I'm a power electronics engineer who deals with thermal management quite a lot. I would estimate a heatsink that size (massive!) would have a thermal resistance of 0.1 degrees C / W, or perhaps even less. That means that if you put 30 W into it, it would only rise by 3 degrees above ambient. The other components in the system also have a thermal resistance too, and judging by the temperatures, they have an even higher thermal resistance than the heatsink, which is backwards from most normal designs. I would estimate that the interface between the heatsink and the heatpipes, the heatpipes themselves, the copper heat block, and the interface between the copper and the CPU each have a thermal resistance somewhere around 0.1 degC/W, hence why the heat just seems to slowly disappear as you move further from the CPU.
And just think of a storage heater, and how long you can just keep pumping watt after watt into it without it becoming a supernova. Usually you have one of those "pick two" triangles with thermal mass, specific heat capacity and thermal inertia at the corners, but this box cost so much you got all three
I work as microelectronics engineer for industrial autmation and we use a similar thermal design for edge computing devices which have to have a sealed fanless casing. Some places require sealed cases, because of dust or other environmental hazards.
I was also thinking from a pure physics perspective, 60C on-die, 50C in-transit, and 30C in the huge thermal mass outside is practically a textbook perfect passive heat-engine gradient. Certainly didn’t seem suspicious to me!
Uh, this is how conduction works. The temp will be lower the further you go in the chain. Heat will not flow without those temp deltas. This is basic physics and totally normal. Why an engineer in this field wouldn't know that is kind of strange.
"And I know this because I remember my mom doing pretty much the same thing in our garage when I was 12, making a waterblock for a homemade water cooling system with tools we bought from harbor freight." Your mom is fucking cool, I couldn't imagine mine doing anything like that
Anybody who's seen the thrifting videos knows that its """""just""""" an Xbox in a funky case. Which then makes me wonder what that "just" is hiding there that is so terrible. I'm getting images of some sort of homebrew hack that glitches the CPU to run code that converts it into a media extender, which they then sell you.
We need a video (unless you have done one I haven’t seen) that goes into your tech industry background. Not calling out any companies you worked for, but just a dive into your history with electronics manufacturing, repair, etc.
I kind of want to hear more about his mom making a water block "on tools from harbor freight in the garage" when he was a kid - and his name is "Gravis"? Like the gamepad? There's clearly a LOT of interesting material there
RePC is such a goldmine of 'wtf?' So many memories came flooding back with this video as I was at MS during Vista development. The Windows Vista launch party was in an underground parking garage....draw your own speculations there. Despite working with the WMC team both at MS and on my free time in Seattle film, it never really hit with me due to the overblown costs associated with the formfactor and the noise issue. This was all extremely interesting as nearly all of my experience was scenario testing on very unoptimized hardware (internally we had reworked Dell Optimas in testing labs and a private cable system that ran Pirates of the Carribean on repeat). It does make me want to install WMC on one of my retro systems, though. A little. And it's passed.
When I used to do vacations in Seattle I would always go to re PC and always end up buying some cool stuff, the TSA inspectors and probably everyone else in the TSA security line however probably didn't like the fact that I would hold up the line pulling out laptops and small form factor desktops and small form factor home cedar PCs or tivo boxes out of my carry-on bag and putting them on all of the bins that they had at SeaTac airport
It was easy, you just had to dive right into it and learn as you go. It's intimidating but not hard at all. My parents were not tech savvy by any means... I built my first water cooled PC at 14 years old (2004 ish), right before high school, when I should have been saving for a car, instead I spent my hard earned $2000 savings on a computer lol... Kind of stupid because I never made a career out of my passion for computers, even though I knew so much, I actually HATED fixing them (monotonous, time sucking, hunks of junk I was expected to make 'better than new' again), also hated programming for anything but my own self entertainment lol. No one could pay me enough to this stuff for a living. Of course my mom was more of a history buff than a computer nerd, instead she trusted me to do the family's computer crap since I was 7, having a 2nd grader successfully install Win98 on her computer lol. So I became the family's free IT expert... Grr... No wonder I hated it lol.
@@exohio I mean, I've built my own PC and have helped manage my family's PC since I was young, but it is more a matter of reading the instruction manuals than being in a family that encouraged tinkering.
I work for a large mining equipment manufacturer that makes electric rope shovels and hybrid wheel loaders and those heatsinks remind me of what is used to cool industrial solid state switching components like SCR's and IGBT's so they very possibly could be off the shelf with some in-house finishing or made to spec components.
My face when you turned that thing on... Our family actually used a Windows Media Center PC for our cable and OTA DVR for many years and I used my 360 as an extender. It worked very well. Can't wait for the next video to see the inside of this abomination.
Dude, this video just opened up my eyes to heat pipes. I've been trying to figure out a cooling solution for my salvage pc cluster and this just might have saved me some sleepless nights trying to figure out something. Thanks.
Same! I've been working on a powered sub design with heatsinks mounted internally, to prevent the hand-slicing exposed fins and enable more usable panel space. I think this may have provided a solution to a problem I was facing.
This was so nostalgic. I used an XBMC fork called Boxee back then, which had “deep integration” with RUclips, Vimeo etc on the top level instead of being a buried plugin in native XBMC. Also podcasts IIRC. That bit of text about how Kodi is a more-known name but it wasn’t called that back then, was hilarious. Thank you
Gasped watching the motherboard reveal - looks like an Intel D975XBX which was the basis of my first PC. A older friend gave it to me as a hand me down in 2009 or 10? Was still a competent and somewhat relevant computer at the time. Fascinating to see in this chassis.
I've been a huge fan of fanless cooling for audio production and audio fidelity. Now the term "sixty-pound Roku" will have a small shelf in my brain for the rest of my life. I am very glad to be one of your Patrons, sir.
Having gone down the rabbit hole of trying to build a MCE box during that era myself (If I recall correctly I had to actually use a MSDN subscription to get a hold of Windows XP MCE at the time) the whole thing seems to have been an idea that somehow managed to go straight from being before its time to being obsolete pretty much instantly when video streaming became a thing. While you could theoretically build a system that could do all that stuff, even simple tasks like playing a Blu-Ray movie on your machine required expensive software (where you were basically buying $5 worth of software and $50 worth of licensing fees) and ripping your physical media required putting up with janky software that required constantly swapping license keys, regularly fiddling with codecs and generally spending more time trying to get things to work than actually using those things. Pretty much all the available solutions for adding a remote to the setup (aside from the big-buck Logitech Harmony ones) required ugly dongles and pretty much worked when they decided they wanted to. Even if you did successfully get the video ripped to your hard drive half the time you would need to tweak about seven different settings in VLC to get it to actually look semi-correct on your TV. And that's not even getting into the travails of trying to get a CableCard tuner to produce usable results... We do actually still have a PC hooked up to the TV today, but it's basically treated as a game console now, and all the actual media stuff just gets handled by the TV itself.
Let me tell ya, BD playback on PCs is still an annoyance. The easy route is like pay 100 dollars for PowerDVD (or... arrrr) and call it a day, or... go with AnyDVD and it decrypts your discs and then VLC plays without the annoying BS. 4K BDs tho are absolutely stupid. It just plain doesn't work unless you do who knows how many sacrifices to Behemoth daily.
It's not actually possible to buy a new PC that can play a 4K bluray, since Intel removed SGX from its new CPUs which was required for the decryption. So they can only be decoded with the custom silicon found in dedicated players. I guess you could implement this on a PC with a dedicated card with custom silicon on it, but nobody cares enough about physical media anymore to build something like this.
@@Kalvinjjand for less than the price of the drives and software you can get a perfectly functional, tiny, silent UHD BD player for the TV. I love using my NAS for music and TV shows and a lot of movies, but the ones I care enough to want the bit rate and motion resolution of a physical disc… I don’t mind just sticking the disc in there, and being unable to quickly watch that version on my phone. Plus it makes watching borrowed DVDs less of a hassle. I used to think, eh it’s only a 5-10 minute delay to rip the DVD first then hand it back to them. But I’d forgotten how quick it was to just stick the disc in the player (and how annoying unskippable menu items are). So I’ve realised I don’t always want to keep it forever, my archivist-hoarder tendencies are much-reduced compared to how they were 10 years ago. Rather than ripping every disc that comes my way, now I’m a bit more deliberate about what I choose to have available at all times. In that way the player is useful for shortlisting stuff to rip, as well as convenient for just “sticking something on” that family brings round (as good natured as they were about waiting for it to show up on Plex when I habitually did that). Oh dear, I appear to have written 5 paragraphs instead of just 2.
@@kaitlyn__L yes, I also have the set-top player that just works perfectly, but... I don't wanna use it on the living room TV nor much less with the speakers they have, hence I play them on my PC (the SB Audigy SE with headphones kicks the ass outta the speakers on the TVs here...). I don't archive them either, just play it right away. I just really wish it wasn't such an annoyance to get working, damn Windows 7 had DVD playback on Media Player 12 and so did XP. But well, DRM gotta DRM eh? ...meanwhile pirates still keep pirating as if nothing happened. As it should.
i'm SO glad you bought these, especially the edge, a 360 AND its on blades?! I hope you didn't update it on the internet because it'll try to, that dashboard is very collectable due to the e-fuse system not allowing you to go back..and this rare Niveus custom variant even Vs lian li's PC cause box swap idea makes it so special, definitely hold onto these! I just pray its an FG Korea XGPU as these avoided the whole RROD issues of the AA Taiwan chips up to Q2 2008 where the underfill quality issues were finally fixed..considering its still working you might have gotten lucky! New thermal paste needed ASAP! Looking forward to the video!
I'm surprised that no one has revealed the real reason the CPU heat sink never gets very hot. The CPU in this system is an intel e4500 made on a 65nm process. This chips main purpose was to be a good LAPTOP CPU. Ignore the 65 Watt intel Thermal Design Power rating for this processor, in reality this chip can barely pull 25W on the most brutal loads. That's why the temps on cooler are so low, this entire setup was designed when intel's desktop Pentium 4's went from 45W to 65W to 90+W over time and cooling needs went crazy. So Niveus designs this insane overkill cooling solution while at same time intel realizes its Pentium 4 is a dead-end solution and takes a chip designed by their Israel branch called Conroe and releases onto the desktop market. So now you have this ludicrous cooling solution for a chip that runs fine in a laptop with a tiny heatsink and impeller fan combo.
Heat pipes have been used in laptops for a very long time, well before the 2000s. I remember repairing Toshiba Satellite & Satellite Pro 400 series and Tecra 700 series machines in the mid to late 90s. Those machines had a heat pipe in them to help distribute the heat from the original Pentium CPU throughout the rear of the machine and to the tiny fan on the side. Those machines did not have a blower style fan that's been common in laptops for a decades now. They had a tiny 20-30mm fan, usually in a full metal bracket to also help facilitate heat transfer, usually on the left side of the laptop.
Funny to mention the xbox as a set top box... back in ~2012 one of our cable companies let you use a 360 as a receiver. If you paid the $100CAD setup fee, they would come to your house and install their official app on the 360, plug in a MoCA Coax->Ethernet adapter, and be on their way. Their set-top boxes (untill 2021) used SoC's running Windows CE 5.0, so they basically re-packaged the app to run on the xbox.
I remember Dish network being really big on winmce and extenders, so much so that they would advertise it on national TV before they dropped in the later half of the 2010s.
In a world of ShitTok videos and short form content that isn’t even long enough to take a single breath, longform work like this fills me with such joy. Just finished the video and can’t wait for the next one. I’m one of the perhaps very few people that *do* always get notified when your videos come out, and always watch as soon as I possibly can. Looking forward to the next one already.
Bet you haven't heard of Speakers called: *EOSON.* The man that created these for home Theater system's, created the speakers for IMAX Theater's. I bought a set of them for a 5.1 system. Along with a Harmon/Kardon AVR80 which was a true THX Receiver. I spent around $7,000 for the whole system back in 1984. It still runs great. And the speakers are just as good as the day they were bought!
I will always love that older audio equipment doesnt 'age' like video does. Like yes we now have new codecs and technologies like Bluetooth but a good set of speakers or headphones from 80 years ago will still sound great when given the right circumstances.
I have an, admittedly pedestrian, Onkyo receiver from the late 80s that has a built in Pro Logic decoder. I have an OK speaker setup with Kenwpod JL703 floor speakers for the left/right channels, a KLH center speaker and Pioneer HS125BK bookshelf speakers for the rear surround channel. Even watching a VHS tape with Dolby Surround sounds great and immersive even for just the 4 channels. I always love watching the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and hearing the bullets buzz by.
I love your videos so much. I actually get a little sad when I don't see one released in a while. I have been keeping up with your inner-perspective channel updates and I must say, whatever you are doing video production wise and what you want to do are A-okay with me, the viewer! Your passion and knowledge shows, who gives a rats ass if this video didn't get alot of views, or this machine isnt very popular so no one cares.....I do! I feel like sometimes your videos are made EXACTLY for me, so thank you! I am working to become a patreon supporter now that I have health insurance. yay adulting! Sending digital love! Thanks CRD!
1:01:10 my father hooked up a pair of stereo speakers in the ceiling that he had hooked up to a hidden TV in a cabinet that closed *if*if you opened his office door. This was in the middle of a military MEPS office, for context. It also kept us occupied when young and sick and being watched while Dad was at work :)
I still use HTPC, I really like that idea. This led me to build an xbox classic htpc, but with updated hardware, it's actually a whole pc inside an xbox classic case. I believe I was the first guy to be able to fit an entire PC inside the og Xbox including the power supply and dedicated video card. The xbox was not sacrificed, I had just sold it, but the buyer stole the parts and returned them to me. I've been collecting movies stored on my HDs for many years, and this htpc is also my personal NAS, to access anything I have from anywhere in the house.
Told ya this one was a genuinely interesting system! I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that the reason they went with BNC was look and feel; BNC was regarded as 'higher end' and more 'premium.' Everything on this machine is 100% genuine, top end, AV fanatic grade parts. And Niveus had some really top notch engineers. For example, they didn't just use tape because it was cheap - they used it because tape wouldn't communicate vibration. The heatsinks are also standard extrusions sold as 6 foot bar stock - I believe Wakefield made those; I know I used the same exact ones. The heatsink anchor, they probably bought from Mouser or similar; it was sold as a standard part, no joke. Including the push-pins. The ICH RAID is extremely necessary for the drives as well. The DB35 drives are also special - the first 'DVR optimized' hard drives. 500GB was the largest capacity, and aggressively tuned for sequential, but only able to handle a whopping 65Mbits/sec. (That's 8 *megabytes* per second.) Random seek, like when your file system was fragmented (gee, that never happens) quickly dropped. They also had a unique 'multisegmented' cache to try and support more streams at once, but, uh, yeah. It absolutely needed the RAID0. Without it, recording was right out. The Seasonic is probably a replacement; Niveus started with customized (don't know who, but not my ODM) power supplies, but the setup did not work. By '05, there were multiple silent (fan off) and fanless ATX power supplies on the market which weren't junk and didn't result in warranty calls. If you look at the later production Denalis, they had switched to Seasonic. The cables would have been the exact same between the two. The BIG problem here is the missing tuners and audio. This one should have had an ATI TV Wonder 550-series, or two of them, minimum. These provided *hardware* MPEG2 encode/decode. Likely this specific box would have had ATI DCT CableCARD tuners before it was scrapped. THESE are what made the box, and they were NOT cheap - 550's were over $150 each, DCTs were OEM only and I still can't tell you how much other than 'a lot.' The Asus Xonar is also definitely a replacement - those didn't even launch until 2008!
so glad you made a video on this!! i saw you mention it in the one thrifting video and ive been on the edge (haha) of my seat checking your channel since. insane that we get two videos too!
It's nice to hear more personal anecdotes and insights into the manufacturing. That case is a beauty though. Could still be used for a modern passive build, but I do agree direct contact with the heatpipes and just a couple more bends would be a huge improvement.
Absolutely loved this, as always. Great story of a little company with big dreams, and a look into the mansion abyss. Can’t wait for the atrocities that will be unleashed in part 2. That Xbox 360 boot screen is a great cliffhanger
I know someone that to this day hacks together laptop motherboards into cable box shells to make media center extenders. I still have no clue why they would do that over just getting a roku or something. I appreciate the effort of turning e-waste into something useful though.
I used a hacked xbox, it was perfect. Never was that mutch in gaming on console. Always a pc user. i got the xbox with my phone or somthing else. Dude you are looking more healthy then normal
Got an HP Media Center PC (a1350n if I remember right) in early 2006 that shipped with MCE 2005 but upgraded ram and to Vista upon release. Absolutely loved that thing and with a GPU upgrade is what I experienced Oblivion on for the first time. Great memories from this time period.
The amusing thing about windows media centre edition was that it was a full fat Windows XP Pro underneath. So a useful OS to have for development. It also came on a number of laptops (which was weird) like the old Sony Vaio the wife had at the time, due to it also having a 'Full HD screen' aka 1080p in around 2005 iirc.
The big advantage of an HTPC if you had a CRT projector was the ability to double or quadruple the scan rate. Back then a line doubler was thousands of dollars. Using a PC gave you all the advantages of a doubler for a lot less. You just needed a projector that could support VGA/Component input at higher scan rates. I had a Sony VPH-1271Q (160 pounds hanging from the ceiling) projecting on a 100" 4x3 screen. Pretty cool for 1995.
I was a remote PC Tech in and around Manhattan back in that era and I got called into to setup those Media Center extenders quite a bit for a few years there in the later part of the decade. They were really pretty seamless devices and a great alternative vs networking multiple media center PC’s. But boy that market evaporated nearly as fast as it came. I haven’t even thought of them since maybe 2009, so thank you for the flashback! Great video as always and looking forward to the follow-up with what in guessing was an overpriced modded xbox haha. Great stuff.
Your insight into weird computers is as enjoyable as ever. You really outdid yourself on the heatpipe explanation/demonstration - I had always thought those sorts of things were just big chonky copper alloy rods, what a wacky revelation! This channel is now fully science-adjacent. You rock.
I swear that Gravis could give us an hour long deep dive into the contents of his nightstand - and it would be riveting. Sort of a tech verison of Kim Gordon's song "Bye Bye" where she essentially reads her packing list over an amazing track.
I finally finished, and I think you got almost everything right on the money in this video. I work in "the CEDIA space" as it's called (woof), so I know a lot about how these mansions are setup and installed. The thing I think that was overlooked was that matrix video switchers and "A/V distribution" is common. In that rack of equipment would be all of your sources, like Kaleidescape, Satellite, Cable, BluRay, etc... a matrix switcher, and at each TV would be a passive output of distribution receiver. Now, that's not to say that the Edge wouldn't still be needed. You still need to be able to produce enough streams that you can have dad in the theater, mom in the kitchen, and the kids all watching something else and getting drunk (yes, regressive stereotypes are very much intentionally used here, lol). I checked our company's database for "integrations" we've done, and was disappointed to see that the Niveus name didn't show up, so I presume they didn't make a huge splash. It's possible that individual integrators could have written code to use that "control" serial port on the back. I'm also curious, and I suspect you'd know or find out, whether serial control over the box was provided by Windows Media Center, or whether Niveus had to do it themselves. And, if the latter, perhaps they didn't get to it, and that's why it's not there? Thanks as always!
Somewhere I have my 2001 copies of Maximum PC, I'm glad I didn't throw them out because I'm due for a nostalgia blast remembering this unique era of PC's when a quiet PC was a truly weird concept.
As a sicko who built a media PC back in the '00s, the trick was to find motherboards that would run laptop chips, which for me meant mobile Athlon parts. (Also, went from a primary desktop running on a BP6 with dual celerons at 550 to a board running dual mobile Athlon II chips -- because regular ass PCs are for suckers) One thing that Windows Media Center did that was great was that if you had a folder with a bunch of full DVD image/folder rips it would treat it as a disc changer, and you could get full menu support instead of just naked movie .avi files.
I want the next video. Holy crap, you sold me! I'm a big Plex guy with in-home streaming to my NVIDIA SHIELDs. In the past, I'd just load up Windows, hook it up to my TV, and use my NAS or the local drive. I'd even custom-burn VCDs and DVDs for fun to try them out.
Back then, I built a dedicated XP media center PC with a dual analog tuner (Hauppauge) TV card. I used this system for almost 10 years as my daily TV setup. It worked flawlessly!! Schedule recordings (two simultaneously or watching TV an record an other channel), and when playing a recording. skipping through commercial block was quick! Now having the modern streaming IP-TV service ad Netflix , the controls always respond so damn slow, and skipping a commercial block takes way more time. I do miss my XP media center setup! 🙏
I just laughed my ass off right with you at the monitor suddenly just deciding it didn’t like being at the right height. Thank you for including that clip!
Bruh I remember hearing about those Niveus Edge things all over the place back then & how they were just Xbox 360's. There's a video called "Potentially Licensed PASSIVE COOLED Xbox 360 Prototype? || Niveus History" which I encourage you to watch, they're apparently very rare and were at one point were possibly considered to be prototypes back then just because of how rare & unknown they really are. I was very surprised watching the end of this video to see that you actually had one and will hopefully explain what it all does and what it was even for in the 1st place. There's barely any info about it online beyond the odd few pictures of it. Can't wait for your video on it!
CRD - I got one of these long ago from a friend when he moved. I gutted it and made it into a more modern HTPC but haven't used it in ages. It has the exact same power supply and the same paste on the heatpipes in the copper slug, so I think those things may be factory. I do remember that the PSU had a large heat pad on it and not paste though. I still have the thing. Nice find!
Thats a run of the mill audio amplifier chassis. Those heatsinks were designed to have multiple audio output transistors coupled to them. Just look at 1990s Krell and Nelson Pass amplifiers and you'll see the resemblance.
Oh, that’s a time capsule! Lots of memories. By the way, I just loved how you kept referring to Tvo’s. That is so US specific it’s funny. I’m from Canada, every people I’ve seen with DVR didn’t really know how to use them, except for those that came with the TV box and that was like five years later… nice video good work
The idea of an HTPC fascinates me immensely - not just because I was 11 in 2005 and I saw the rise of DVR and HTPCs in Europe with stuff like Sky offering their very first DVR and HD-capable set top boxes AND I had a habit of looking up cool hardware on the mail-in catalogues of old Italian electronics stores like GBC to see what was new on the market. In an era where streaming services have not only reached the logical endpoint of the horseshoe theory to become just like cable, but have also started deleting stuff because it's cheaper to do tax write-offs than to pay royalties to the creators involved with those products, having your very own HTPC and your stack of Blu-Rays has become desirable once again.
33:52 I loved my ATI All In Wonder Video Card. Along with Napster and cable TV, made recording movies an TV amazing. This was late 90's greatness before I bought the Voodoo 3 3500. Nice edit. I was all in for Computer Media Center usage. Whilst in college during the late 2000's, I used my Dell Intel Core Duo with Hauppauge USB HD antenna. Windows 7 with Medis Center and Direct TV made my college experience amazing. It downloaded all of the listing with no problem. I used this for 2 years. I was amazed at how integrated the Windows Media Center was with Direct TV. Best 2 years of usage I javelin had. Haven't used Media Center since. Like I said, ATI All In Wonder started it all.
Love the style and passive-cooling of the case. I just turned a walk-in closet behind my screen into the room that holds my AV gear, which is also seperated by a hallway with a full wall of BD & DVD movie shelves so not only do I have a noisy rackmount server handling media but all my other noisy servers & switches are there and yet I can't hear even a hum 15 feet away.
You're getting a delta-T between the CPU temp and the heatsink temp of about 30°C, that's essentially all due to the thermal gradient within the copper slug between the CPU surface and where the heatpipes interface. It also means the heatsink can dissipate the 65W under load with a delta-T of only 10°C to the ambient air, which is absolutely bonkers for a passive cooler. Of course it will heat up (and stabilize) the much less dissipative rest of the case to the same temperature. If they eliminated the thermal resistance of the copper slug by mounting the heatpipes directly on the CPU (like proper heatsinks do), they could probably keep it at 40°C under load (or rather realistically use a small fraction of the cooler size). The GPU side has a dramatically worse thermal transport (fewer and longer heatpipes, worse interface to the heatsink and between heatsinks) and probably a comparable thermal output, so it makes sense that it needs a considerably higher delta-T to dissipate that heat. I had a cute mini-ITX Zalman case with a proper passive heatpipe solution capable of comparable thermal dissipation from a big-boy CPU, but using probably less than 2 kilos for the entire case. Of course that was many years later, well into the Sandybridge era.
Holy moly, I remember seeing a machine like the Denali when I was shopping for a PC in 2005! It was waaay out of my range tho, IIRC the price was in the teens of thousands PLN - I have NO idea what it'd be in USD now adjusted etc. etc., but it was north of two years average wages back then... PS: It was kept in a plexiglass case to showcase the fact that it could be enclosed to a large degree. Oh, and on the topic of quietness, I ended up with an Athlon with an aftermarket heatsink that routinely drowned out music...
My first "HTPC" setup was a set of composite and stereo audio cables that ran between two rooms in my parents' apartment to connect the PC with the TV. You wanted to watch a movie in the living room? You switched the GPU to TV-out, hit spacebar and walked there. You wanted to pause it? You walked back to the computer room to hit the spacebar again. And it didn't run Media Center or anything like it, not just because it didn't make sense without a remote, but primarily because in the early 2000s Poland where this story is taking place, the most common video format was pirated CD-Rs with DivX-encoded DVDRips and matching text files containing subtitles. And there was a whole local Polish scene of competing freeware video players that overlaid the subtitles on top of a normal DirectShow player component, everyone was using one of those. Eventually the pirate scene moved towards more standard solutions like VLC and MPC for handling subtitle files, and then online streaming (of both the officially licensed and more shady kinds) basically took over like everywhere else. But one can feel the nostalgia for the more janky times.
Honestly as far as the pirate scene goes, the truth I think is that the majority of people even here did exactly what you're describing, full screen a copy of VLC or whatever and deal with it. Personally I never had a remote for anything I played video on, I just know that there were people at the high end of the market who bothered to put in the effort and expense, haha.
Random modern PC nerd chiming in with some thoughts on that thermal solution: Honestly, not at all surprised it is taking that CPU so well, 65 watts is low by modern standards, that is the kind of wattage a dinky intel/AMD stock cooler will be able to handle with ease, a heatsink of that shear thermal mass will not even break a sweat. The likely reason your GPU is showing up more clearly is because it is only attached to one of the heatsinks, dumping all of its heat into one place and making for a much more obvious delta for the IR camera. Also, 60C is a perfectly fine temperature for a CPU. Most modern chips are perfectly happy all the way up to ~80C or so, only starting to properly throttle around 90C+. Older chips are probably a bit less tolerable than that, but 60C is well under. I would be supper curious to see this thing on a newer CPU of a higher TDP, it seems like it should be able to handle it...
I had a media centre PC about when this came out, mine was just windows shares on my pc going out via DLNA to my PS3, my stock gen 1 PS3. Through witch I could browse the file system, play music and legal obtained movies. This was back when you could squeeze a 2 hour movie into a 700mb cd. The blacks were garbage but overall it was passable. God bless Trinatron CRT's. Now I just have a plex/file/minecraft server, complete with a Digital tv tuner. It runs a second gen ryzen 3 chip on an ITX board. The case I bought is a small run aluminum thing that looks remarkably like this one, minus the heat sinks. I do miss the days of being able to just live with a less than perfect signal. I'd get four more channels if the signal wasn't corrupted beyond usability. Anyhow That was all pointless except to say that HTPC is still a thing for some of us.
So my experience with this was with one of those "more money than brains" type of wealthy person. He did indeed have the whole house audio/video thing going on, with a central rack of equipment, with this particular model at the centre of it. I was quite impressed by the sheer size and weight of it. It would have worked well as a mooring weight if placed on the Queen's Bottom.
I did a passively cooled PC with that Zalman cooler. Also removed the FETs from the PSU and put them on giant aluminum heatsinks, so that was fanless too (though also a massive electrical hazard.)
In this timeframe I used a Buffalo NAS and a mediaplayer that could mount a shared folder, total power use of about 5-10 watts. I did have to have a machine to capture HDTV, rip a DVD or download a torrent and copy that to the NAS, it just wasnt used in the living room or a bedroom, but that machine wasn't always running.
I had an AV custom install business in the UK and we pioneered using XP media centre systems, then VISTA (oh god the trauma) and later fully custom networked multi room PC based systems with servers. Also Mac Front Row all allowing centralised movie and music server with individual TV recording that pushed back to the server and allowing playback of recordings in all the rooms. The last multi room PC based system we purchased had custom networked Blu-ray drives, a massive solid state NAS and cost over £15,000 - the company went bust before we even got to turn it on and we couldn’t even get the login information from them so the whole thing was bricked! Never touched anything like this again.
I think the Niveus used BNC ports for the Component output because most projectors at the time used BNC. Even for VGA runs at the time, using 5 BNC cables in the wall from source to the projector was pretty common then. DVI and HDMI were next to impossible to run to those lengths in 2004.
I have some tiny feedback on something I've noticed other RUclipsrs do too. (I might have complained about this in the comments of a Technology Connections video): I don't know how to feel about the pop-up texts. Either I have to pause the video to read them, or read them and not listen to what you say for a few seconds. It's one or the other. It doesn't seem like a good idea to convey two pieces of information, sometimes unrelated or even contrary to another, at the same time. I prefer the cutting room inserts, the actual video snippets you did in a few videos in the past. Anyway, keep up the great work!
![Little Guys 5: Three Of Them [MediaSite / NCR N3000]](/img/1.gif)
I'm a power electronics engineer who deals with thermal management quite a lot. I would estimate a heatsink that size (massive!) would have a thermal resistance of 0.1 degrees C / W, or perhaps even less. That means that if you put 30 W into it, it would only rise by 3 degrees above ambient. The other components in the system also have a thermal resistance too, and judging by the temperatures, they have an even higher thermal resistance than the heatsink, which is backwards from most normal designs. I would estimate that the interface between the heatsink and the heatpipes, the heatpipes themselves, the copper heat block, and the interface between the copper and the CPU each have a thermal resistance somewhere around 0.1 degC/W, hence why the heat just seems to slowly disappear as you move further from the CPU.
And just think of a storage heater, and how long you can just keep pumping watt after watt into it without it becoming a supernova. Usually you have one of those "pick two" triangles with thermal mass, specific heat capacity and thermal inertia at the corners, but this box cost so much you got all three
I work as microelectronics engineer for industrial autmation and we use a similar thermal design for edge computing devices which have to have a sealed fanless casing. Some places require sealed cases, because of dust or other environmental hazards.
I was also thinking from a pure physics perspective, 60C on-die, 50C in-transit, and 30C in the huge thermal mass outside is practically a textbook perfect passive heat-engine gradient. Certainly didn’t seem suspicious to me!
Uh, this is how conduction works. The temp will be lower the further you go in the chain. Heat will not flow without those temp deltas. This is basic physics and totally normal. Why an engineer in this field wouldn't know that is kind of strange.
@@kaitlyn__L Yep, this is a clear and basic example of conduction. I'm not sure how this expert finds that weird.
"And I know this because I remember my mom doing pretty much the same thing in our garage when I was 12, making a waterblock for a homemade water cooling system with tools we bought from harbor freight."
Your mom is fucking cool, I couldn't imagine mine doing anything like that
yo honestly
I wanna see his mom's PC.
The way my jaw DROPPED when I saw the logo reveal at the very end of the video. Can't wait for the next part!
I GUESS THAT EXPLAINS WHY THATS SO BIG??
And the Big Phat *X* on the top of each case!
Anybody who's seen the thrifting videos knows that its """""just""""" an Xbox in a funky case. Which then makes me wonder what that "just" is hiding there that is so terrible. I'm getting images of some sort of homebrew hack that glitches the CPU to run code that converts it into a media extender, which they then sell you.
@@kargaroc386Maybe the price. How much can an xbox in a custom case cost? I bet Niveus charged 5x as much.
Thank you so much for not spoiling it.
We need a video (unless you have done one I haven’t seen) that goes into your tech industry background. Not calling out any companies you worked for, but just a dive into your history with electronics manufacturing, repair, etc.
"Who is this CATHODE RAY HACKER??"
I'll second that! Seems like Gravis has led an interesting life up to this point.
I kind of want to hear more about his mom making a water block "on tools from harbor freight in the garage" when he was a kid - and his name is "Gravis"? Like the gamepad? There's clearly a LOT of interesting material there
@@gorak9000 huh - i always thought gravis was the name of his fursona?
@@deneb_tm Those might not be mutually exclusive.
OH YOU DID GO BACK AND BUY THESE
I'VE BEEN CURIOUS ABOUT THESE EVER SINCE THE REVEAL OF THE... OTHER COMPONENT 😮
i was thinking the same thing
also, fresh hat
How much did it all cost you?
RePC is such a goldmine of 'wtf?' So many memories came flooding back with this video as I was at MS during Vista development. The Windows Vista launch party was in an underground parking garage....draw your own speculations there. Despite working with the WMC team both at MS and on my free time in Seattle film, it never really hit with me due to the overblown costs associated with the formfactor and the noise issue. This was all extremely interesting as nearly all of my experience was scenario testing on very unoptimized hardware (internally we had reworked Dell Optimas in testing labs and a private cable system that ran Pirates of the Carribean on repeat). It does make me want to install WMC on one of my retro systems, though. A little. And it's passed.
When I used to do vacations in Seattle I would always go to re PC and always end up buying some cool stuff, the TSA inspectors and probably everyone else in the TSA security line however probably didn't like the fact that I would hold up the line pulling out laptops and small form factor desktops and small form factor home cedar PCs or tivo boxes out of my carry-on bag and putting them on all of the bins that they had at SeaTac airport
As someone who has their pc in another room and runs cables under the door; This videos makes me feel extremely validated.
You may think this is an "easy" hobbyist build, but I didn't grow up with a Mom who was building water-cooled PCs in the garage. 😊
It was easy, you just had to dive right into it and learn as you go. It's intimidating but not hard at all. My parents were not tech savvy by any means...
I built my first water cooled PC at 14 years old (2004 ish), right before high school, when I should have been saving for a car, instead I spent my hard earned $2000 savings on a computer lol... Kind of stupid because I never made a career out of my passion for computers, even though I knew so much, I actually HATED fixing them (monotonous, time sucking, hunks of junk I was expected to make 'better than new' again), also hated programming for anything but my own self entertainment lol. No one could pay me enough to this stuff for a living.
Of course my mom was more of a history buff than a computer nerd, instead she trusted me to do the family's computer crap since I was 7, having a 2nd grader successfully install Win98 on her computer lol. So I became the family's free IT expert... Grr... No wonder I hated it lol.
@@exohio I mean, I've built my own PC and have helped manage my family's PC since I was young, but it is more a matter of reading the instruction manuals than being in a family that encouraged tinkering.
@@kentslocum I still never read the manuals 😆Unless I'm completely stumped.
@@exohio I would read my family's set of encyclopedias when I was bored. 😂
@kentslocum 😆 I had a friend that did that. No idea how. I'd fall asleep lol
I work for a large mining equipment manufacturer that makes electric rope shovels and hybrid wheel loaders and those heatsinks remind me of what is used to cool industrial solid state switching components like SCR's and IGBT's so they very possibly could be off the shelf with some in-house finishing or made to spec components.
My face when you turned that thing on... Our family actually used a Windows Media Center PC for our cable and OTA DVR for many years and I used my 360 as an extender. It worked very well. Can't wait for the next video to see the inside of this abomination.
What is an extender
Basically a lighter weight streaming box that connects back to your main media center PC
Dude, this video just opened up my eyes to heat pipes. I've been trying to figure out a cooling solution for my salvage pc cluster and this just might have saved me some sleepless nights trying to figure out something. Thanks.
Same! I've been working on a powered sub design with heatsinks mounted internally, to prevent the hand-slicing exposed fins and enable more usable panel space. I think this may have provided a solution to a problem I was facing.
This was so nostalgic. I used an XBMC fork called Boxee back then, which had “deep integration” with RUclips, Vimeo etc on the top level instead of being a buried plugin in native XBMC. Also podcasts IIRC.
That bit of text about how Kodi is a more-known name but it wasn’t called that back then, was hilarious. Thank you
Gasped watching the motherboard reveal - looks like an Intel D975XBX which was the basis of my first PC. A older friend gave it to me as a hand me down in 2009 or 10? Was still a competent and somewhat relevant computer at the time. Fascinating to see in this chassis.
loved the monitor having an automatic adjustment for going into movie mode.
Wow.... when you turned on that extender to give us a preview... I actually shouted, "OH NO!" hahaha. Looking forward to that one!
ONE HOUR CATHODE RAY DUDE LETS GOOOI
This is the best thing that could possibly happen on a day off work. My day just got that much better.
My thoughts exactly!!
This guy gets it
@@henryt112 *gal but the sentiment is appreciated non the less ahahaha.
We all appreciate one hour Cathode Ray Dude in this house
Hour-long CRD vids are like raking sand in a zen garden
I've been a huge fan of fanless cooling for audio production and audio fidelity. Now the term "sixty-pound Roku" will have a small shelf in my brain for the rest of my life. I am very glad to be one of your Patrons, sir.
Having gone down the rabbit hole of trying to build a MCE box during that era myself (If I recall correctly I had to actually use a MSDN subscription to get a hold of Windows XP MCE at the time) the whole thing seems to have been an idea that somehow managed to go straight from being before its time to being obsolete pretty much instantly when video streaming became a thing. While you could theoretically build a system that could do all that stuff, even simple tasks like playing a Blu-Ray movie on your machine required expensive software (where you were basically buying $5 worth of software and $50 worth of licensing fees) and ripping your physical media required putting up with janky software that required constantly swapping license keys, regularly fiddling with codecs and generally spending more time trying to get things to work than actually using those things. Pretty much all the available solutions for adding a remote to the setup (aside from the big-buck Logitech Harmony ones) required ugly dongles and pretty much worked when they decided they wanted to. Even if you did successfully get the video ripped to your hard drive half the time you would need to tweak about seven different settings in VLC to get it to actually look semi-correct on your TV. And that's not even getting into the travails of trying to get a CableCard tuner to produce usable results...
We do actually still have a PC hooked up to the TV today, but it's basically treated as a game console now, and all the actual media stuff just gets handled by the TV itself.
Let me tell ya, BD playback on PCs is still an annoyance. The easy route is like pay 100 dollars for PowerDVD (or... arrrr) and call it a day, or... go with AnyDVD and it decrypts your discs and then VLC plays without the annoying BS.
4K BDs tho are absolutely stupid. It just plain doesn't work unless you do who knows how many sacrifices to Behemoth daily.
if you treat the PC like a game console, you can consider adding steam big picture to the startup, just immediately consoleifies your pc.
It's not actually possible to buy a new PC that can play a 4K bluray, since Intel removed SGX from its new CPUs which was required for the decryption. So they can only be decoded with the custom silicon found in dedicated players. I guess you could implement this on a PC with a dedicated card with custom silicon on it, but nobody cares enough about physical media anymore to build something like this.
@@Kalvinjjand for less than the price of the drives and software you can get a perfectly functional, tiny, silent UHD BD player for the TV.
I love using my NAS for music and TV shows and a lot of movies, but the ones I care enough to want the bit rate and motion resolution of a physical disc… I don’t mind just sticking the disc in there, and being unable to quickly watch that version on my phone.
Plus it makes watching borrowed DVDs less of a hassle. I used to think, eh it’s only a 5-10 minute delay to rip the DVD first then hand it back to them. But I’d forgotten how quick it was to just stick the disc in the player (and how annoying unskippable menu items are).
So I’ve realised I don’t always want to keep it forever, my archivist-hoarder tendencies are much-reduced compared to how they were 10 years ago. Rather than ripping every disc that comes my way, now I’m a bit more deliberate about what I choose to have available at all times. In that way the player is useful for shortlisting stuff to rip, as well as convenient for just “sticking something on” that family brings round (as good natured as they were about waiting for it to show up on Plex when I habitually did that).
Oh dear, I appear to have written 5 paragraphs instead of just 2.
@@kaitlyn__L yes, I also have the set-top player that just works perfectly, but... I don't wanna use it on the living room TV nor much less with the speakers they have, hence I play them on my PC (the SB Audigy SE with headphones kicks the ass outta the speakers on the TVs here...). I don't archive them either, just play it right away.
I just really wish it wasn't such an annoyance to get working, damn Windows 7 had DVD playback on Media Player 12 and so did XP. But well, DRM gotta DRM eh?
...meanwhile pirates still keep pirating as if nothing happened. As it should.
i'm SO glad you bought these, especially the edge, a 360 AND its on blades?! I hope you didn't update it on the internet because it'll try to, that dashboard is very collectable due to the e-fuse system not allowing you to go back..and this rare Niveus custom variant even Vs lian li's PC cause box swap idea makes it so special, definitely hold onto these! I just pray its an FG Korea XGPU as these avoided the whole RROD issues of the AA Taiwan chips up to Q2 2008 where the underfill quality issues were finally fixed..considering its still working you might have gotten lucky! New thermal paste needed ASAP! Looking forward to the video!
I'm surprised that no one has revealed the real reason the CPU heat sink never gets very hot. The CPU in this system is an intel e4500 made on a 65nm process. This chips main purpose was to be a good LAPTOP CPU. Ignore the 65 Watt intel Thermal Design Power rating for this processor, in reality this chip can barely pull 25W on the most brutal loads. That's why the temps on cooler are so low, this entire setup was designed when intel's desktop Pentium 4's went from 45W to 65W to 90+W over time and cooling needs went crazy. So Niveus designs this insane overkill cooling solution while at same time intel realizes its Pentium 4 is a dead-end solution and takes a chip designed by their Israel branch called Conroe and releases onto the desktop market. So now you have this ludicrous cooling solution for a chip that runs fine in a laptop with a tiny heatsink and impeller fan combo.
Heat pipes have been used in laptops for a very long time, well before the 2000s. I remember repairing Toshiba Satellite & Satellite Pro 400 series and Tecra 700 series machines in the mid to late 90s. Those machines had a heat pipe in them to help distribute the heat from the original Pentium CPU throughout the rear of the machine and to the tiny fan on the side. Those machines did not have a blower style fan that's been common in laptops for a decades now. They had a tiny 20-30mm fan, usually in a full metal bracket to also help facilitate heat transfer, usually on the left side of the laptop.
Funny to mention the xbox as a set top box... back in ~2012 one of our cable companies let you use a 360 as a receiver.
If you paid the $100CAD setup fee, they would come to your house and install their official app on the 360, plug in a MoCA Coax->Ethernet adapter, and be on their way.
Their set-top boxes (untill 2021) used SoC's running Windows CE 5.0, so they basically re-packaged the app to run on the xbox.
I remember Dish network being really big on winmce and extenders, so much so that they would advertise it on national TV before they dropped in the later half of the 2010s.
I'm always impressed with the depth of your research.
I can't believe it, Gravis actually went back and bought it.
I can
My first laptop ran Vista and you playing around in Media Center (specifically the Vista sample pictures) gave me a weird hit of nostalgia
In a world of ShitTok videos and short form content that isn’t even long enough to take a single breath, longform work like this fills me with such joy.
Just finished the video and can’t wait for the next one.
I’m one of the perhaps very few people that *do* always get notified when your videos come out, and always watch as soon as I possibly can.
Looking forward to the next one already.
Bet you haven't heard of Speakers called: *EOSON.* The man that created these for home Theater system's, created the speakers for IMAX Theater's. I bought a set of them for a 5.1 system. Along with a Harmon/Kardon AVR80 which was a true THX Receiver. I spent around $7,000 for the whole system back in 1984. It still runs great. And the speakers are just as good as the day they were bought!
I will always love that older audio equipment doesnt 'age' like video does. Like yes we now have new codecs and technologies like Bluetooth but a good set of speakers or headphones from 80 years ago will still sound great when given the right circumstances.
I have an, admittedly pedestrian, Onkyo receiver from the late 80s that has a built in Pro Logic decoder. I have an OK speaker setup with Kenwpod JL703 floor speakers for the left/right channels, a KLH center speaker and Pioneer HS125BK bookshelf speakers for the rear surround channel. Even watching a VHS tape with Dolby Surround sounds great and immersive even for just the 4 channels. I always love watching the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and hearing the bullets buzz by.
I love your videos so much. I actually get a little sad when I don't see one released in a while. I have been keeping up with your inner-perspective channel updates and I must say, whatever you are doing video production wise and what you want to do are A-okay with me, the viewer! Your passion and knowledge shows, who gives a rats ass if this video didn't get alot of views, or this machine isnt very popular so no one cares.....I do!
I feel like sometimes your videos are made EXACTLY for me, so thank you! I am working to become a patreon supporter now that I have health insurance. yay adulting! Sending digital love! Thanks CRD!
1:01:10 my father hooked up a pair of stereo speakers in the ceiling that he had hooked up to a hidden TV in a cabinet that closed *if*if you opened his office door. This was in the middle of a military MEPS office, for context.
It also kept us occupied when young and sick and being watched while Dad was at work :)
I still use HTPC, I really like that idea. This led me to build an xbox classic htpc, but with updated hardware, it's actually a whole pc inside an xbox classic case. I believe I was the first guy to be able to fit an entire PC inside the og Xbox including the power supply and dedicated video card. The xbox was not sacrificed, I had just sold it, but the buyer stole the parts and returned them to me. I've been collecting movies stored on my HDs for many years, and this htpc is also my personal NAS, to access anything I have from anywhere in the house.
i wanna hear more about your moms custom 90s watercooling rig
Yes please.
Oh
My
God
That logo at the end
I'm SO excited!
Glad to see you back. It looks like you're feeling better and I am excited to watch an hour long video about something I never knew existed.
Told ya this one was a genuinely interesting system! I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that the reason they went with BNC was look and feel; BNC was regarded as 'higher end' and more 'premium.' Everything on this machine is 100% genuine, top end, AV fanatic grade parts. And Niveus had some really top notch engineers. For example, they didn't just use tape because it was cheap - they used it because tape wouldn't communicate vibration. The heatsinks are also standard extrusions sold as 6 foot bar stock - I believe Wakefield made those; I know I used the same exact ones. The heatsink anchor, they probably bought from Mouser or similar; it was sold as a standard part, no joke. Including the push-pins.
The ICH RAID is extremely necessary for the drives as well. The DB35 drives are also special - the first 'DVR optimized' hard drives. 500GB was the largest capacity, and aggressively tuned for sequential, but only able to handle a whopping 65Mbits/sec. (That's 8 *megabytes* per second.) Random seek, like when your file system was fragmented (gee, that never happens) quickly dropped. They also had a unique 'multisegmented' cache to try and support more streams at once, but, uh, yeah. It absolutely needed the RAID0. Without it, recording was right out.
The Seasonic is probably a replacement; Niveus started with customized (don't know who, but not my ODM) power supplies, but the setup did not work. By '05, there were multiple silent (fan off) and fanless ATX power supplies on the market which weren't junk and didn't result in warranty calls. If you look at the later production Denalis, they had switched to Seasonic. The cables would have been the exact same between the two.
The BIG problem here is the missing tuners and audio. This one should have had an ATI TV Wonder 550-series, or two of them, minimum. These provided *hardware* MPEG2 encode/decode. Likely this specific box would have had ATI DCT CableCARD tuners before it was scrapped. THESE are what made the box, and they were NOT cheap - 550's were over $150 each, DCTs were OEM only and I still can't tell you how much other than 'a lot.' The Asus Xonar is also definitely a replacement - those didn't even launch until 2008!
so glad you made a video on this!! i saw you mention it in the one thrifting video and ive been on the edge (haha) of my seat checking your channel since. insane that we get two videos too!
It's nice to hear more personal anecdotes and insights into the manufacturing. That case is a beauty though. Could still be used for a modern passive build, but I do agree direct contact with the heatpipes and just a couple more bends would be a huge improvement.
bedtime video sorted. thank you for existing cathode ray dude, you are the best
Absolutely loved this, as always. Great story of a little company with big dreams, and a look into the mansion abyss. Can’t wait for the atrocities that will be unleashed in part 2. That Xbox 360 boot screen is a great cliffhanger
I know someone that to this day hacks together laptop motherboards into cable box shells to make media center extenders. I still have no clue why they would do that over just getting a roku or something. I appreciate the effort of turning e-waste into something useful though.
I used a hacked xbox, it was perfect. Never was that mutch in gaming on console. Always a pc user. i got the xbox with my phone or somthing else. Dude you are looking more healthy then normal
That card bracket is one of THE most "5 guys in a shop" things I've ever seen. They even put speed holes in it!
Got an HP Media Center PC (a1350n if I remember right) in early 2006 that shipped with MCE 2005 but upgraded ram and to Vista upon release. Absolutely loved that thing and with a GPU upgrade is what I experienced Oblivion on for the first time. Great memories from this time period.
That ending thought lol
Never expected a plot twist
The amusing thing about windows media centre edition was that it was a full fat Windows XP Pro underneath. So a useful OS to have for development. It also came on a number of laptops (which was weird) like the old Sony Vaio the wife had at the time, due to it also having a 'Full HD screen' aka 1080p in around 2005 iirc.
The big advantage of an HTPC if you had a CRT projector was the ability to double or quadruple the scan rate. Back then a line doubler was thousands of dollars. Using a PC gave you all the advantages of a doubler for a lot less. You just needed a projector that could support VGA/Component input at higher scan rates. I had a Sony VPH-1271Q (160 pounds hanging from the ceiling) projecting on a 100" 4x3 screen. Pretty cool for 1995.
I was a remote PC Tech in and around Manhattan back in that era and I got called into to setup those Media Center extenders quite a bit for a few years there in the later part of the decade. They were really pretty seamless devices and a great alternative vs networking multiple media center PC’s. But boy that market evaporated nearly as fast as it came. I haven’t even thought of them since maybe 2009, so thank you for the flashback! Great video as always and looking forward to the follow-up with what in guessing was an overpriced modded xbox haha. Great stuff.
great video! please keep doing what makes you happy!
Your insight into weird computers is as enjoyable as ever. You really outdid yourself on the heatpipe explanation/demonstration - I had always thought those sorts of things were just big chonky copper alloy rods, what a wacky revelation! This channel is now fully science-adjacent. You rock.
I swear that Gravis could give us an hour long deep dive into the contents of his nightstand - and it would be riveting. Sort of a tech verison of Kim Gordon's song "Bye Bye" where she essentially reads her packing list over an amazing track.
Well, you got me for the next video.
I audibly said “what” when the boot animation came up.
What a cliffhanger.
I finally finished, and I think you got almost everything right on the money in this video. I work in "the CEDIA space" as it's called (woof), so I know a lot about how these mansions are setup and installed. The thing I think that was overlooked was that matrix video switchers and "A/V distribution" is common. In that rack of equipment would be all of your sources, like Kaleidescape, Satellite, Cable, BluRay, etc... a matrix switcher, and at each TV would be a passive output of distribution receiver. Now, that's not to say that the Edge wouldn't still be needed. You still need to be able to produce enough streams that you can have dad in the theater, mom in the kitchen, and the kids all watching something else and getting drunk (yes, regressive stereotypes are very much intentionally used here, lol). I checked our company's database for "integrations" we've done, and was disappointed to see that the Niveus name didn't show up, so I presume they didn't make a huge splash. It's possible that individual integrators could have written code to use that "control" serial port on the back. I'm also curious, and I suspect you'd know or find out, whether serial control over the box was provided by Windows Media Center, or whether Niveus had to do it themselves. And, if the latter, perhaps they didn't get to it, and that's why it's not there? Thanks as always!
This is why I watch this channel, because this is history that shouldn't be forgotten. PC History is Retro-computing.
I like his style ( sorry I'm a new sub & don't know your name yet), relaxed and informative, but like Technology Connections. deserves more subs.
I literally went “WHAT?!?” out loud at the end logo!
This is amazing!
Somewhere I have my 2001 copies of Maximum PC, I'm glad I didn't throw them out because I'm due for a nostalgia blast remembering this unique era of PC's when a quiet PC was a truly weird concept.
As a sicko who built a media PC back in the '00s, the trick was to find motherboards that would run laptop chips, which for me meant mobile Athlon parts. (Also, went from a primary desktop running on a BP6 with dual celerons at 550 to a board running dual mobile Athlon II chips -- because regular ass PCs are for suckers)
One thing that Windows Media Center did that was great was that if you had a folder with a bunch of full DVD image/folder rips it would treat it as a disc changer, and you could get full menu support instead of just naked movie .avi files.
I want the next video. Holy crap, you sold me! I'm a big Plex guy with in-home streaming to my NVIDIA SHIELDs. In the past, I'd just load up Windows, hook it up to my TV, and use my NAS or the local drive. I'd even custom-burn VCDs and DVDs for fun to try them out.
Back then, I built a dedicated XP media center PC with a dual analog tuner (Hauppauge) TV card.
I used this system for almost 10 years as my daily TV setup. It worked flawlessly!! Schedule recordings (two simultaneously or watching TV an record an other channel), and when playing a recording. skipping through commercial block was quick!
Now having the modern streaming IP-TV service ad Netflix , the controls always respond so damn slow, and skipping a commercial block takes way more time.
I do miss my XP media center setup! 🙏
I just laughed my ass off right with you at the monitor suddenly just deciding it didn’t like being at the right height. Thank you for including that clip!
Bruh I remember hearing about those Niveus Edge things all over the place back then & how they were just Xbox 360's.
There's a video called "Potentially Licensed PASSIVE COOLED Xbox 360 Prototype? || Niveus History" which I encourage you to watch, they're apparently very rare and were at one point were possibly considered to be prototypes back then just because of how rare & unknown they really are.
I was very surprised watching the end of this video to see that you actually had one and will hopefully explain what it all does and what it was even for in the 1st place. There's barely any info about it online beyond the odd few pictures of it. Can't wait for your video on it!
Glad to see you are back to normal and feeling better
52:55 getting some Cathode Ray Dude mom's lore in here, that was badass to do in the early 2000s.
Wow, I've seen heat pipes tons of times, I never knew about how they were made or realized how efficient they are.
CRD - I got one of these long ago from a friend when he moved. I gutted it and made it into a more modern HTPC but haven't used it in ages. It has the exact same power supply and the same paste on the heatpipes in the copper slug, so I think those things may be factory. I do remember that the PSU had a large heat pad on it and not paste though. I still have the thing. Nice find!
A good. You scooped those. Hell yeah!
Thats a run of the mill audio amplifier chassis. Those heatsinks were designed to have multiple audio output transistors coupled to them. Just look at 1990s Krell and Nelson Pass amplifiers and you'll see the resemblance.
That ending is the best "stay tuned!" next-episode teaser I've ever seen
Oh, that’s a time capsule! Lots of memories. By the way, I just loved how you kept referring to Tvo’s. That is so US specific it’s funny. I’m from Canada, every people I’ve seen with DVR didn’t really know how to use them, except for those that came with the TV box and that was like five years later… nice video good work
How does this guy always get me a watch and hour long video about a basic PC
this thing seems wildly huge for a htpc at least from ones i knew about. very interesting machine
The idea of an HTPC fascinates me immensely - not just because I was 11 in 2005 and I saw the rise of DVR and HTPCs in Europe with stuff like Sky offering their very first DVR and HD-capable set top boxes AND I had a habit of looking up cool hardware on the mail-in catalogues of old Italian electronics stores like GBC to see what was new on the market.
In an era where streaming services have not only reached the logical endpoint of the horseshoe theory to become just like cable, but have also started deleting stuff because it's cheaper to do tax write-offs than to pay royalties to the creators involved with those products, having your very own HTPC and your stack of Blu-Rays has become desirable once again.
I burst out laughing at that reveal at the end.
33:52 I loved my ATI All In Wonder Video Card. Along with Napster and cable TV, made recording movies an TV amazing. This was late 90's greatness before I bought the Voodoo 3 3500.
Nice edit.
I was all in for Computer Media Center usage. Whilst in college during the late 2000's, I used my Dell Intel Core Duo with Hauppauge USB HD antenna. Windows 7 with Medis Center and Direct TV made my college experience amazing. It downloaded all of the listing with no problem. I used this for 2 years. I was amazed at how integrated the Windows Media Center was with Direct TV. Best 2 years of usage I javelin had. Haven't used Media Center since. Like I said, ATI All In Wonder started it all.
Thanks for making this video!! Enjoyed it very much! I can't wait for the next video!
Love the style and passive-cooling of the case. I just turned a walk-in closet behind my screen into the room that holds my AV gear, which is also seperated by a hallway with a full wall of BD & DVD movie shelves so not only do I have a noisy rackmount server handling media but all my other noisy servers & switches are there and yet I can't hear even a hum 15 feet away.
Learning more about gravis' manufacturing background makes so much sense
You're getting a delta-T between the CPU temp and the heatsink temp of about 30°C, that's essentially all due to the thermal gradient within the copper slug between the CPU surface and where the heatpipes interface. It also means the heatsink can dissipate the 65W under load with a delta-T of only 10°C to the ambient air, which is absolutely bonkers for a passive cooler. Of course it will heat up (and stabilize) the much less dissipative rest of the case to the same temperature. If they eliminated the thermal resistance of the copper slug by mounting the heatpipes directly on the CPU (like proper heatsinks do), they could probably keep it at 40°C under load (or rather realistically use a small fraction of the cooler size). The GPU side has a dramatically worse thermal transport (fewer and longer heatpipes, worse interface to the heatsink and between heatsinks) and probably a comparable thermal output, so it makes sense that it needs a considerably higher delta-T to dissipate that heat.
I had a cute mini-ITX Zalman case with a proper passive heatpipe solution capable of comparable thermal dissipation from a big-boy CPU, but using probably less than 2 kilos for the entire case. Of course that was many years later, well into the Sandybridge era.
52:57 I want to have a video on this. Your mom sounds like an awesome mom.
Holy moly, I remember seeing a machine like the Denali when I was shopping for a PC in 2005! It was waaay out of my range tho, IIRC the price was in the teens of thousands PLN - I have NO idea what it'd be in USD now adjusted etc. etc., but it was north of two years average wages back then...
PS: It was kept in a plexiglass case to showcase the fact that it could be enclosed to a large degree. Oh, and on the topic of quietness, I ended up with an Athlon with an aftermarket heatsink that routinely drowned out music...
My first "HTPC" setup was a set of composite and stereo audio cables that ran between two rooms in my parents' apartment to connect the PC with the TV. You wanted to watch a movie in the living room? You switched the GPU to TV-out, hit spacebar and walked there. You wanted to pause it? You walked back to the computer room to hit the spacebar again.
And it didn't run Media Center or anything like it, not just because it didn't make sense without a remote, but primarily because in the early 2000s Poland where this story is taking place, the most common video format was pirated CD-Rs with DivX-encoded DVDRips and matching text files containing subtitles. And there was a whole local Polish scene of competing freeware video players that overlaid the subtitles on top of a normal DirectShow player component, everyone was using one of those.
Eventually the pirate scene moved towards more standard solutions like VLC and MPC for handling subtitle files, and then online streaming (of both the officially licensed and more shady kinds) basically took over like everywhere else. But one can feel the nostalgia for the more janky times.
Honestly as far as the pirate scene goes, the truth I think is that the majority of people even here did exactly what you're describing, full screen a copy of VLC or whatever and deal with it. Personally I never had a remote for anything I played video on, I just know that there were people at the high end of the market who bothered to put in the effort and expense, haha.
Hour long CRD?
HELL YEAH
Random modern PC nerd chiming in with some thoughts on that thermal solution:
Honestly, not at all surprised it is taking that CPU so well, 65 watts is low by modern standards, that is the kind of wattage a dinky intel/AMD stock cooler will be able to handle with ease, a heatsink of that shear thermal mass will not even break a sweat. The likely reason your GPU is showing up more clearly is because it is only attached to one of the heatsinks, dumping all of its heat into one place and making for a much more obvious delta for the IR camera.
Also, 60C is a perfectly fine temperature for a CPU. Most modern chips are perfectly happy all the way up to ~80C or so, only starting to properly throttle around 90C+. Older chips are probably a bit less tolerable than that, but 60C is well under.
I would be supper curious to see this thing on a newer CPU of a higher TDP, it seems like it should be able to handle it...
I had a media centre PC about when this came out, mine was just windows shares on my pc going out via DLNA to my PS3, my stock gen 1 PS3. Through witch I could browse the file system, play music and legal obtained movies. This was back when you could squeeze a 2 hour movie into a 700mb cd. The blacks were garbage but overall it was passable. God bless Trinatron CRT's. Now I just have a plex/file/minecraft server, complete with a Digital tv tuner. It runs a second gen ryzen 3 chip on an ITX board. The case I bought is a small run aluminum thing that looks remarkably like this one, minus the heat sinks. I do miss the days of being able to just live with a less than perfect signal. I'd get four more channels if the signal wasn't corrupted beyond usability. Anyhow That was all pointless except to say that HTPC is still a thing for some of us.
That ending genuinely made my jaw drop holy shit lol
Actually laughed out loud at the monitor deflating and then even more so the Xbox boot screen! Loved it :)
Oh hey, Cardis Audio is based out of my home town on the Oregon coast. Briefly met George Cardis, which isn’t surprising since town is 2500 people.
I was devastated you didn't pick this stuff up in your drifting shiznit. Now I am complete.
Seeing an Apple II, with a commodore monitor running PC software and the SNES controller made my head 🤯
I just spent over an hour watching a video about a PC with a fancy heatsink. Nice job.
So my experience with this was with one of those "more money than brains" type of wealthy person. He did indeed have the whole house audio/video thing going on, with a central rack of equipment, with this particular model at the centre of it. I was quite impressed by the sheer size and weight of it. It would have worked well as a mooring weight if placed on the Queen's Bottom.
I had an similar chassie back in the days bought in Europe. Instead of the connectors at the back I had 4 stereo amps 8x45w and a 7.1 soundcard
I was just watching the last CRD video for the second time and then a new one pops up
Yayyy
I did a passively cooled PC with that Zalman cooler. Also removed the FETs from the PSU and put them on giant aluminum heatsinks, so that was fanless too (though also a massive electrical hazard.)
In this timeframe I used a Buffalo NAS and a mediaplayer that could mount a shared folder, total power use of about 5-10 watts.
I did have to have a machine to capture HDTV, rip a DVD or download a torrent and copy that to the NAS, it just wasnt used in the living room or a bedroom, but that machine wasn't always running.
...oh wow, the absolute whiplash when you powered the Edge on and I heard *that* bootup...
I had an AV custom install business in the UK and we pioneered using XP media centre systems, then VISTA (oh god the trauma) and later fully custom networked multi room PC based systems with servers. Also Mac Front Row all allowing centralised movie and music server with individual TV recording that pushed back to the server and allowing playback of recordings in all the rooms. The last multi room PC based system we purchased had custom networked Blu-ray drives, a massive solid state NAS and cost over £15,000 - the company went bust before we even got to turn it on and we couldn’t even get the login information from them so the whole thing was bricked! Never touched anything like this again.
I think the Niveus used BNC ports for the Component output because most projectors at the time used BNC. Even for VGA runs at the time, using 5 BNC cables in the wall from source to the projector was pretty common then. DVI and HDMI were next to impossible to run to those lengths in 2004.
This was awesome!!!! I can’t wait to see the next one on the edge
I have some tiny feedback on something I've noticed other RUclipsrs do too. (I might have complained about this in the comments of a Technology Connections video):
I don't know how to feel about the pop-up texts. Either I have to pause the video to read them, or read them and not listen to what you say for a few seconds. It's one or the other. It doesn't seem like a good idea to convey two pieces of information, sometimes unrelated or even contrary to another, at the same time. I prefer the cutting room inserts, the actual video snippets you did in a few videos in the past.
Anyway, keep up the great work!