I'm also in the process of building something silent (and all custom made). Htpc based on mini-itx and i3-2120T. System will be without fans and use the case as cooling. It will be quite small (98x186x232 mm). For cad-image see below (seen from the side, with the slot-in bluray visible). http://www....

On the specs the i3 2120 is stated to have a tdp of 65 w. In your test, on full load, system power is listed as 60 w???

Could it be that you are using i3 2120 T (tdp of 35 w) in this test? Or am I missing something?

Would be nice to see a close up picture of how the motherboard is bolted to the heatsink. We have used AMD, and on those mainboards (don't know if it is the same for Intel) the heatsink is originally attached through a frame surrounding the CPU on the mainboard. This frame is attached to the mainbo...

Hi,

have been into silent computing and fan less some time. Here is an article about extending the concepts to a very small cluster:

www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/273/1

Is this ur personal system, or a customers? The first one I actually sold to a friend. The second one was the result of an inquiry of a firm needing a silent "appliance computer" (and they didn't want to be restricted to a vertical placement of the computer). But since it is a prototype and since I...

I'm very curious to know more about the the transfer mechanism to the cooling wall. I can think of a few ways it might be achieved, but I'm wondering how involved (read: expensive) the method is here. Regardless, that's genius. I can think of a lot of people (myself included) who'd enjoy a PC with ...

Regarding the second one, is it just one fan in the system? So there is no fan explicitly cooling the CPU? That is right, only one fan in the system, a 1500 rpm Nexus. I wanted to make the box as thin as possible, and I soon realized that it would be difficult if I were to use a heat sink and fan o...

Looks interesting! But it's kind of hard to see from the pictures, exactly what is going on there. So the entire side is basically a heat sink connected to the CPU/GPU?? The cpu is connected to the side wall. It is connected via a solid piece of aluminum (in the same way as has been described on th...

Have been working on silent computing for quite some time now. Mostly fanless. Our best model this far can be viewed here http://www.renget.se/bilder/slask.jpg . It uses a 45 W athlon, and is of dimensions 30x28x10 cm. While under stress CPU-temp lands at around 55 C. Due to space constraints only a...

miahallen wrote: I plan to hang it on the wall above the TV

Funny, my fanless is more or less designed for that purpose (placed on the wall). With a 45 W cpu dimensions are about 10x30x28 (thickness x height x width).

I have made a htpc of similar dimensions (2.5 disk instead of a ssd). Case was custom built, and I used one of the sides as heat sink. Cpu was an undervolted 65 W AMD. This system works, with decent temperatures, but I would GUESS that it would be a lot more difficult (impossible?) with a case of th...

Clearly you either are a very skilled system builder, have great ambient conditions, or both. Neither I would say. But I believe the design principles we are following are good (new?). Have also built a small cluster along the same lines (at the moment just four CPUs). Also fanless. Maybe fanless w...

at least one thing to consider is that you will decrease the lifetime of components and for no measurable or detectable improvement in noise level Would 50 C (full load, around 20 in the room) at the CPU decrease the life time of it? Should also have mentioned that we (of course?) use "home made" c...

A challenge not worth it if all you are after is silence and you have room for a setup that can accommodate fans. What do you mean by this? If the system works equally well as one with fans and if it is not more expensive then why shouldn't it be "worth it"? Should mention that we use internal grap...

Fanless is not worth the trouble, if your criterion is silence. If you are doing it for the extreme challenge, fine, but if you just want silence all you need is low speed fans. This seems to be the common wisdom, but has it been tested? I would think the noise would "add up"? Maybe it is true if y...

running fanless is pointless. In my HTPC I only have one 120mm fan at 750RPM running and everything is cool. CPU gets to 40 degrees under load, HDD at 30s. Room temp 20 degrees. As a comparison, when I tried fanless. CPU 50+, HDD 40+. Turning of the fans, yes, probably not a good idea. But that doe...

OK, so I guess many of you will start looking at faness setups when solid state memory are are going to be used instead of hard drives? Have been running fanless for many years now, and while it is true that HD is "noiisy" there is absolutely no drawback in running fanless IF system is giving you th...

pure456 wrote:What type of connection was used for the video testing of this board? Also, what drivers and bios version? If it was HDMI I'd love to hear how you got it working.

Hello?

Any advice on how I could go about solving this problem? I don't want to spend a lot of money on rigging larger heatsinks on the NB if that is not the real problem. Thanks for your help. Just maybe the board is reporting wrong temperatures? No idea if it would help, but have you considered upgradin...

Amourek: 14 C is about 57 F?

bomsy: firmware, where can I find this? On asus page I only find different versions of the bios as well as drivers for different version of Windows (I use linux).

Thanks!

What's the problem? I don't see a problem. You cannot expect the mb/cpu monitor to give the same temp reading as a physical probe atop the heatspreader. No way the latter can be positioned correctly, esp. if you have anything mounted atop. The edge temp will be much lower than the center of the hea...

I have this board, using it in a home made case with a heat pipe solution (from mcubed) to cool th cpu. I really don't know if I have made something stupid or if the bios reading of temperature is wrong. Have run several different test cases, e.g., in one underclocked run I measured around 40 C at t...

Hi all, I have the same motherboard, M2A-VM HDMI, and to me it seems the temperature measured in bios does not correspond to the CPU, but more likely to the Northbridge. I have measured just under 40 C (stress --cpu 2) at the heat spreader on top of the cpu, while at the same time the cpu temp in bi...

I'm not using it at the moment, but for temps and fan speeds there is lm-sensors, with GUI-extensions, ksensors (as well as possibly xsensors and others).

A question: in windows, are there an application that can control the voltage? I thought that was only possible to do in BIOS?

Regards,

/jon

a few thoughts from a non-heatpipe-expert Me neither. Did something really stupid, which I think explains the behavior I saw. The heat pipes I bought (Mcubed) are supposed to be attached via heat spreaders on top of a block of copper at the CPU. I thought I could do it without the block, and instea...

Got answer from Mcubed. No preferred direction.

Ah, didn't know that (about stress on CPU in BIOS), interesting!

But still strange there should be a 20 C difference between the two sides of the heat pipes (maybe temp-readings on MB wrong?).

Guess I'll have to try both directions to see if there is a preferred direction.

Thanks a lot!

Hi, thanks, The pipes are positioned so that the cold side is above the hot one (which, if it matters, should be "a good thing"). However, the pipes I bought are L-shaped, with one leg longer than the other, so when I was referring to direction I was more wondering if the internal structure of the h...

Hi, Recently bought heat pipes from mcubed (Borg HPC). For various reasons (better fit to the case I'm building) I mounted them in the "wrong" direction (i.e., the end which are supposed to go on the cpu was put on the "cool" side, and vice versa ...). In this case the cool side is an aluminum, finn...

Hi there, I have a few questions I was wondering if someone could help me with. Goal is to build a silent htpc system, and initially I will use a analog tv-card (Hauppauge pvr150), and resolution will not be high, so playback is not going to stress the cpu (however, later on I might go for high reso...