Low Budget, Zero Moving Parts PC.

[Brian]

I've been toying with the idea of a PC with no moving parts for a long time. I finally rounded up enough parts from the garbage and EBay and got it done.

Parts:

$20 2GB Transcend CF card, 120X. Supports DMA. I got it on NewEgg a while ago.
$5 CF-IDE adapter. Does not support DMA.
$20 ASUS Cusi-FX motherboard. It's bigger than MiniITX and smaller than uATX. Integrated video, S370. Comes with electrically insulative manual, pictured below.

The following parts were salvaged from a Gateway a relative was throwing out:
1GHz P3, now at 750MHz.
.5GB RAM
DVD drive
A very nifty heatsink, de-fanned.


In the final version, the snowman was replaced with a de-fanned ATX PSU.

Unless you put a disc in the drive, it's got no moving parts! Natural convection keeps the northbridge very cool, and the CPU stays nice and toasty.

Good points:
No moving parts.
The machine has enough power to run XP, Office, the Internet, and Skype.
It was cheap.

Bad points:
I wish it had more than 2GB so I could keep things like music and movies on it.
Has only two USB 1.1 ports.
It's not silent. It's got a faint buzz/crackle coming from the CPU area. Probably the VRM. No big deal, since you can't hear it from where I sit, 1m away.

All in all, I'm very happy with it.
Maybe I'll buy a PicoPSU and build it a case at some point.

Edit: I should add two things:
The power consumption: 20W AC.
If you're thinking about building one of these, I would strongly recommend you get a card reader that supports DMA, and get a Sparta.

[fmriguy]

Very nice, too bad the snowman in all of his stylish glory can't power it himself... So what were you planning on doing with the system, just using it for casual web browsing, office, etc? I suppose it would also work quite well as a low-power home server. Although you don't have much in terms of storage, you could easily use a small linux distro and mount network shares (or external USB) and voila! At the very least you could use it as a firewall or printserver. So many options

Also, did you have to slow the 1Ghz proc down to 750 for stability reasons given that you removed the fan from the heatsink, or was it just for power savings? Regardless, a nice bit of tinkering. Post again when you make your own fancy case for it.

[Brian]

Thank you.

This system replaces Motorcraft, and I'm using it right now. I've got Office and Matlab on it, so it's my main work box, too.

I chose 750MHz since that's what simulations predicted my heatsink could handle. The simulations were right: CPU temps get up to about 55°C under sustained load.

I could undervolt this beast, which would enable me to bump up the CPU speed a tad while staying inside my thermal envelope, but undervolting a P3 is a hardware mod, shorting pins on the CPU or socket.

[ivionday]

This is really cool.
Similar to what I did in college with a cardboard box and fullsize atx. I remember a similar electrical buzz , but it came from the power supply i think.
This little rig is a proof that these utility pc's could be sold for 100 bucks. I always heard that regular flash memory can't be used as a system drive because of the write limit. What's your insight on the subject?

[williamn6133]

I've been toying with the idea of a PC with no moving parts for a long time. I finally rounded up enough parts from the garbage and EBay and got it done.

Cool! Can we see some pics of the finished, working product?

[Rebellious]

Nice, I like no moving parts, except the electrons of course

How did you install XP on the CF-IDE? Did Windows see it as a hard disk?

[Spare Tire]

Could you bench the 120X CF card? I benched my rated 280X CF card with HDTune and i got only ~11Mb/sec, much lower than what it's rated. Don't know why. My computer certainly isn't the chokepoint.

[pingu666]

could be the usb controller, some are pretty random with speeds they give :\

[Spare Tire]

No, i plug it straight into the IDE header.