Tranquil T3 - power supply?

[ytrebil]

Hi guys,

Won a Tranquil T3 last night on eBay, has EPIA-M10000 Motherboard with built in VIA C3 1GHZ CPU.

No idea why I bought it, guess I've been after some kind of small PC for a while and always liked the sound of the VIA's, the fact they draw a lot less power than conventional CPU's from AMD and Intel.

Anyway, it doesn't come with a PSU or HDD.

Firstly, what PSU do I need? I spotted a mini-ITX 90w Anstec PSU on eBay which is incredibly cheap (about 10 quid brand new delivered) - would something like this do?

Secondly, HDD - I don't want/need anything big. Only thing it needs is to be quiet. What can you recommend being cheap and silent?

Also read in the description that there is no space in the Tranquil P3 case for a CD Drive - don't even think there is in the case for a floppy drive! So will have to pre-load the operating system on it.

Anyone got any idea how quiet this set up would be? Planning to run it 24/7 hosting something - not sure yet!

[joshwa]

Seagate and Samsung make the quietest normal sized IDE hard drives, but for something quieter you could use a laptop HD and adapter. If the case has enough sound proofing then the HD should be pretty quiet, however the loudest component is likely to be the crappy fan on the mainboard itself. There are various solutions you can try to solve this, the simplest would be to replace the fan with something else depending what will fit.

90w *should* be plenty for mainboard + HDD, but if you start adding another HD, CD/DVD rom etc then it may not be enough.

I used an EPIA as a webserver for a year or two, it was fine, very reliable, and passively cooled