[kuldan]

I have shipped a small NUC/XBMCBuntu based Build for a friend of mine (i5 Haswell NUC) and to be honest, if I don't put my ear near the box (<50cm) I don't hear the fan at all. it is veeery quiet and in my tests, never, ever revved up at all. It can, because it revves for a second at boot, but it never had to in my tests (without 4k video media, but bluray images and so on). I plan on getting one for myself soon as well, as the noise of my current micro-atx based build is way too high for my liking.

[eirki]

I have a NUC as well (Haswell, late 2013 i3 version), and I can hear the high pitched sound from the fan when there is no other sound in the room. Any kind of music or media playing (or even conversation) will drown it out, but I find it is definately audible in an (otherwise) silent room.

I'd consider a fanless case if I had the budget and space (guess it needs to be situated in a well ventilated place) for it. Keep in mind that the NUC is almost totally silent, just not completely.

[Topken]

I plan on getting a Zotac ZBox Bi320+ 2gb of ram+ either a 32gb or 64gb msata ssd The 32gb msata+2gb of ram puts me at around $179 and I live in the US which puts me in the same price range as the Chromebox. Plus I get a Celeron 2957u and 32gb of space instead of only 16gb.

[JackalHeadGod]

Right, taken the plunge and ordered the ASUS Chromebox M031U (celeron 2955U, 4GB RAM, 16GB Storage). Hopefully I won't have any trouble getting OpenElec on it.

Thanks, everyone for the help.

[wrxtasy]

With helpful people like Matt Devo around , it should not be too hard at all.

[JackalHeadGod]

Got the chrome box all set up with openelec, thanks for everyones help and advice.

I had one issue with the script: It appeared to crash when creating the openelec install USB and caused a reboot. As I'd already done the single install partitioning I couldn't boot and had to make the install USB on my PC instead. Other than that install went fine.

Matt Devo: Thanks for the script, doing all those steps manually would have been a real pain. One small suggestion, if you don't mind: Perhaps it's worth switching the order of the steps to have people create the installer first in case this happens for others, that way they'd still have a bootable system?

I've one small issue with the system. If I turn of the TV and then come back later it doesn't seem to resume correctly. When I try to play videos everything just starts flickering until I reboot (thankfully that takes about 10 seconds). There's some notes online about an issue with openelec that cause it, need to look in to that but it's relatively minor.

Thanks again everyone.

[Matt Devo]

Got the chrome box all set up with openelec, thanks for everyones help and advice.

I had one issue with the script: It appeared to crash when creating the openelec install USB and caused a reboot. As I'd already done the single install partitioning I couldn't boot and had to make the install USB on my PC instead. Other than that install went fine.

Matt Devo: Thanks for the script, doing all those steps manually would have been a real pain. One small suggestion, if you don't mind: Perhaps it's worth switching the order of the steps to have people create the installer first in case this happens for others, that way they'd still have a bootable system?

there's nothing in the creation of the install media that should cause it to reboot, but your suggestion to reverse the order of the steps is a good one.

I've one small issue with the system. If I turn of the TV and then come back later it doesn't seem to resume correctly. When I try to play videos everything just starts flickering until I reboot (thankfully that takes about 10 seconds). There's some notes online about an issue with openelec that cause it, need to look in to that but it's relatively minor.

Thanks again everyone.

are you only turning off the TV, or the ChromeBox as well?