to the IT people -fanless PC

[Sancho]

Probably not compatible, but old Apple iBooks don't have fans. The heat comes out of the keyboard, which is fine apart from the cat tends to sleep on it....

For what it's worth, too. Dell were good up until about ten years ago and their retail stuff now is just junk.

[MattF]

thanks for the links! dont look i'll be buying any time soon though, not now i need to spend more money on the car this month

Your other option, (cheaper), would be to get a generic Motorola based ADSL router and use the open source RouterTech firmware, or a Linksys, D-Link or the like and use the OpenWRT? firmware.

[MattF]

Just on a side note with regards to processor compatibility, NetBSD is your best option in that regard. It will give you a lot of leeway in what hardware you can use:

http://netbsd.org/docs/

[RodLeach]

Why dont you just go watercooled or something?!

[MattF]

Why dont you just go watercooled or something?!

It won't be required plus water and electricity don't mix. Water cooled kits are nothing more than eye candy, (and money earners for the retailers), for the real computer anoraks. Anyone with an ounce of gorm wouldn't let one anywhere near a computer.

[dieselboy]

i did a water and peltier cooled setup a couple of years ago, to see how far i could push my cpu.

idle temps were -10c on both cores, and load temps were anywhere between -1c and +2c.
ice formed on the copper which spread the heat from the cpu out to a larger surface area, which the pelt then removed and transferred to the water.

many things to note:
i needed a seperate psu to power the tiny half playing card size of the peltier
the heat dissipated by the pelt / water and radiator setup was enough to heat my room to way hotter than comfortable, and opening the window didnt help enough.
the power drawn by the pelt was enough to melt the 30AMP connector blocks i used to wire it together, to the point where it almost short circuited.
the ice was fine, until you loaded the cpu and it would melt
the negative temperatures wasnt liked by my AMD opteron, and caused the memory controller to crash.

one thing though: i bought a 30cm piece of copper to cut 2" from the end to make a square block about 5mm thick,
i held it at one end, and the copper is so good at transferring heat, that the heat from the circular saw travelled the length of the copper, and burnt my hand through leather gloves before i had cut through it.

this was a lot of fun, and if i had an intel chip may be i would have had more interesting experiences - eg near the 4ghz mark.

[dieselboy]

Your other option, (cheaper), would be to get a generic Motorola based ADSL router and use the open source RouterTech firmware, or a Linksys, D-Link or the like and use the OpenWRT? firmware.

thats obviously too easy