On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 10:06:43PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
The G450 is in the closet because I'm a fan of hardware decoded audio/video which helps keep the system cool and silent, and I was turned off by reading some TV-out setup docs for the G450 (looked complicated to (lazy) me, and I didn't find anything about getting everything right from the BIOS messages to go to the TV-out (the Radeon does that just by plugging in the cable)). So I haven't bothered to really even try it out.
Well, my TV will normally be powered on by the VDR relay plugin, and if I needed to view any BIOS messages, I could plug a VGA monitor to the primary head connector. The system is rather silent. The only fan is a 80 mm CPU fan that blows air through a 80 mm hole on the back of the case. The power supply is cooled passively. CPU temperature (900 MHz Celeron) is usually below 30°C, and system temperature is around 40°C when the output is not suspended. Hard disk temperature is usually around 38°C.
I'd say that this system is much more quiet than the underclocked 200 or 250 MHz AMD K6-2 that drove the DXR3 card. Without CPU fan, it reached over 60°C, and the power supply was rather noisy. :-)
In any case, noise is not that much of an issue when you use nvram-wakeup. nvram-wakeup has worked pretty reliably for me. A couple of times over the past two years, something in the VIA chipset has required power cycling. The symptoms were that Linux would hang while initializing the PCI bus, or it would fail to recognize the DVB-T tuner cards. Rebooting or soft power-off wouldn't fix the situation. Luckily, this has never occurred with the wakeup timer.
I'd ask you to sell me the G450 if I were building another VDR box now. Instead, I'm waiting for better hardware in HTPC or small desktop case with a built-in dual DVB-T tuner and Linux friendly onboard graphics. I guess I'll have to wait a couple more years.
Marko