>There is no way you could run any processor without a cooling device I don't
>think. Certainly not a SLOT chip, they have fans built onto the chip. You
>could replace the fan with a peltier device but these chew a wack of power
>which is bad in the car. But it'd be nice for the home model to have silence
>(although I'm not sure how quiet Peltiers are). Also, MP3 decoding should
>take the same ammount of processor regardless of platform but of course the
>processing overhead of Windoze will crank abit of heat. But just MP3
>decoding will push even a low end pentium.

I tried using just a large heatsink on both a P90 and a K5-75. It works
fine at room temperature with the covers off, but inside a case there's
just no way. It locked up after 20 minutes. If you used a peltier device
without a fan you would need a very significant heatsink. The sound of a
processor fan is about the same as a hard disk anyway.

Full decoding is possible on a 486 or 586 @ 120 mhz but almost anything
will cause it to glitch. A K5-75 or Pentium 75 is perfectly happy. I can
play tunes while shoving files to the player about 1 megabyte/second
through ethernet, and it is smooth with a P90, and glitches a bit with a
K5-75. Partly that might be due to bus speed, 50mhz on the 75 and 60mhz on
the 90, since it's a throughput problem(or maybe just need to "nice" the
ftp task).

If you need a power supply you can copy mine:
http://www.bobblick.com/bob/projects/yamm/

If you use a motherboard with on-board audio, you might want to look at my
fix for crappy sound:
http://www.bobblick.com/bob/computer/cmi8330.html
It applies to the cmi8330 sound chip and also the HT1869 which is the same
thing.

Cheers,
Bob