Another Amazing Beryl + Linux Video
Posted to General. 10 Responses
I’m definitely not in a position where I’d want to switch away from the Mac, but some of the latest work going on with Linux is extremely tempting. All they need are native Adobe apps (Wine powered doesn’t count), and someone needs to build a PC that even remotely approaches the iMac in terms of form factor and quietness (I have a reasonably quiet Shuttle PC I almost never use because even though it’s very quiet in PC terms, it’s not SILENT like my iMac).
March 9th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
I don’t know about you, but increased wobbliness and transparency is sure as shit not on my shortlist of things I need more of from Mac OS X visuals.
March 9th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Transparency is actually useful. Of course, if it isn’t to you, just don’t turn it on
March 9th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Notice how when you start dragging a window the transparency increases so you can see what’s underneath. That’s actually very helpful.
Peter, there’s a whole industry out there dedicated to constructing silent PCs. The hypothetical tradeoff between non-silent PC and silent Mac is not valid. And by the way, I have the latest iMac and it is not silent. But I do have a completely silent PC.
March 9th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
That there may be, but they’re so hard to find. When I search for ’silent pc’ I get lots of sites selling silent components, which is a good start, but I can’t really find any particular brand doing this. I do see a lot of BTX and “mini” PCs, but they’re rather underpowered. My iMac totally slaughters my Shuttle-based Athlon X2 4000+ by about 1.5 on processor benchmarks.
Intriguingly, the Shuttle is silent CPU wise. It’s the various vents at the back (and the video card) that seem to be the cause of the racket. But this is moot.. I’m not buying another mega monitor in the near future unless this iMac blows up
And I gave my 20″ Dell to my dad in exchange for a smaller screen since I only use the 2nd screen for iTunes!
Perhaps I’ll get a 27″ or 30″ in several months’ time and see what the situation is like then.
March 10th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I don’t know if you can get shipments from them in the UK, but newegg.com is a great place to find all sorts of silent heatsinks and really quiet fans. They have large pictures of all their products from various angles. They also have very detailed specs about all their products that allow you to search for the exact speed, size etc. you want. You could, for example, get dual quad-core xeon processors on a dual-core ASUS motherboard and then put silent CPU fans on them. You could also get a great silent Seasonic power supply, along with some hard drive dampers, and you’d be in business. This would smoke your Mac, be a lot cheaper, and it would be practically silent. If you want total silence you could go with water cooling, but that’s a bit more expensive. Anyway though, it really is quite affordable and easy to build a powerful silent PC if you know the right place to buy from.
March 10th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Sorry, meant to say dual-proc ASUS motherboard.
March 10th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
All sounds very fun, but I’d certainly expect a machine with £1000+ of processors in it to ’smoke my Mac’ with a £150 processor in it
Sounds like a lot of work. I just like to fork over the money and have something working. I guess some people enjoy playing about with it all though and will find this useful advice.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Have you tried kustompcs.co.uk? They sell quite a lot of components that can reduce the noise of the heatsink by either using heatpipes to channel the heat away, or water cooling (http://kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/Kustom_PCs_Shop_Watercooling_70.html).
Another angle, but not as powerful, would be a Via fanless board. My home file/email server is fanless and near quite. Mine is a pokey 700 mhz (perfect for a server), though they do go up to 1.5 ghz (http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2#p1661)
Geoffrey
April 5th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Very pretty eye-candy. I’m sure we can trust the Apple UI people to keep it to dull roar though. They know when too much is just flashy call girls and reduces user productivity and interface intelligibility.
I do like those burning away windows, but it would get old quickly unless there was some randomness to the way it occurs.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:16 am
WTFOMG!!!111 They copied OSX! funny that this isn’t a problem because it’s linux and not Windows, and even stranger since unlike Windows, it *actually is* a copy of OSX in places. Or is that ok because Beryl copies Windows too in places?
I actually don’t care about this argument, just seems to be all over the place and only goes to show how childish it is. FWIW I’m using Vista, and frankly I like it. it does everything I need, it’s faster and more attractive than XP, and there’s some really powerful stuff under the hood - And I’m not talking about the visuals.
All that said, Beryl does look lovely. I might just give it a go. A fun project for me this weekend anyway!