My fanless HTPC (thanks everyone!)

Info & chat about quiet prebuilt, small form factor and barebones systems, people's experiences with vendors thereof, etc.

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tbessie
Posts: 232
Joined: Tue Feb 05, 2008 10:07 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

My fanless HTPC (thanks everyone!)

Post by tbessie » Fri Oct 05, 2018 10:48 am

Hey folks...

I want to thank everyone here who participated in the several threads I started on the topic of creating a silent, fanless PC to use in my home theater.

I ended up with a rather expensive option, but a good one:

http://www.atechfabrication.com/product ... Client.htm

The guy created the case (with a few mods from the stock case he makes), and installed motherboard, memory and M.2 drive.

I got it yesterday, installed more drives, and got it up and running with Windows 10. It's sitting under my TV now.

Had a problem at first with HDMI audio, but found it was due to an unclear bios setting.

Anyway, I highly recommend the above company. Small company in Southern California, I think just 2 guys running it. High quality work. In speaking with one of them (Glenn), he told me that these sorts of fanless designs didn't much exist when he came up with his first cases, but just a couple of years after he started selling them, similar cases started appearing from Chinese companies - he suspects they stole his ideas. Anyway, if you want something made here in the US and top quality, he's your man.

- Tim

CA_Steve
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Re: My fanless HTPC (thanks everyone!)

Post by CA_Steve » Sat Oct 06, 2018 5:29 am

Glad it worked out for you. If you have the time, I'd love to see some heat soak tests results (temp vs time for idle, light load, heavy load).

tbessie
Posts: 232
Joined: Tue Feb 05, 2008 10:07 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Re: My fanless HTPC (thanks everyone!)

Post by tbessie » Wed Oct 10, 2018 10:25 pm

CA_Steve wrote:Glad it worked out for you. If you have the time, I'd love to see some heat soak tests results (temp vs time for idle, light load, heavy load).
Sure - how would I do those? I can run RealTemp with Prime95, but that's all I know how to do.

- Tim

CA_Steve
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Re: My fanless HTPC (thanks everyone!)

Post by CA_Steve » Thu Oct 11, 2018 7:07 am

I don't know of any free data logging programs, offhand...sure, some that will graph temp over time...but not actually show the time. I go old school:
- RealTemp, Prime95, a timer, and a spreadsheet.

idle soak: After the PC has been off for a few hours, start boot and the timer. Load RealTemp and excel. Log the first measurement and every 5 min or so. When things slow down, go to 10 min intervals. If you don't see an increase after 10 min, stop.

stress soak: 1) Do after the idle soak for a nice baseline.
2) Start Prime95 small FFT torture test and try and grab 15 sec intervals for the first few minutes, until the increase slows. Then go to 1 min intervals and repeat. Then 5 min intervals. Then 10 min intervals. When temp stops rising, go to 3).
3) Stop Prime95 and repeat the measurement steps from above.

The early part of the load and load stop tests will tell you how well your heatsink/heatpipe interface is connected to the CPU. The later part of the load test tells you how well the case can remove heat from the CPU. The latter part of the load stop test tells you how well the case can dissipate heat to the environment.

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