So, ever since I bought my new iMac, this has brought "computer buying frenzy" to Sunnyvale. Kevin has upped the ante by purchasing two machines -- an iMac (for GarageBand), and a Sony of his owny (for Linux, Apache, and MythTV). The iMac hasn't arrived from Apple yet, so Kevin scooped up the Sony VGC-RC110G today, to start playing with that first:
In the Reitz family tradition, I made him take the machine apart before anything else happened with it. One of the reasons why Kevin chose this particular machine is because it is supposedly very quiet. Taking a look inside, this could certainly be the case. The 400W power supply has quite a large fan in it, which hopefully will spin at a lower RPM. The video card doesn't has only a heat sink (no fan), and the CPU has a heat pipe (potentially water cooled) combined with the biggest heatsink that I have ever seen (and I've seen the inside of the PowerMac G5). Sitting beside the heatsink is an even larger fan that what is in the power supply.
So, there is every possibility that this could be one quiet machine. I don't think it will be quieter than my iMac, but it will certainly be quieter than my Dell Precision Workstation 420 (which has at least one fan that is in some stage of going bad, so has been making quite an annoying racket for months now. But not annoying enough for me to fix it!).
Anyways, hardware-wise the Sony PC consists of an Intel 945P chipset (on an Intel-made motherboard), a Pentium D 830 (dual core Pentium 4 running at 3.0Ghz), 1Gb of RAM, and a 250Gb SATA disk. The machine also includes an ATI X300 PCI-Express video card (which can probably be made to work in Linux), and a Sony "Giga Pocket" video capture card. This card doesn't appear to be supported under Linux, but I found that it has a Conexant CX23416-22 chip on it, so getting it to work under Linux might just be a possibility. I am encouraging Kevin to work with the folks behind the ivtv project to see if this can be made a reality. I think it would be a nice story to take a piece of hardware that initially only worked with Sony's proprietary TV capture software, and now has been expanded to work with Windows Media Center Edition, work in Linux.
Expect more updates on that, and Kevin's general progress with this machine, in the coming months. For now, there is a gallery of photos available for your enjoyment.
-Andy.