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Just thought I'd let folks know that I just ordered a new mini-ITX box from mini-itx.com. It looks pretty nice, and it's the first nicely packaged box I've seen that has a passively cooled VIA EPIA M9000 board with a 933MHz CPU.

See Hush mini-ITX

This will replace my current HTPC, a P4 1.8GHz in an Ahanix DIGN HTPC case. I'm really looking forward to the lack of fan noise, and I don't think I'll miss the VFD from the DIGN case (on-screen display is much more useful to me, I never seem to look at the VFD). I know I won't miss throwing money at the electric company to run the P4 24 hours a day. :-)

Anyway, it'll be a while before it gets here, but I thought I'd throw out the reference and I'll post impressions at some point. I only use the HTPC for an mp3 jukebox, running my own software. No PC gaming in the family room, and no desire for it there (a Playstation2 scratches that occasional itch). I had been looking at idot.com, but the only HT-oriented case they carry appears to be the Morex Cubid, which isn't pretty (plastic faceplate, ugly door for front ports).

Any interest in selling your old stuff?

I wish Hush would allow you to buy without any extras. I'd be interested in their box, perhaps, if I could get it sans HDD, memory and CD-Rom.

Please report your results. Additionally, how were you outputting the results and interacting with the desktop?

Regarding selling my old box... I'm probably going to keep it for a bit, at least until I have the EPIA machine working well.

For interface, I have been using an X-10 remote with my own X-10 software to interact with the jukebox software I wrote, but I think I'm going to toy with using IR on the new box. I'm basically not interacting with the desktop in general, just my mp3 client application. I'm running FreeBSD pretty much everywhere, except for one linux development box, a Powerbook and a G4 tower. The one bad thing about the EPIA board is that there's only one serial port, I might wind up buying a serial port card at some point so I'll still have a port to talk to my Sunfire receiver. My mp3 jukebox software has a CORBA interface, so I can just fire up the mp3 control client on my laptop, but the laptop isn't convenient to recharge like a good remote control and doesn't have a lot of battery logevity. It also isn't horribly fun to use in a reclined position. :-) The output went via S-video on the old box, I suspect I'll do the same with the EPIA. Audio went analog, on the new box I hope to use the S/PDIF (no idea if the OSS drivers will work). The box is powered 7x24 because the jukebox software multicasts on my LAN and I listen from other machines with zinf (and recently an RTP-enabled version of xmms). Hence the move to a VIA EPIA board... I'd like to cut back on the power consumption. The jukebox software uses very little CPU, maybe 5 minutes a day running 3 separate multicasts and the associated control servants (which handle searching, queueing, and upload/download of mp3 files to/from the jukebox).

I started writing the jukebox software a few years ago in my spare time. I haven't worked on it much in a while, in part because it does what I need it to do and has been rock-solid stable for a year. The plan was to release it under a BSD-style license, I just haven't gotten around to it. It's using omniORB for CORBA (and JacORB in the case of the java client, which I rarely use), and a modified liveMedia library for multicast. It's also using id3lib (for tag handling), Qt (for the native client), and I forget what else (my point being it's probably a license quagmire for anyone who'd want to make money from it :-)).

SPDIF on the Epia mobo works excellently and should output to your Sunfire with RAW digital for DVD, DivX, MP3 and audio redbook. I believe the HUSH is using a 50 or 60 W DC-DC coverter. Very little power. Here are some specs based on someone who measured power consumption on a system similar to the HUSH.
http://www.seanm.ca/eden/psu.html
My 1st stab on HTPC is here which is using the same board as the HUSH. EPIA 9000M
http://www.spacelofts.com/HTPC/
The EPIA M9000 All-in-one board is easy to setup. Issues I had was some noise with a TV tuner tuner and the Video on DVD is not as clear. The built on video is so-so. The picture was not as crisp as the new box I have just built. I am building my 2nd HTPC which is using a Radeon 9700 based on this box using Celeron or a P4 chip.
http://www.techseekers.net/modules.php?name=Reviews&rop=showcontent&id=40
I was surprised to get a Radeon 9700 running fine even though this box only had a 150W PSU. Readeon 9700 specs suggested a 300W+ PSU. The picture for both the MSI TV Tuner and DVD is excellent using WinDVD Platinum/PVR. I still have yet to try DScaler or the Sonic CineMaster player which a lot of AVS Forum members are doing. Semi thanks for all the tips.

Saturn
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=116221

Ops. The link under my name was incorrectly placed. It should be above my name. That post was not by me. It was a Thread that help me in building my 2nd HTPC. Will post results on the new box later on.

As per my comment above on the EPIA mobo. I do not think it is a poor product. It is great for an easy to do All-in-one package. Great for music and DVDs. I thought to myself why was I not having issues like some other people on building a HTPC. The EPIA solves the everything within the package deal. It is silent, small, almost fanless and has the built-in motion compensation chip. It is a great HTPC.

I didn't get into problems until I started building a HTPC with more ummphhh. More power was needed, quiet cooling and better airflow. The new Redeon's has superior video output. It gave a substantially cleaner DVD output. This new box definitely has now enough horsepower to push the new 3D games. Although currently a Celeron 2.2 I will upgrade to a Hyper threading CPU when the prices of those go down. It didn't run XP sluggishly like the EPIA did when working with apps. Was able to pick up a deal on the Radeon 9700 DDR 128. It was OEM and came with Sapphire Cd drivers. I install the standard ATI Catalyst drivers and it looks like it detects a Radeon Pro 9700. I might be wrong. It was a nice price of $329 CDN or $235 US.

dwm can you post a review on the HUSH box after you have
it all setup. I would like to know your finding since I have yet to see anyone post a review on performance on the box.

This is another case that caught my eye outside of the Hush. Its only sold out of Japan. and it aint cheap.
$1115US barebones system!!!
http://www.soldam.com/barebone/polo_r_figaro/fav/





Saturn

I don't need oomph here, nor the electricity consumption. I work from home, and there are 6 dual-CPU computers here, including a watercooled dual Xeon 2.8GHz w/ 2G DDR and a watercooled dual AMD MP 2600+ with 2G DDR (both with 10,000 rpm SCSI drives). There are 6 single-CPU machines too. My electricity bill would make most people ill, and the noise of the racks in the basement is definitely way beyond what any sane person would tolerate in a living space. The objective in the family room now is 'no fans, no water pumps'. i.e. silent but for disk drive fans. I have no interest in another DVD in the family room, since my standalone player works fine and I'm about to order a Denon 2900 to get SACD. No need for a tuner card either, I have cable, over-the-air HD, DirectTV HD, and a Replay 5000 in the family room. I do have a couple of WinTV cards elsewhere, and they work fine, you just have to be careful about cabling and card placement to avoid noise
(RG-59 is a bad idea in my office, for example; I needed good RG-6 to avoid induced noise). Video quality only has to be good enough to use my mp3 jukebox client, and I could actually live without any video since my tendency is to queue a bunch of stuff at once (which I can do from any computere in the house, including the laptops).

I would definitely be interested in your findings for the SPDIF out of the HUSH via EPIA mobo in comparison to your old setup. Or are you planning to put a specialized audio card into the Hush for your audio output? I always thought that RAW digital out via coax or optic was always the same but I have read some writeups that some cards or mobo actually resample up or down which doesnt really make sense to my limited knowloedge of HTPC, SPDIF outputs.

I'd like to avoid buying another audio card, but it is in the back of my mind and I'll do it if necessary. Upsampling makes complete sense to me, since I suspect a lot of PC sources aren't 44.1kHz (many games, for example, don't need 44.1kHz sampling or even 16-bit quantization).

I'm running FreeBSD, so I suspect it'll all boil down to whether or not the OSS drivers work correctly with S/PDIF output on the VT1616. They work on my office desktop machine (the dual Xeon 2.8), but that's a different beast altogether (different on-board audio) and I'm using a Flying Cow for D/A there since I needed balanced analog outs to interface with my other gear (all balanced runs to avoid induced noise from all the computer and related gear in my office).

If I have to use a PCI card, I'm not sure what I'll do. I don't think OSS supports S/PDIF on the Envy24 chip, so the m-audio cards probably aren't an option (REvolution 7.1 would be nice since it's inexpensive, but if the S/PDIF output won't work on FreeBSD...). I'd rather not go as far as an Audigy2 Platinum eX, since I'd like to avoid the space consumption of an external D/A box and the like. Unfortunately OSS only supports S/PDIF on the external boxes for Creative cards, so that's what I'd probably have to use. Hopefully OSS will drive the S/PDIF on the motherboard so I won't have to worry about it.

It looks like it'll be at least 3 weeks 'til I get the Hush box. Apparently they were taking pre-orders for a while, my confirmation says the build time is expected to be 2 weeks out and it'll take 5 days to ship to the U.S.

My Hush EPIA M9000 box arrived this week. First impressions: it's perfect for what I'm doing. No fans, the case looks nice (esp. the power button), and the heatsink design works well. I did a 'make world' (FreeBSD) to run the disks and CPU hard for a while, the heatsinks gets slightly warm but the top stays cool. Seems to be working just dandy. I have 512M RAM in it, the Teac slim CDRW/DVD combo, and the 80G Barracuda disk drive.

I managed to get XFree86 working with the S-video output. Not great, but it's fine for what I need to do (run my jukebox interface at 640x480). At the moment I'm using the analog audio output, which turns out to not be horrible. I grounded the Hush box to the receiver, and much to my surprise, there's no audible noise even when there's no input signal (mp3 player paused) and the Sunfire Ultimate is wound up to -20dB from max. Above this is too loud to be comfortable if there's input signal, so I'm happy with it for now. I'll try the OSS driver this weekend with the S/PDIF output.

I only wish I had waited a little bit before ordering. Hush is now selling Nehemiah based boxes for like $32 more U.S. Maybe the next one... :-)