Dean Vaughan

Operation Silent Xbox

I use a soft modded Xbox with XBMC as a home theatre PC. I do not have cable TV or satellite,  my DVD player isn't even plugged in. XBMC is the only way I watch TV or movies.

I really like this setup. It is easy to use and I have never had a problem with it besides one; my Xbox is loud. It is not any louder than a normal Xbox and in PC terms it is pretty quiet. After years of working around computers hard drive whines and fans annoy the piss out of me. Where as a normal person would never hear it, I can. Normally I can tune it out, but sometimes, like when I pause a show, I can hear it.

This is what it sounds like:

It is slowly driving me insane.

I tried out a Popcorn Hour A-110 and it did not have any where near the features or polish XBMC has. It was quiet though. I've also tried MythTV it was a pain in the ass to setup and use. Also the PC needed to run it wasn't any better noise wise than the Xbox.

Now my plan is to make the Xbox silent by purchasing a new hard drive and fan.

HD: Seagate Barracude 7200 80GB ($52 shipped)
Fan: Noctua NF-R8 Ultra Silent 80mm ($21 shipped)

Both of these come recommended as being very quiet.

Here is where this story gets sad.

The fan couldn't push enough air and my Xbox was getting too hot. Back to the old fan. Thing is, even spun up, the original fan isn't very loud. XBMC keeps it at around %20 max spin anyway. It's silent.

The new hard drive was just as loud as the old one. From experimenting a bit the hard drive is by far the loudest component in the Xbox. The only other noise makers are the DVD drive, the case fan, and the GPU fan. I never use the DVD drive. The GPU and case fans are pretty much silent.

What recourse does that leave me with? Not much really, I can purchase an SSD hard drive which will be silent as the night is dark, but they cost about $250 for 80GB. That's more than I paid for the Xbox, new hds, and fan put together. I'm not willing to do that.

My other option is to build an HTPC from scratch and use XBMC Linux. Again, relatively high cost would be factor in this too.

What I ended up doing was pushing the Xbox as far back into my entertainment center as possible. A couple inches of wood and a TV make for ok sound proofing.

Good times.