I was thinkin... I don't know a lot about bluetooth, but wouldn't it be possible to make it communicate everything? I mean, replace video, audio, mouse, keyboard, usb, etc. so if you wanted you could move your computer itself anywhere in the house and be able to have a hub receiver for all your stuff in your actual office? If this were possible sometime in the future, perhaps not with bluetooth, but some other new technology, the location of the computer itself would not matter anymore? The main producer of heat in a computer is the video card, cpu, and power supply. If you could build a new computer with these components say installed on the roof sorta like an air conditioner, with excellent ventilation, you could have the input devices and storage wirelessly connected on your desk. Wirelessly connect cd/dvd, hard drive, zip, keyboard, mouse, monitor, soundcard, speakers.

If a computer were setup this way you could have the central processor produce as much heat as you want. You could make it 100ghz, and need a car radiator to cool it, and still have silence. Then in the house have all the important stuff. Ofcourse this would only apply to those with the option of having a computer mounted outside. But think it could be done? I mean... this would be the ultimate in silent performance.

To cool it even more silently you could put it underground in say a small cement hole, and cool it with pipes attached to the cpu and sticking deep into the ground, with a water pump to circulate water in these pipes. Better yet, hook it to your plumbing maybe.

What do you think of these ideas? Maybe I have to much time to think.

*edit*
I forgot hard drives make noise. A solid state hard drive would remove the noise from it. If it were wirelessly connected it could be somewhere out of the office or out of hearing.

Funnily enough I was only earlier this month thinking of the possibility of using the house central heating loop for WC during the summer. Could use it during the winter... just make the family wear more jumpers...

Would be an interesting project, not quite as silly as it sounds once you start to think about it. Great heat dissipation, pump already in situ in another room and no fans needed for the rads...

Maybe only connect to an upstairs unused rad. and point an airconditioning unit at it....

Lots of strange possibilities...


mmm...


Pete

P.S. as for the 'put/move it to another room' idea... you may have started more than you realise there... . Put on a flame proof suit if I were you.

I know. The other thread on that idea has been locked. But I'm more looking at this from a wireless perspective and feasibility. Not so much as a universal solution overlooked. I'm also not suggesting put 'the computer' as such outside. I am thinking just put the components that are heat/noise producers outside. Not important input and output components such as the CD-Rom drive etc.

If you think about it, putting these components underground or on the roof wirelessly connected could really provide some interesting possibilities. Such as water cooling taken to a level never seen before.

Without wires this could really make for some interesting possibilities. Maybe an LCD screen with DVD burner/player built into it, and keyboard and mouse similar to those used on PDA's or laptops. Your computer could become something you throw in a drawer when your not using it, yet have unmatchable power. Say 100ghz? When heat's not an issue, that could really open some doors.

Well you could easily drop the idea of a solid state hard drive. You need the hard drive to be near the CPU rather than near you.

As for the keyboard and mouse I don't see a problem with those being wireless but I'm a little less sure about the Cd drives and monitor. Would there be enough bandwidth available?

Probably best to have these connected with cables though I don't know how long the cables could get while maintaining performance.

No, too slow.

My Sony/Ericsson T610 takes forever just to transfer a few small images shot with the hardly-a-few-kilopixels camera. Synching the address book alone takes around 30 seconds, any I don't exactly have all of Scarsdale in there.

It works fine for my MX900 mouse and the wireless bluetooth keyboard, but the phone is proof that the bandwidth is far too little for mass storage.

-Ed

The point is not really "how can we do this with cables" the point is more what new possibilities doing it without any cables bring.

Enough bandwidth? Well, I'm sure that could be worked somehow. Maybe double up the transmitters. However, I'm not even saying it is possible yet, just if it is possible what one could do to utilize this concept for silence. If it is not really freezable yet, it probably will become rather soon.

Hard drive being near you can be a good thing, if the transmission technology is fast enough. Portability of huge amounts of important data for example. If everything were wireless, you could have your hard drive plugged in where ever, assuming the wireless communication was able to communicate clearly with it.

It doesn't really matter in this example where the hard drive is though, since the point is more separating the heat producers (cpu/gpu/psu) from the fairly silent passively coolable components (sound, dvdrw/cdrw, mouse, keyboard, monitor).

Everything is now possible to communicate via digital. Therefore anything could be communicated through wireless I would think. DVI video, spdif sound, etc. Of course this could also be done digitally over cables, if one were so inclined. Cables however remove any portability this approach might have.

Having a universal communication technology such as maybe Bluetooth for everything you could have a transmitter at the cpu/gpu/psu sending to a receiver in the house, which then retransmits to everywhere in the house. Then printer, monitor, keyboard, everything could be anywhere and be hooked in.

The key idea I'm looking at here is the possibilities that separating the heat/noise producing components (cpu/gpu/psu) from the rest of the system wirelessly could bring.

I have a bluetooth printer, it's not bad. I don't think I would want to use bluethtooth for anything speedy.

Intel is developing Wireless USB, I can't remember the speed for it though.

USB wireless dongles are out now and ordinary wireless is up to 108Mbs, with I would imagine, like everything else, more to come.

Maybe not entirely usefull now, the futures looking brighter though.

It'll come... and in the mean time, might make a suitable though lower key solution.

Maybe it's time to start to ...'Think outside the box' as it were


Pete.

I think this willl become a reality, but not for another 5-10 years. Massive amounts of bandwidth would be needed to transmit data to video displays. Each frame would need to be compressed, and encoding @ the computer, and decoding @ the monitor would add additional lag time. This would be fine if you are just surfing or editing documents. However, games would feel unresponsive.

Well, maybe the technology is not available just yet. But when it is, I'm thinkin maybe it could really change the way we use computers.

Like I said, maybe I have to much time to think.

(PS, I wrote my other post up before I read your post Ed ).

I guess my question right now is, is there any wireless video transmission technology available for computer resolution video?

WUSB (Wireless USB) is a completely new technology.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1981

Agreed, which is why I said "USB wireless dongles" not wireless USB.
Pete

Yes, there is. You know those tablet PCs that disconnect from their docks so you can carry them around? They do wireless video transmission, but it's not good enough for movies or games... there's just not enough bandwidth.

IIRC Tablet PC's use Windows XP PRO's 'Remote Desktop'. That is why they are slow. It is even slow on a 100M network.
It is not the fault of wireless entirely that it's slow, it's slow by nature and MS is working on getting it up to speed so it is viable in exactly this kind of deployment.

Also Remote Desktop does not support Direct X, at least at the moment. So it will be useless for some things i.e. games.


Pete

Hmmm... back to good ol' wires I guess.

I still think the concept of separating the heat producing components from the rest of the system could somehow be implemented in a useful way. If you went all-digital (dvi, spdif etc) you wouldn't have signal loss over a long wire I don't think. So it could be done. Perhaps with usb keyboard, mouse, sound, and storage and dvdrom drives. Then you would have two cables, dvi, and usb. However, usb has a problem being run over long distances if I recall correctly. Needs boosting through powered hubs in between I think. Not impossible, but annoying.

Functionally if you were to do it this way you would not sacrifice much, since you can program the computer to turn on by pressing a specific key on the keyboard, and shut down is through windows. USB floppy, dvd/cdrom, and keyboard/mouse/joystick about fulfill most users needs. Internet hookup could be done wireless, so you would have access to the modem in case it needs a reset. Running a spdif wire from your computer to your speakers easily solves the sound problem... sound OUTPUT. Where would I plug in my mic for voice chat?! So... sound would have to be usb external, for all practical purposes. You could ofcourse get a soundcard with spdif input, but that doesn't help since mics are analog. The only way would be to get say an Extigy and convert to spdif. Why do that when you could just as well plug it in usb and save running the two spdif wires? So to complete the setup, you would also need a USB external sound setup. So that about boils down to two wires. USB and DVI. I guess you could run it over a long distance this way, if your in the mood to buy a USB hub for every 15 feet of wire. Perhaps firewire would be a better alternative. However, I think it also suffers from signal loss and the need for hubs. Ultimately it seems to me impractical to use wires for all but short distances. Maybe USB wireless will offer something for a setup like this.

Just my thoughts, if someone were so inclined to try this. That wouldn't be me.

I use the PC at my office (first floor) to watch movies in DVD, play games and surf the internet from my TV in the family room and in the kitchen (both in the ground floor at about 7 meters and two brick walls from the PC).

This is my setup:

- The keyboard / mouse is a Logitech diNovo. Amazing piece of HW because it is beautiful and because it works flawlessly accross those walls.
- The gaming device is a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad. Also works perfect.
- Video (at 800 x 600, enough for the TV) and Audio are inserted in the antenna cables of the house. Really easy and unexpensive, done with a VHF A/V modulator and a wideband mixer that I needed anyway. I can watch the PC screen in every TV of the house.

I previously had a 2.4 GHz wireless video transmitter that worked pretty well (slightly better quality but messy with the orientation of the antennas) but it used the same frequency that the other wireless devices and there were small interference bands in the screen, so that I changed to the VHF modulator and I'm extremely happy. So, you can have a full wireless system if you need to (interferences only appear when you click buttons or move the mouse, so that it is good for movies but not for games).

The noise I get in the family room is, of course, zero, but for me the main reason for this setup is not only the noise but avoiding the hazzle and the cost of having two different PCs to connect, maintain, operate, upgrade, etc.

the only problem with wireless units is providing power - nobody has yet developed a safe wireless power ssupply, and there hasn't been a significant enough leap in battery technology to have loads of battery operated items around and aabout.

Now i don't have the link, but there was this disabled guy who wanted a more "elite" watercooling system, so he got his carer to dig a ditch round the garden and laid a load of copper piping down, n buried it. He get's low temperatures.

griff

Three words: Find the link!

Hehe, I'm interested in this, it's the concept I was thinking of... just cuz it's silent supper cooling. Think if you had aluminum pipes, instead of copper, with heat dissipaters welded onto them, buried...

Now, what would be nice is that you could use this technology to make shared used of a real powerfull system. More citrix/terminal server-like.
I always felt that all the hours a pc is just waiting for input really is wasted a lot. 95% of the time your pc is using 5% cpu power... and 5% of the time it's using 95%... being able to make use of shared cpu power could level things out more... But that's actually not on topic and an entirely different discussion

(but... I think noone can deny the move in corporations toward citrix and terminal server like systems, basically putting things back to what they were 10-20 years ago with a terminal at your desktop, logged in to a big, powerfull mainframe instead of the 1-cpu-per-desk 'hype' promoted by ms and hardware vendors we've had to endure for the last 10-15 years).

More on-topic: A while ago I was thinking that putting 1 usb cable between a hub on my desk and my pc would be enough for all my i/o needs... except ofcourse for video

Along similar lines: BladeRunner's "Bomb". Be sure to read the rest of the article too, its full of very cool homebrew WC'ing stuff. While you're at it, give his site a visit: Zero fan Zone. He pops in here at SPCR every once in awhile.

Good concept, since it's true most computers aren't at full potential very often. However, privacy is limited with a shared system to a certain extent. I certainly wouldn't want my data on a shared system with say my neighbor. Also, for gamers and the like, wouldn't they want all the performance to themselves?

Hey, maybe there should be a forum here dedicated to only true hardcore silent cooling?

Like the links btw.

Err, I think the entire place already is....

Yeah; remember the, "warm," reception we gave xg2004?

Well... not everyone on this forum is willing to dig an 8 foot hole and weld a watercooling system onto a huge tank and burry it. That's hardcore. Just padding a case and better heatsinks etc, that I call silencing... vrs quieting which is what is more your average. Quieting, Silencing, and hardcore supper silencing I guess. hehe. Maybe I'm wrong tho.

Inside joke? what?

*edit*
Ah, I get it... lol. Thankfully this thread did not take that route. Yet..

Well, this is SilentPCReview, not QuietPCReview...

Cheers,

Jan

Bluetooth is EXTREMELY slow. Forget about bluetooth and think WLAN. And while you are thinking of WLAN you might want to think about linux as well (why? Beats me ).

So, what is generating noise in your computer?
- CPU
- Harddrives
- PSU
- Case fan
- Graphics card

So let's put those somewhere else! No, I'm not talking about having a bunch of wires going through a wall. I'm talking about creating a mainframe with a quiet node.

If you just want to get rid of the harddrive noise you are in luck since putting up an NFS server is simple and efficient. Now instead of booting from the hd you boot from a floppy or usb stick and mount the root fs over wlan. Unfortunately harddrive noise is the only noise this setup can eliminate.

However since this is SILENT pc review, why not go silent?

You see there is this really nice debian based project called skolelinux (think easier LTSP). The way this works is that you have a server (your ex desktop computer) that you run everything on just like before. The only difference is that instead of the computer drawing stuff on the screen, it will "draw" stuff to the wlan. The same goes for playing audio. You will only transfer drawing instructions and an audio stream over the wlan to the little node that only needs enough power to display and play what it is told.

To do just the drawing of the output you don't need anything more powerful than a Pentium ~100Mhz! If you have lot's of cash to spend you can get an (old) VIA EPIA for ~$150 (or €) or than you can just make due with an older computer.

Note that old computers draw A LOT less power, hence you can generally speaking get away with a <100W psu and use that as the only fan in the whole machine!

Edit: Made some clarifications

um...

um...

if we could have a really loud box, (and quiet interface) stuff it in the basement, and run remotely in any fashion we choose, quiet would not really be an issue-
all of these wonderful people here, and all of the wonderful engineering, and community, and exchange of ideas, as well as a decent hobby, WOULD GO POOF! (or at least 90% of it) be careful what you wish for folks... i think SPCR will have more, not less value in times to come...