How it all started...

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:03:02 GMT

As one might know we have an exhibition centre here in Dortmund - so called "Westfalenhallen". And once a year there is an exhibition called "Hobbytronic". A lot of computer shops from Dortmund and most of bigger Online-shops for IT and electronics offer mostly remaining or outdated stock. And sometimes one can make a good deal of it. So it happend that a good friend of mine visited the "Hobbytronic" and gave me a call

"Hey - here's an good offer for a MSI barebone for socket 370 with a two slot PCI raiser!"

We already discussed howto build a cheap and small server for SwyxWare some time ago and this offer was the start! He bought two of the basrbones and started to implement the first homegrown SwyxWare. The barebone was a desktop PC with a so called LPX form factor. Very nice and tiny at 2001 when it first came out.

Here some information about it:

http://www.msi-computer.de/produkte/bare_idx_view.php?Prod_id=101

I already did some research on low power CPU and performance calculation and finally decided to use a VIA C3 Eden CPU with 800Mhz. This CPU should not take more than 12W under full load and therefore it should be possible to implement a silent cooling and ensure a low power consumption to run 24/7 at home. In addition I modified the housing to remove the nasty 40mm power supply fan and 60mm CPU by 80mm fan to cool both the CPU and the power supply. As harddisk I used an older 20GB 2,5" notebook model. As result I ended up with a very silent PC with around 50W power consumption at normal operation

As OS I used XP with a SwyxWare v5.0

to be continued...

Ralf's Blog

How it all started...