TrustedReviews looks at a very, very, very cool new PC design:
There are two critical requirements for a Media PC that’s going to reside in your living room, it has to look great and be quiet as a mouse. Unfortunately, these two requirements are poles apart when it comes to designing and engineering a computer. In order to make a PC look good it needs to resemble a consumer electronics device with slim dimensions like a modern DVD player, but the slimmer and more attractive you make a PC, the hotter it becomes inside and the more fans you have to use to cool it, resulting in greater noise pollution. Tackling the problem from the other side, you can use a large case with lots of air flow, along with large fans spinning at low speed and making very little noise, but the result is a big, ugly system that no one would want in their living room.
However, German custom PC builder Hush Technologies has managed to create machines that fulfill both criteria with aplomb. Hush PCs, as the name suggests, are completely quiet in operation. This is due to the fact that there isn’t a single fan spinning inside the system case – absolutely everything from the CPU to the graphics card is passively cooled. Now Hush has been building fanless ATX systems for some time and I reviewed one myself here, but this is the first time that Hush has taken its passively cooled PC design to its natural progression and equipped it with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
This is the first Media Center PC ever to roll off the Hush production line, and I have to say that if this is Hush’s idea of a first attempt, it’s not leaving itself much room for improvement. Usually when I’m looking at an early sample of a new product, I find it to be a little rough around the edges, but everything on this Hush is as close to perfect as it’s ever going to be. Of course from a hardware perspective this isn’t surprising, but I thought that there might be a few software niggles, since Hush has never implemented Media Center before, but running MCE proved to be as smooth as the beautifully machined Hush casing.
This is only one of many really great new designs I’ve seen lately from companies that realize a PC has to look different to fit in the living room. (I’ll spotlight a few more in coming days.) What makes this one special is the focus on low noise.
Thanks to Scoble for the pointer to the Hush design.
Ed Bott 