Mailing List Archive

My MythTV Box is an Asus Pundit with a 120gb seagate barracuda, and a
2.4GHz Pentium4. It is the most quiet box in the house. The loudest
moment is the first few seconds when it is powering on, and after that
the "quiet fan" option kicks in.

This thing is a whisper. I have yet to load it down enough to kick it
into "high fan" mode.

I find the crazy-super-bright power LED to be far more annoying than
the sound.

Make sure you get a quiet hard drive though. I purchased the Seagate
Barracuda specifically because it is suppose to be a quiet drive. And I
must say that it is the quietest drive I have ever heard.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Nessuno Nessuno wrote:

>
> Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room
>
>
>
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>
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--- darco
http://www.deepdarc.com/

This is one of the quietest PCs you can get.

I can't tell if mine is on unless I look at it to see if the light is on.

You wil probably hear the hard drive spinning before you hear the actual
box. The TV out is not bad either and it seems to run Linux really nice with
the Redhat 9.0 stock kernel.

You have room for two PCI cards, but it is a tight fit. If they only made it
about 3/8 of an inch taller to get the cards in easier it would be perfect.

Joe MacDonald

Nessuno Nessuno writes:

>
> Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.

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On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 02:49:17PM -0700, darco wrote:

> I find the crazy-super-bright power LED to be far more annoying than
> the sound.
>

Home Depot sells electrician's tape in a variety of colors, one of which
may match your case. This is the best fix I know of for annoying LEDs
(sometimes when I get up and walk through the house at night, I feel
like I'm being watched by a large pack of feral, green-eyed little
things).

--
Lan Barnes lan@falleagle.net
Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.
- George Bernard Shaw

> Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room

As everyone else has said, yes, it's quiet. When not running under a
load, it's the quietest case I've ever run into (I work for a systems
builder, we've dealt with pretty much every popular case out there).
Make sure you use a fluid-bearing hard drive (preferably a seagate
7200.7 or barracuda IV - they seem to be quieter than WD). Under load
(encoding an hour long movie with hefty mpeg4 options on my 2.4Ghz p4),
it makes a little noise, but it's still quieter than a shuttle and any
"normal" desktop system under no load. Nothing I can hear over the hum
of my fridge in the next room.

And as has also been said, the bright blue HD LED on the front is far
worse than the noise. My wife has often mistaken the blue blink in our
living room at night for a police car parked nearby outside. But that's
easy enough to fix with a piece of tape (or in my case, a blanket or a
cupboard door).

-Chris

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Oh yeah, one more addition: The X SiS drivers do NOT support overscan
on the TV-Out of the Pundit. I don't know how big of a deal this is to
you, but I thought you should know. I know that I was kinda depressed
when I was unable to get overscan working.

Maybe one day it'll be supported, but at the moment you will have to
deal with the thin black bars on the TV.

Of course, if you are going to hook this up to an HDTV (ie: bypassing
the tv-out) then you will have no problems. (Er, you shouldn't... I
donno, I don't have an HDTV)

On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Nessuno Nessuno wrote:

>
> Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room
>
>
>
<image.tiff>
>
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier.
> Bingo._______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
--- darco
http://www.deepdarc.com/

My Pundit seems to fill the screen just fine. Here is my device section... Am I missing something?

Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "sis"
Option "XvOnCRT2" "true"
Option "ForceCRT2Type" "SVIDEO"
#Option "ForceCRT2Type" "TV"
#Option "CHTVOverscan" "false"
Option "CHTVOverscan" "true"
VendorName "Silicon Integrated Systems"
BoardName "SiS 315/650"
VideoRam 65536

EndSection

----- Original Message -----
From: darco
To: Discussion about mythtv
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 6:18 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Asus Pundit question


Oh yeah, one more addition: The X SiS drivers do NOT support overscan on the TV-Out of the Pundit. I don't know how big of a deal this is to you, but I thought you should know. I know that I was kinda depressed when I was unable to get overscan working.

Maybe one day it'll be supported, but at the moment you will have to deal with the thin black bars on the TV.

Of course, if you are going to hook this up to an HDTV (ie: bypassing the tv-out) then you will have no problems. (Er, you shouldn't... I donno, I don't have an HDTV)

On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Nessuno Nessuno wrote:



Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room




<image.tiff>


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--- darco
http://www.deepdarc.com/



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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> My Pundit seems to fill the screen just fine. Here is my device
> section... Am I missing something?

It depends on your tv. older tv's (and maybe some newer ones, I don't
know) have some built-in overscan of their own. My 27" sony wega has
maybe 1/4" of border on the horizontal, and 1/4" of overscan on the
vertical (such that in order to fix it, I'd need to overscan the
horizontal, and underscan the vertical). But it's not enough to be
really annoying.

-Chris

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FWIW, I have had no problems with overscan using S-Video from my
pundit. I've tried it with two sets (a 1990-vintage RCA 27" set and a
new Sharp flatscreen 27") with similar results. Normally run at 640x480
since I only record at 480x480, but have tried 800x600 and 1024x768 with
no overscan problems.

Be sure to use the *latest* SiS drivers from Thomas W's site - the older
versions had some bugs (namely the "black bar on right side of screen"
bug, check the forum history).

Regarding noise level, my Pundit makes NO noticeable sound when on,
apart from the initial fan spin-up at system start. I'm running a
diskless frontend with a 1.7 Celeron and 512 Megs of PC2700 DDR RAM.
I'm using an Intel Pro/100+ NIC rather then the onboard Broadcom adapter
for PXE boot capabilities.

My back-end is a 1.4 Ghz Athlon with 512 MB RAM and 120 GB hdd; capture
card is an old Hauppage WinTV PCI. Funny how small 120 Gigs can seem
when you start capturing lots of video... :)

== Steve

Overscan is more than just being large enough to fit the visible
screen. Even though your pundit can fill YOUR screen, it is still not
filling the entire NTSC frame. You may notice that you can see more of
a picture using your pundit rather than just tuning your TV to that
station. This is because the pundit is underscaning the video -- It is
taking an entire 640x480 NTSC frame and scaling it down into a subset
of an NTSC frame. Yuck.

You loose picture information when this happens. If you could put your
pundit into overscan mode, you could disable de-interlacing and the
picture will(should) actually look better.This is because you don't
have to do any re-scaling or de-interlacing, which slightly degrades
picture quality.

The CHTVOverscan option unfortunately isn't supported on the Pundit, so
it doesn't do anything. :(

On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 06:56 PM, Shawn wrote:

> My Pundit seems to fill the screen just fine.  Here is my device
> section...  Am I missing something?
>  
> Section "Device"
> Identifier  "Videocard0"
> Driver      "sis"
> Option      "XvOnCRT2"  "true"
> Option      "ForceCRT2Type" "SVIDEO"
> #Option      "ForceCRT2Type" "TV"
> #Option      "CHTVOverscan"  "false"
> Option      "CHTVOverscan"  "true"
> VendorName  "Silicon Integrated Systems"
> BoardName   "SiS 315/650"
> VideoRam    65536
> EndSection
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: darco
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 6:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Asus Pundit question
>
> Oh yeah, one more addition: The X SiS drivers do NOT support overscan
> on the TV-Out of the Pundit. I don't know how big of a deal this is to
> you, but I thought you should know. I know that I was kinda depressed
> when I was unable to get overscan working.
>
> Maybe one day it'll be supported, but at the moment you will have to
> deal with the thin black bars on the TV.
>
> Of course, if you are going to hook this up to an HDTV (ie: bypassing
> the tv-out) then you will have no problems. (Er, you shouldn't... I
> donno, I don't have an HDTV)
>
> On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Nessuno Nessuno wrote:
>
>
> Is it pretty quiet? wife won't tollerate a loud PC in the TV room
>
>
>
> <image.tiff>
>
>
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier.
> Bingo._______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
> --- darco
> http://www.deepdarc.com/
>
>
>
<image.tiff>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>

--- darco
http://www.deepdarc.com/