Passive general purpose PC

Show off your quiet rig.

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
vishcompany
Posts: 96
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 1:46 pm

Passive general purpose PC

Post by vishcompany » Sun Feb 05, 2017 12:38 pm

When my GF started to get into foto editing, it was obvious pretty soon, that the baytrail J-1900 board, would not cut it any longer. I put together a nice setup around an i3-6100. The only issue being, that the baytrail board had been sitting inside a long-obsolete Serener GS-L02 passive heatpipe case. Without heatpipes, as the baytrail chip emits so little heat, it just does not matter.
For the moment I moved the new setup into an old mATX case, the idea being, that I would find the time eventually to get that heatpipe case back into use.

I found a heatpipe set by impactics, which looked useable for my scenario.

Impactics also offers a heatpipe case, the C3LH-B. It is recommended for systems up to 50W TDP. It could handle the i3-6100.

Looking at the images I estimated/calculated this case to have 1584 cm² of cooling fin area, while the Serener GS-L02 has 1080 cm². Would this be enough to tame the CPU in question?

I decided to take the risk, taking into consideration the fact, that she mostly does office, web browsing and some Lightroom. She definitely does not torture it with P95 day and night.

The only problem left was to make good contact between the heatpipes and the heatsinks left and right.
The heatsinks have a 6mm groove, which can take 6mm heatpipes, so I just needed some small metal plates, some holes and some screws. For one side. The other side has the groove too low, so I wanted to use one of the aluminium blocks with a groove, which come with the coolset. For this I got a Z-shaped profile. A friend of mine is running a metal workshop and made it for me. I would not have known, how to get this project done without his contribution.

So here goes. This is the Serener GS-L02 heatpipe case. It is obsolete for ages, even their website is down now. Pity, because I think it looks pretty good.

Image


I did a dry run first, just to get everything into place. I also had to bend the heatpipes upwards slightly. On the right you can see the Z-shaped profile pressing down the heatpipe into the aluminium block with its groove and also pressing both of them against the heatsink.
I decided to leave the chipset alone, although the heatpipe set comes with a short heatpipe for it. I used this one on the right side.

Image


Image

Image



After some final touches I applied lots of heatpaste. Noctua NT-H1 and Cryorig CP7 being the stuff lying around. This shot was taken before I closed the lid of the cooling block. (It is made of nice pure copper by the way)

Image



This is how it looks with all the rest put in. I am using an Akasa 80W pico PSU.
Image



So how does it behave?

I started very carefully, being afraid, that the CPU would run too hot, but I soon noticed, that the cooling system works pretty well. So I got bolder and raised the number of threads in P95 from one to two to three and finally four! After 20 minutes of this torture test the CPU cores settled at 85°C. When I stopped there was an immediate temp drop of 30°, which is more than with any cooler I have used up till now (the biggest being a Noctua NH-U14S).
I was really impressed, that I did not have to abort due to overheating. The sides of the case get really, really hot, which is a good sign, as it shows, that all that heat gets transported away properly.
In daily use the sides get lukewarm and the CPU temps are bewtween 40-50°C.

So she is happy to have the beautiful case back on her desk and I was happy to do some tinkering. :D
Last edited by vishcompany on Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

CA_Steve
Moderator
Posts: 7650
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:36 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: Passive general purpose PC

Post by CA_Steve » Sun Feb 05, 2017 1:55 pm

Sweet :)

Post Reply