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Re: [LUG] thin clients: silent, right?



Adrian Midgley wrote:

Thin clients for X or for that matter MS' windowing GUI don't have a fan in,
am I right?

Ylem were using Axel boxes, the Axel 3000 65 has no moving parts
(apart I guess from the off switch ?!) and supports VNC to
Linux, RDP to Windows, and a selection of text terminal options!
www.axel.com

Other vendors vary as to whether they have a fan or not.

So no noise to disturb the office/consulting room?

Commonest GP IT grumble apart from programs falling over is of the noise the
PC makes in a consulting room.

You can get real computing power these days without a fan, ask
Apple ! The G4 cube supplies the power of one Cray C90
processor, but without the room sized cooling system, although
the cube runs hot enough to generate a heat haze above the CPU!

If you step down to lower power processors, Intel do a selection
of processors that can be air cooled (or even water cooled -
shades of standing milk cartons on the old ZX81). You can also
buy fan free kits for various existing CPUs, and fan free power
supplies.

There are whole websites dedicated to this.

The problem is most people don't (think they) want to pay the
premium, or loss of CPU power.

In future I'm assured processors will come with a layer of
artifical diamond across the top, to take advantage of the high
heat conductance of diamond. Intel CPUs are already worth more
than there weight in gold, but the diamond should let them stay
cooler.

I'd be more worried about the programs falling over myself - but
then I don't do hardware ;-)

Simon

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