using one of the lite installations of XP you could probably get away with read speeds of this level since seeks probably make up a decent percentage of the time anyway....
Here's what Kingston PR says about their 32MB flash pen USB drive:

12 Megabit/sec is of course 1.5MByte/sec...

They do! The Nehemiah core and later revisions finally have a full-speed floating point unit. Of course, this is still a Winchip core we're talking here so the FPU perfromance is still downright pathetic.
Not that you can blame a design that has a single FPU to an athlons three...

The thing is, substantially undervolting and underclocking a budget mainstream part like a Celeron or a Duron should allow you to run fanless (on the CPU) and still have better performance than a C3 family or a Geode chip. An XP or windows2000 install where an idle thread is built into the OS should keep heat problems to a minimum as well.
If you're paranoid about it you can buy a fan with a temperature probe of an Asus motherboard with their "AI" fan system.

The tiny little Eden and Geode boards are sexy though, and you can shoehorn them into a Super Nintendo

@den: Thanks for the suggestion. I am not a fan of Linux in general because of some of Torvalds' opinions. I don't want to sound like a zealot either but there's no way I'd pick linux over any BSDs I don't think I'll need a remote controller either, I'll set up my playlist and it'll play for sometime. But I might consider attaching the USB2 drive through an infrared channel to reduce the noise even further. Most of these VIA embedded mobos come with a compactflash socket, I guess I'll just be using that instead of an external card reader.

@seanyseansean: Geode processors seem to be even lower in frequencies. I don't know if they could handle FP load. Let me know your experiences and a few links to your company mobos will also be appreciated.

@Audible! : Lexar's 40X CompactFlash cards have 6MB/sec read/write speed. It's sort of comparable to a hard drive. Although Duron is probably faster as you suggest, I don't need anything a tad faster than playing audio files with a few DSPs. I don't want the trouble of heating+water cooling and the board size should be minimal. That's why Eden processors seem just right for the purpose. But if I could find a Mini-ITX board that would take a Duron and downclock it so that a heatsink will be sufficient for cooling, then it is a good idea. But with common AMD boards even the chipset has its own fan (and on my current computer that one makes the most noise!).

What size a CF card do I need to fit a minimal XP embedded installation with WinAmp?

Sounds like a great idea!

I don't want to come across as a Pentium M zeal0t, but if you're thinking about Celerons and Durons and Efficeons, why not consider a Pentium M? IIRC, there are small form factor PCs available with Pentium Ms, and I guarantee you it'll blow away any Efficeon, Duron, or Celeron. With the CPU not running at maximum speed & load, there is no need for a fan...no undervolting or underclocking needed since they already do that via Enhanced SpeedStep.

About the quick on/off, what about using XP's hibernation feature? With 512 MB ram, it seems to take about 10 seconds to resume.

Because Pentium M is too expensive and sort of an overkill for the purpose I don't think it's a viable option. That computer is just going to be a jukebox. I don't really need that many transistors. Minimality is my most important concern. I'd have picked an XScale processor if I could run MPC decoder on it. But I think my player and OS options will be very limited in that case.

I didn't know much about Hibernate, thanks for bringing it to my attention. StandBy seems to be more what I am looking for actually. Because Hibernate saves the memory contents to the hard disk, it will require a hard disk for my Windows partition as opposed to a small compact flash card. And there's really nothing I want to save about the previous session, so it doesn't seem to be very different compared to a regular bootup? But maybe I can set it up so that the Hibernate data goes into an external memory card which would be interesting and would probably provide fast bootup. I guess StandBy seems like a good idea though. When I do a StandBy what happens to the running processes?

What do you guys think of the Nano-ITX reference board ? It seems it's just designed for this purpose. No compactflash reader though... Maybe there're SATA compactflash readers around.

Yes, stand by is probably what you want. Basically, it powers most everything off except the RAM...all running programs stay running so when you un-standby it resumes exactly the way you left it. Hibernation does basically the same thing except RAM contents are written to disk and everything is powered off. For your purposes hibernation's only advantage over a regular boot up would be speed.

instead of assembling the thing yourself, why not get a laptop instead? to keep down the price, get a 2nd hand laptop, an outdated type preferable because they'll be cheaper ('slow' processor compared to todays' standard, and the thing doesn't need to be fast). Wipe it, install OS and player of choice and don't make it load any unnecessary drivers / hardware etc; keep it basic.

Upgrade it with a huge harddrive or preferably, external 200 gig. You can hook up this ext hd to your main box to load more music whenever you want.

With a bit of luck, the laptop will have a 'standby' or 'hibernate' button to power it down and quickly restart it as mentioned before.

choice enough

I've put an old PC running Win98 in one room, and my stereo in another. I'm drilling a hole between the two rooms to take the audio cable (via wall sockets), and I don't expect PC noise to be a problem . A video link to the TV, and a wireless keyboard/mouse/remote should be easy.

The problem (and this has always been the problem every time I've nearly started on this project) is getting nice simple software that I can control from the TV, that also makes sense to my wife. I'm hoping they'll be a GUI for foobar2k which will do the job before too long.


I may be way out of date, but isn't it better to underclock Intel devices rather than AMD devices? Or is it just an issue of cost?

Cheers,
David.

YES! a ten feet interface for Foobar please!.

I've been promoting that for a while now. I'm also considering building a HIFI jukebox, but has it on hold at the moment. Mostly due to the fact that I want real HIFI.

There are these major problems as I see it:

1. Absolutely quiet.

NO fans!. Even if you undervolt/underclock a Duron you still need PSU with a fan. Morex make fanless PSU, but they're only 55W and only suitable for ITX. Harddrive has to be enclosed in an enclosure. This means most ITX boxes wont do because they only have 1 tray for CD-ROM and you need 2 because you HD-silencer will take one. So I ruled out using a pre-made chassi.

2. Expandability

I need at least ONE PCI, and preferrably 2. Tricky with EDEN platform I know, but there are two card risers. This is a must because there are some severe performance limits to VIA solutions with integrated video/audio. Sure you can use laptops, but then you're limited to USB soundcards. As for now I know of no 2-PCI-slot ITX chassis.

3. Sound quality

Basically you need an external DAC. And to that you need a S/PDIF interface. The problem is that not all S/PDIF interfaces are created equal. The cheapest solution is basically a card from Audiotrak/m-audio/.. NOT creative's, because they resample everything to 48khz even on the S/PDIF outs. And basicall every motherboard does this to their digital outs if they don't explicitly say that they run true 44.1khz.

4. PowerSave

I want it to run 24/7. No bootups, and I want to be able to schedule my PVR too at any time any day. This is also a reason to make it ULTRA quiet and low-power.

5. Userfriendly

10 feet user interface!. because you havent got a keyboard/mouse in front of you there should be a possibility to change playlists with your remote. And you should be able to shut/wake down the monitor with it. Why not implement a text-prediction system like the ones found in our mobile cell phones?.

6. Cheapness

The Hush is a nice try, but not entirely quiet, mostly because they don't use a SilentDrive, and still only 1 PCI slot. And it's way expensive. LAptops (used ones) are quiet, cheap, but you have to upgrade with an external HD which makes them less cheap, and then only USB soundcards and USB PVR which arent any good. Underclocked Durons still need a 250W powersupply which (if not ridiculously expensive) makes noise.

Alltogether you need at least 1 PCI for a decent soundcard, and then you probably want another one for your PVR. Then you need adequate horsepower for the PVR-card (they still need some for playback) so far 500Mhz won't cut it.

@freshfruit: A laptop won't do so well. A notebook is designed for portability which is irrelevant for a high end jukebox. A laptop is still expensive and with high power consumption (unless you get a mobile processor which is very expensive). And building your own computer is rather easy and fun, you can buy each component quite cheap online instead of paying a higher fee if you buy them altogether directly from a vendor and there're no hidden OS costs if you already have one.

@d_kay303 : Why do you need the PCI slots for? They would just make the case bigger. The embedded mobos have a display card on them as well as a SATA/ATA controller. Both the sound card and the hard drive could be connected through the USB port. There are very good USB sound cards out there. And you don't need a CD-ROM either because all your music will stay ripped on your hard drive prepared on a separate desktop computer. That's what makes it a jukebox, all the music is preloaded. Then such a computer could easily live with 55W fanless power suppy (considering all the peripherals would have their own fanless power supplies).

The associated costs apart from software and hi-fi as far as I planned is as follows
$100 for the Motherboard+CPU
$70 for the nice looking case+ fanless power supply+mouse
$150 for 200GB USB2 External Hard Drive (I have this already)
$100 for a decent USB sound card (I have this too)
$100 for an average 15" LCD monitor
$80 for a 512MB high speed CompactFlash card.

@Audible!: Do you think a 1Ghz Eden-N could run Waves Direct-X plugins which run with 15% CPU time consumption on a 1.6Ghz Athlon? I'd be disappointed if not.

I'm just starting to put together my first PC jukebox, so far my plan is:

Athlon 900, water-cooled
2 Gb Hard disk with the OS installed
160 Gb Hard disk, whatever's cheapest, need to buy this
Modded passive PSU
Network card

I'll chuck that lot in the corner after I have installed the OS and software, then control it over ethernet with VNC, so no keyboard, monitor, mouse or access required.

Currently planning on using winamp, controlling it with Remoteamp or something similar with a wireless Ipaq. Going to use Monkey Audio to save a bit of space.

My big dilemma at the moment is how to get the sound out.

I use an M-audio Superdac 2496 in my hi-fi at the moment, but this has no internal clock and relies on reconstucting the clock signal from the spdif input, so the quality of the digital feed is very important for decent sound.

Do I use a USB card like the M-audio Sonica, fed into my dac, a PCI card in to the superdac, or something a bit better like the M-audio Audiophile USB straight into my hi-fi? (not an m-audio nut, just used for example)

Anyone else been concerned about the digital feed from their PC and used any sort of reclocking device?

Any experiences or suggestions would be useful.

Cheers,
Phill

Hard to speculate, but I'd think it'd run fine. Might be video card dependent somewhat as well.

There you go then

Waves plugins != vis...they're audio processing plugins. So it wouldn't depend on the video card. :B

VIA's Eden-N has not been released yet (everything says spring 2004), and according to a review found here , the VIA C3 processor at 1ghz can barely play a DVD without skipping (the 933mhz model drops frames....) Why not just buy a Duron processor, undervolt / underclock it, and get a large but slow moving fan? Does it really have to be silent ? I would really recommend staying away from VIA's processors (some of them are not even 100% x86 compliant and crash when you run certain applications.)

PS - The Nano-ITX board has a C3 processor, not the Eden-N......

But it has a website set up. I wouldn't think Intel, Via or AMD prepares webpages for unreleased processors.


I am sort of fed up with the feeling of a desktop computer sounding like it will take off soon. As long as it is not necessary I want to avoid fans. Many are very likely to to make a lot of noise after some time. The other option is water cooling which brings many more complications and cost.


I got this on the Eden-N page. I guess my previous link was misinformed.

Thanks a lot for the review link! This review also confirms the efficiency problems related to Via. But this review seems to be happy with the performance.

Quote from VIA's press release page located on the same page you found that pic on -

VIA Eden-N Processor Availability
The VIA Eden-N processor is sampling now and is expected to start appearing in secure networking, entertainment and communication devices in Q1, 2004. For sales information please contact your local VIA sales office or send an email to mkt@via.com.tw.

Sorry, but no dice on the Eden-N (not yet at least)

You might need a bigger case to use a heatsink such as this one here, but at 20db, I doubt that noise would be a problem. Also, with that Zalman heatsink, I wouldn't be at all supprised if it would run fanless w/ an undervolted / underclocked processor.....

It's the same core ("Nehemiah" - basically a WinChip "C7" with SSE), different package.
'Eden' appears to be a brand name for the passively cooled embedded varieties (lower voltage, upgrade not possible) while 'Antaur' appears to be a brand name for something very similar in notebooks. The C3 at one time was the socket370 version but now I think it's used interchangeably with Eden - if the processor has a fan on it, it's a C3(?) apparently, even if it's embedded ball grid array.

But you're right, for processor intensive tasks a dramatically undervolted duron 1.2Ghz say, running at 700MHz, would clean the floor with a C3 at 1GHz, especially when the floating point units get used.

But it doesn't look like atici even cares about DVD playback on this box.

I know he doesn't care about DVD playback, but it just shows how underpowered this processor is. Hell, my old Celeron 400 could play DVDs without a decoder card . I don't think the C3 / Eden processor would have nearly enough power to do what atici wants it to do...

I am not claiming Eden is a strong processor Thanks for your suggestions they're well appreciated.

I just think it's very likely that it's strong enough for my purposes. Consider the mobile 700Mhz Motorola G4's which Apple sold with such a boast just a short while ago and Pentium III processors... They can run an entire computer with many processes although sometimes with difficulty. All I will run is a single player application. However it might be the case that the Waves plugins are more demanding than my estimates. But at the same time until I build the box, there's some room for more development (for instance the CPU bus speed is to be set to 200MHz soon with a 400Mhz memory clock)

In either way, there's still some time until I build this box. I posted it mostly for brainstorming, as a call for ideas and also to seed a thread on HA to refer to whenever a jukebox is to be built for different needs.

Well, it should be sufficient for playing FLAC and MPC files, and APE files shouldnt faze it either.
The real question is whether the winamp waves plugin he wants to use will run properly with any and all of these file types (edit: in terms of CPU usage), and I'd be surprised (not shocked) if it didn't.

Doesn't the Eden chipset have hardware assisted mpeg decoding built in? You might want to check, as I doubt it'd struggle to playback mpeg2 streams as it's designed to be used in small media appliances.

I will need a DVD-ROM drive. To watch DVD's. And I need a PCI soundcard to feel that I have the possibility to upgrade. USB soundcards have a smaller market thus they are in general less feature packed. I can buy AudioTrak 7.1 PCI card for 99$ and it's pretty good, and has some really nifty stuff too that I want. That's just one example, but as I see it USB isn't a viable upgrade path.

Most PVR's (from Pinnacle) have hardware mpeg2 decoder/coder, so watching DVD's shouldn't be a problem. Although you can only watch it hardware decoded on your TV-screen (!).

When you've silenced your 250W PSU & CPU by switching fan to a panaflo or papst 19dB (this is really easy btw), then you'll hear your HD whining. So don't go for HD's with more than one platter, and higher speeds than 7200rpm.

For me, building a PC that is small, cheap, and silent just seems like a pain. If I wanted to build a silent (or at least near silent) PC, then I would build it using a midsize/full ATX case. My part choices would be:

1. Antec TruePower 430w Power Supply (I have one, not completely silent, but damn near close enough for me.) If it had to be totally silent, then I would use a PS such as the SilentMaxx Prosilence , which is 350w and uses no fans, but costs $230 .

2. Motherboard with no northbridge fan, or one that runs fine without one (My Shuttle AK31 came with one, but runs at room temp with no fan, so what's the point?)

3. Duron processor underclocked / undervolted with a large Zalman heatsink and no fan.

4. A case such as the Antec SX1040BII, which is extremely big, yet uses thick metal all round and covers the optical drive bays in the front. I have built systems with this case before, and found that it keeps noise where it belongs (inside the case.) And, of couse, those 5 case fans would have to go!

5. A 5400 rpm HD and low noise CD-Rom / DVD-Rom drives.

If small form factor is a must, then this isn't an option, but silent and small is a very hard thing to do (large heatsinks arn't an option, and small cases have trouble getting rid of heat....)

@ViPER1313: My assumption with the first post is that the jukebox computer would not be used as the main computer. If not the silent computer thread is probably a better read and posting point.

As soon as the performance demand drops requirement for 400W PSUs and fans for almost all components drops too. Of course at that point it's up to what one aims for in the range from extreme performance to extreme silence and minimality.

I think if you want a silent computer for daily use it is a good idea to aim for the best performance for a fixed price and then try to put the computer away somewhere else using wireless components for input devices.

Have you already tried this? Using which combination of duron/HS?

Thanks,

-ec