thanks to all i learned on this website i was able to build this quiet powerful pc equipped with a 2*50watts audio amplifier. the first edition was built inside a silentium t2 case, but without the amp and with a fullsize atx-board.

this machine is based on a gigabyte micro-atx-board. the lesser hight of the board gives room for the audio amplifier on the bottom.

cleaned the machine today after 6 months of use and took the opportunity to take pictures. including the dust that accumulated inside the case despite the antec-filter in front of the 92mm front-fans.

have a look at:

http://picasaweb.google.nl/sansephotos/ ... mplifierPC

I like the idea, but how much extra heat does the amp produce? I know most amps produce a substantial amount of heat, but I understand the class-T amps from companies like Sonic Impact are much more efficient. What type and model is the amp?

Also, you've got a completely ridiculous number of cables in that case, but you've done a fine job of managing them.

but I think a good t amp outside the case is the way to go. Less RFI, less heat, and a good t amp is a very good amp for relatively not a lot of money.
sending the sound out to a t amp with a USB DAC is the way I want to go. I don't game and am not interested in 5.1 just the best two channel I can get within reason.

the mCubed fancontroller gives indeed an enormous amount of cables.

the amp does not give heat-problems. when playing music for an hour at strong levels the amp itself feels just luke warm. it's a 12v car-audio amplifier by blaupunkt (tha 275 pnp). it's not a normal amp-design, but a high effiency one. the details of all that are not known to me.



the amp gives no rfi problems. absolute silence in the speakers with sound muted. and only one quiet pc and 2 speakers in the living room.

Very nice, but how do you power the amplifier? From the PSU?

Also car amps are usually better shielded against RFI than home amps, and also have decent input voltage filtering, seeing as the +12V(14.4V) in cars are usually a tad noisy...

yes, from the psu (one of the 12v lines of the neohe) by a 'modified' pci-e cable.

Cool!
have you watched the 12v rail while blasting music?

I've all ways wanted to mod in a old knob car radio/ cassette deck in my case so i can play AM and tapes on my pc!


oooh an 8 track pc....hmm...

you mean with a scope? no, but would that be necessary with a 550w psu...? if the audio-amp delivers 100 watt peaks, then the neohe has to deliver 8 ampere peaks on one of the three 18 ampere rails. should be no problem.

I have a Super T-Amp and have thought many times about mounting mine inside my case also. The 12v rail is a good idea. I just need to figure out how to bypass the volume knob and hard-wire that now too.

i'm using the imon for that. it's the device on top above the dvd-writer. it contains a volume-knob (software driven over usb), that can control the master volume level of windows.

have a look at www.soundgraph.com for more info about imon.

for the people interested: i've added screenshots of the bigng fancontroller temp-voltage (voltages in percentages) profiles to the photoalbum.

the cpu-fan (scythe 100mm) measures the temp under the cpu-heatsink near the 939 socket with a digital sensor. the mobo-fan (140mm sharkoon) reacts to the temps from the vrm, northbridge, southbridge and ddr-ram with 4 analog foil-sensors. the gpu-fan (sunon 70mm) acts on the temp of the gpu-heatsink near the 8600gts gpu by a digital sensor. the case fans (120mm silenx rear and 2*92mm silenx front) react to the temp in the case in the rear upper corner just under the neohe psu measured by a digital sensor.

with these 4 profiles the system does not ramp up fans with t-ambient below 25c, when playing music with mediaplayer or winamp. on tropic days or when gaming things change of course. in the right upper corner of the screenshots you can see a (live) presentation of the various machine-parameters like temps, rpms, clocks, voltages, etc with samurize (www.samurize.com).

have a look at:

http://picasaweb.google.nl/sansephotos/ ... mplifierPC

I have seen a couple of these already before, but this is quite likely the best executed one! Good job, the amount of cables in there is just crazy.

thanks for the kind words, jipa.

the dust i found in the pc after a half year of use despite the antec filter motivated me to think about this. as a result of this thinking i added some foam to the upper part of the front of the case behind the bezel. thereby effectively blocking unfiltered air entering the case around the floppydrive, the sata-bay, the dvd-writer and the imon. the foam is held in place by the antec bay-rails:



in the opening of the sata-bay another piece of (hard) foam was placed to prevent air from entering the case through the sata-bay itself. and i also added an extra filter in front of the antec filter. just loosely put there and held in place by the bezel. these actions resulted in less dust in the case, but also fans ramping up a little (<1 degree C) earlier.

It might be an idea to install a Capacitor such as those fitted in car ICE systems...? 1 farad would probably be overkill in this context, but it would help to smooth out the power requirements.

but why would it be necessary to smooth out the power requirements? aren't they smooth enough already?

I thought the capacitors in the car stereos were to provide extra power when the bass speakers attempt to lift your car off the road..

Which wont be an issue in a PC case.

the ultimate amplifier pc was updated with new discs: one 128Gb ssd (crucial m4) and one 2Tb hdd (wd20earx). the 10.000 rpm raptor and the 2 data hdd's were removed. the machine is a lot quieter and cooler now. the upper front fan can blow directly to the rear part of the case and about 25 watt of heat disappeared. the ssd was mounted upside down on the other side of the hdd-tray with screws. the operating system was upgraded to windows 7 ultimate x64 sp1, which is ''ssd-aware''.