Gear: going fanless

[mdlbear]

This afternoon I finally hauled off and ordered a VIA CN1000 fanless Mini-ITX board for my recording rig, which even with a single 40mm CPU fan is annoyingly loud in a quiet room. And the case is fairly big and heavy; I'll fix that, too. With luck, it ought to arrive in time for me to take the new setup to Westercon, but too late for me to waste much potential recording time futzing with it. I'll try not to work on it next weekend even if it arrives on Friday.

It's difficult to appreciate a totally fanless computer until you've used one. The silence is addictive. I'm tempted to give the new machine a flash drive, with an external hard drive only for working off the network and away from the fileserver.

The old 800MHz machine, which is in a very cool-looking black Morex 2699B case, should do well on the stereo rack (as a CD ripper and/or streaming music player) or in some other application where it's far enough from users that the slight fan noise won't matter. I'm becoming more noise-sensitive in my old age.

I've been casting about for alternatives to a stack of CDs for listening in the car on the road to Westercon (an 8-10 hour drive depending on the route); realized that a 12-volt adapter for one of the little computers would be cheaper than either a laptop power adapter or an MP3 player. But the flower_cat has expressed a preference for CDs, so it's probably moot.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Since Dad's computer died in the power outage, I've been sitting next to one of his bench computers with the Noisiest Fan since the beginning of time. You'd think we had a computer farm back here or something (we actually do, but they are home computers and shouldn't be this loud). Since he just browses the web and reads e-mail, it will be a while before he buys anything new. Glad he turns it off at night. Does make listening to music more annoying. *sigh*