Aiming at Nothing

Thanks in part to a lesson in patience brought to me by UPS (the patience arrived before my packages did), I was forced to delay my PVR building project for a few days. When the parts did finally arrive, I worked non-stop on it for most of the following day. I took some pictures. Occasionally I remembered to eat.

Because this device is going to sit in our family room, I wanted to keep the fan noise as low as possible. On the other hand, the PC is going to necessarily generate a good deal of heat. In trying to strike a balance between noise and cooling, I selected a fanless graphics processor using a pair of heat pipes and radiators. Whatever the eventual noise level of my PVR, this graphics card will not contribute at all to that value.

The card utilizes two finned radiators—one on the front and a smaller one on the back—to pull heat away from an NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT processor. A copper transfer plate that is also covered in heat-radiating fins hides the chip itself.

As you can see from the picture above, this card occupies two slots in the backplane. If I were building a gaming machine with SLi (two GPUs ganged together), I would need to plan ahead for the additional space requirements. This application, however, doesn’t require a great deal of 3D rendering. My main concern was throughput and, while this card was probably overkill, one must admit that it looks pretty freaking cool. With enough case ventilation, it should stay cool as well.

There are three outputs on the backplane: VGA, DVI-D and a proprietary connector for hooking up a breakout box for component and S-video. My monitor—a 50 inch DLP 1280×720 projector—has inputs to match any of those outputs, giving me a great deal of flexibility. Ultimately I chose to use DVI-D because the monitor identifies itself to the GPU automatically. As of this writing I can tell you that the GPU is not working very hard and is therefore not building up much heat. In a later post I’ll talk about how I hope to better utilize this card to offload tasks from the CPU.

I’ve included a couple photos of the output. The screen is slightly off-center because I was getting reflection from windows in another room; moving the camera slightly pushed the reflection to the left.

Here we see a frame from CSI:New York without the Snapstream HUD in the way. Click on the picture for a larger version.