Building the Mother of All Silent PC cases

Show off your quiet rig.

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Hezz
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Building the Mother of All Silent PC cases

Post by Hezz » Thu Sep 15, 2005 11:22 am

Hello everyone,

I am embarking on a new silent computer build. After starting to build up a DIY home theater and a HTPC to drive my projector I realized that I need a powerful quiet PC to do the things that I wanted to do with it.

After some trail and error in other system builds that I had done I tried putting together some designs typical of HTPC cases. I first bought an Antec Overture case which was a pretty quiet case but that case soon cooked my hard drives due to it's less than robust cooling design.

Then I decided I needed to get serious and I started designing some custom PC cases from the ground up. These were not based on using an existing case and modifying it but were designed from a clean slate. I had done a couple of high end PC case designs before but never really ended up making them as I was able to get adequate performance for the need at hand by cheaper and easier means of modifying existing cases and using quiet components.

After several design iterations I came to the conclusion that for me instead of trying to fight with physics and force all the hardware into a horizontal style case that would fit in my A/V HT rack I would design a new A/V rack that would accomodate a large custom made vertical tower case. My reasoning was that the tower configuration is inhearantly easier to cool and there are a lot more case options for modification.

I put together an inexpensive rig from left over parts but I knew that in the long run it would not be satisfactory and it was way too loud. I hate the whine of fans and it is hard to get really good cooling with really slow moving fans. Actually that case would not have been so bad if not for the typical power supply mounting scheme. Holding the PS at one end caused the aluminum bodied PS case to warp a little and the flexing of the PS case warped the frame of the quiet fan that I had installed. At this point the fan was no longer quiet but still functioned.

I have realized that typical sheet metal cases are not really high performers in any regard and that they were cheap and easy for manufacturers to make in high quantities. I wanted to push the envelope and build something that would really not go out of date.

One of the criterion I had for the case was that it would have above average cooling for long term reliability. And enough thermal capacity to deal with future higher wattage CPU and GPU designs and also a PPU. THe goal was also to have no fans. And the whole case had to be self contained. In other words there can be no external cooling rig linked with hoses or tubes. Also, the design would have to have some asthetic appeal since it has to fit into the home theater environment.

I am starting this thread to document my build and progress on this case. It is going to be a bit expensive but my goal is that this will be the last HTPC case I will ever need. At least for a long time.

I have already started on the frame for the PC case and I expect the design to evolve to some degree as I progress. Here are some models of my design intentions. These are only beginning designs so they do not show all of the components.

The case will use water cooling and only one medium volume very quiet pump to cool the CPU and northbridge. THe rest of the case will have passive and convective cooling.

I will discuss several of my design reasons as I post pictures and so forth and since this build will be a long term slow process it will take a while for updates. I hope this stimulates some others to make an assault on the state of the art.

Hezz

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Thu Sep 15, 2005 11:24 am

Looks like I am going to have to host the pictures on another server so it will take a little while for me to get that set up.

Hezz

[Mod comment: you can use Image Shack. ]

Bluefront
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Post by Bluefront » Thu Sep 15, 2005 12:24 pm

Not trying to fight physics is definately a benefit, but keeping your setup quiet at the same time causes some conflicts. For good passive cooling of internal components, intake and exhaust openings must be as open as possible. This of course allows sound to excape more easily.

I've taken a different approach.....I seal and dampen my cases as much as possible. I use minimum airflow necessary for sufficient cooling by the use of directed airflow/ducting. I position exhausts and intakes in such a way as to minimize noise (bottom and rear openings only). I try to position all fans used toward the center of the case.....at least 5" from any opening.

I also avoid noisy components....I don't need a high-power video card. Even cooled passively, they necessitate higher fan speeds to evacuate the heat. I have avoided fanless PSUs for the same reason....heat has to be removed somehow, either by a PSU fan or increased airflow through the case.

Lots of ways to build a quiet computer....I haven't seen the best way yet.

cotdt
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Post by cotdt » Thu Sep 15, 2005 12:55 pm

I think the best way to passive cooling and cases will ultimately be a variant of the Zalman TN-500/TN-300. There doesn't need to be direct ventilation if you can somehow get the heat to exhaust through the aluminum metal. Of course selecting low-heat components would always be a must. All-passive cooling is underrated and doesn't have as many problems as people make them out to be.

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Thu Sep 15, 2005 7:20 pm

Bluefront,

All good ideas. I used similar methods with my first quiet PC and it was a reasonable success. With this PC because of it's intended use I need a more robust solution than my previous effort. I will need a quieter PC and one that can handle any CPU, GPU and PPU that I need to cool. Plus I need multiple HD's for media files.

Cotdt,

My case is exactly that but I think that it will function better than the Zalman case and I will explain why in future posts.

I posted a picture of one of the model shots on Image Shack. I hope it works.

Image
Image
[Mod edit: you need to use the "direct" link to the image; not the link to the page where the image can seen...]

Hezz

cotdt
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Post by cotdt » Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:36 am

VERY NICE!!! yes I think it can beat the Zalman case and be smaller than the Zalman too. Of course it will be heavy but we are strong!

what is that thing under the case for? I don't understand what that pyramid-like thing on top is?

hmmm... would i help to also have heatsink ridges on the inside to "ventilate" better?

I think the hardest part is the insides.

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Fri Sep 16, 2005 10:57 pm

cotdt,

The pyramidal top plate is an assembly of slats with openings. It may be hard to tell in the picture as it is somewhat compressed. It is an attempt to allow a generous amount of air in the case to rise out of the case by normal warm air rising and still offer some protection to keep anything from falling into the case such as dust or accidental spills.

The case reminds me of a modern office building. The base is a water reservior that has copper sides which are in contact with the aluminum cooling fins. This works like the Zalman reservator. This is to give the case reserve cooling capacity and overhead for cooling 2 CPU's or a cell CPU coprocessor card which might be in the future. To save money my idea is to make the water tank out of scraps of acrylic plastic and then have thin copper sheeting inlaid on the sides.

Having cooling fins on the inside is a good idea and I have thought of that before but I think that it will raise the building complexity up to a point where it is too much of a pain for me to build it. Also, I think with the good vertical venting the warm air inside the case won't be too much of a problem. If necessary, I can see using one slow moving fan at the bottom or top of the case to move more air. In fact one 400-500 RPM 120mm fan at the bottom driving the air up and out of the might be a further possibility but in the past I have found that even slow 120mm fans were more noise than I wanted. Of course it was a Panaflo. Maybe there are quieter fans now.

The gap between the upper and lower modules is a two inch air inlet which allow air to enter the bottom of the upper main PC compartment. The entire floor of the upper case is open except for some screen mesh to keep out bugs and stuff.

My ideas is to use one upper heat sink to cool the CPU and the northbridge and then dump the water into the reservoir for longer cooling time. The PS will be a high quality fanless design. The GPU, PPU will have passive heat sinks that ancor to the other heat sink on the top case. And additional water cooling can be used wherever is needed by adding a second water pump and taking it from the lower reservoir.

There will also be a really good HDD mounting scheme whice will help to cool, silence, and dampen the HDD vibrations.

Hezz

I will post some pictures from differing angles for better viewing.

cotdt
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Post by cotdt » Sat Sep 17, 2005 12:25 am

Ahhh that's exactly what I speculated those things would be and I just wanted to be sure. Well... I think that's a lot more cooling than one will need! PSU's are easy to passively cool as long as it gets good air, as is the CPU and northbridge. Some GPUs are harder to cool but still aren't too difficult. I don't think any fans are needed at all, not even for safety. If done well I think you would discover that the case can cool better than even high-end air. The bottom thing doesn't seem to be needed. OK good luck and post pictures as they are available!

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Sat Sep 17, 2005 3:01 pm

Of course this case design is overkill but that is my idea. I want it to have enough reserve capacity to accomodate any future expansions.

Here are a couple of more picture angles.

Hezz

Image

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Sat Sep 17, 2005 3:14 pm

Here is a shot from the back showing the tubular steel frame that supports the structure. Everything is mounted to this light rigid frame. THe water tank is just a mockup block and some of the frame components are not in place yet such as the rear I/O card cutouts and HDD mounts.

After some thinking on frame design I asked myself a few questions. I listed what a PC case frame out to be and I said. Open so hot air can move out or contact heat cooling walls like aluminum walls or heatsinks. The frame needs to resist resonance so it needs to be rigid and not amplify any vibrations like HDD and fan and pump noise. It also needs to be a material that I have the tools to work with. I choose square tubular steel because it is cheap and easy for me to weld and cut.

I came to the conclusion that the PC case frame should be a space frame like certain kinds of race cars. It would be strong and resist vibration and allow for open contact of internal hot air to cooling surfaces. Also because there were no thin walled aluminum or steel structural members to vibrate and amplify sound it would be inhearantly quieter. After all, it can't resonate if it isn't there. For extreme dampening the hollow volume of the frame can be filled with lead shot and sand. THis will very effectively dampen any frame borne vibrations cause by HDD or fans.

Hezz



Image

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Thu Oct 06, 2005 7:53 pm

Since starting this build project I have decided to make two cases. The case pictured above will become my CAD/Design Engineering computer and I will build a HTPC which is similar but will not have the extra lower water cooling unit. THe CAD workstation will be water cooled and have no fans and the HTPC will be completely passively air cooled with no fans.

I bought some 1/2 inch acrylic plastic remnants at a local plactic sign supplier for about 20 bucks which will make up most of the material for the water tank.

Hezz

wisdomtooth
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Post by wisdomtooth » Thu Oct 06, 2005 8:26 pm

In case you didn't know...

There is an HTPC case available that does passive cooling: The ATech 6000. http://www.atechfabrication.com/product ... c_6000.htm

It uses heatpipes to duct the heat from the CPU and GPU to the case itself for dissipation, similar to the Zalman TNN-series of server cases.

Several posters at http://www.htpcnews.com have built their HTPCs using this case and the results were very good.

My condolences on your having to suffer through that episode with the Antec Overtemperature, er, Overture. That thing is a complete piece of crap.

HTH.

Al
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Post by Al » Fri Oct 07, 2005 1:36 am

wisdomtooth wrote:There is an HTPC case available that does passive cooling: The ATech 6000.
That's not the only one... try the mCubed HFX, which I reckon looks a lot better than the ATech... cools CPU, VGA and NB with heatpipes, and you can fit an iMon VFD into the front of the case.

Al

wisdomtooth
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Post by wisdomtooth » Fri Oct 07, 2005 6:57 am

That's not the only one... try the mCubed HFX, which I reckon looks a lot better than the ATech... cools CPU, VGA and NB with heatpipes, and you can fit an iMon VFD into the front of the case.
The MCubed is also nice, BUT! There are several things to keep in mind:

The ATech 6000 is less than 13 inches deep while the MCubed is almost 18 inches. So if the depth of your media rack is a concern, the ATech 6000 is the far better choice than the MCubed.

The ATech is also more flexible in terms of cooling schemes-- If you are running really hot components like a Pentium-D and want to have a bit of active cooling to help along the passive case cooling, the ATech's rear-mounted PSU layout will let you use a PSU as part of the exhaust system. The MCubed's front PSU mount means a fan-cooled PSU will be dumping its heated exhaust into the case.

Also, ATech got different bezel options available-- You can get it in quite a few different configurations, right up to one with a touch-screen LCD screen built in. There's one available for fitting a VFD (with integrated IR) as well.

HTH.

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:07 pm

Wisdomtooth $ Al,

Great links. I had seen the A-tech cases before and they are about the best HTPC cases I have seen. Also the mCubed HFX looks like a good case. For me the deep depth for a HTPC is a problem and 16 inches is the max as far as I am concerned that the HTPC should be deep unless you have an unusually deep rack or case.

THe Overture case was too deep for me but I got by with it for a short time. The case is now being used to house a 233Mhz pentium music jukebox for playing back ripped CD's. In this capacity with a cpu with 10 watt heat disipation and no graphics card the case works well. Also I am running a ATA100 hard drive at ATA33 speed to slow it down and make less noise. This disk is used to store the music files and is plenty fast enough for this. It works great. My HTPC is another matter and is down right now due to a bad PS.

I like the heat pipe cooled cases but after looking at the Zalman and the A-tech I wondered why they had to have so many heat pipes and my feeling is that heat pipes are not highly efficient unless there is a large temperture differential between the ends. Ideally, with a passively cooled heatsink and heatpipes there would be no more than a twenty to fourty degree temperture differential between the ends but I think that with a single quarter inch heatpipe it does not really start moving heat until it has a 70-100 degree variation between the ends. It is claimed that a single quarter inch heatpipe can move about 100 watts of heat but this must be in an ideal situation. Of course redundency is smart but the difficulty of routing 4 - 6 semi rigid copper heatpipes is not appealing to me.

Anyway, that is my theory. I have not tested it only read a lot of papers and write ups on heatpipe experimentaion with PC cooling.

That is the reason that I am going with water cooling for the "Mother-of-All Tower". Though a little louder it is much more efficient at transferring heat with smaller temperature differentials.

With the HTPC tower I think that I am going to try and combine a high quality heatpipe fanless CPU cooler with a flexible copper strip going to the large side wall heatsink. Or perhaps one or two heatpipes combines with a local CPU heatsink.

Hezz

sgtpokey
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Post by sgtpokey » Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:31 pm

Hi All,
I actually finished building my mcubed fanless HTPC 2 weeks ago and have been testing it out as an HTPC and a game machien for the past two weeks.

I do plan on posting a more thorough assessment (with install pictures) but the highlights are:

1. Yes completely passive designs DO work.

2. Have a P-M overclocked to 2.236 (172X13) ghz. Idle: 38, Load 47

3. Have a 7800 GT, using a modified mcubed borg heatpipe system (used an old Zalman HD80 in place of mcube's mounting mechanism). Idle 45 Load 67 (These are great numbers for those not used to Video card temp tolerances)

4. Used the i915 Aopen ATX P-M board. Had to replace the fanned northbridge with a zalman northbridge by using thermal epoxy [no motherboard screw mounts]. It's a good board for the normal stuff, but a terrible overclocker. I'm happy with the max overclock but would have preferred to get to 200mhz FSB (for a 2.6ghz P-M). BTW, this board DOES allow you to run EIST so when in idle state you can throttle down and undervolt the P-M even further.

5. The install took some doing and I probably wouldn't recommend new system builders to try it. The heatpipes do bend very nicely (for those used to Zalman's heatpipes, these ones are made to be pliable). However, you may still end up bending things too much and want to start from scratch. Unfortunately there are no spare heatpipes supplied.

6. Space is an issue, make sure you use the recommended fanless psu (the Silverstone). The fanless Antec has a deeper profile and that may be an issue in the case.

7. I already use external SATA as my hard drive system, so I did not need to mess around inside the case with my HD storage. Also, the heat and power requirements of the HD's do not impact the powerload/temps inside the case, since there are no hard drives in the case.

8. System temp: idel 40, load 60. The northbridge is pretty hot but after two weeks of burn in no issues.

all in all I am quite pleased but am stilll tweaking the system...

sgtpokey
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Post by sgtpokey » Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:32 pm

Hi All,
I actually finished building my mcubed fanless HTPC 2 weeks ago and have been testing it out as an HTPC and a game machien for the past two weeks.

I do plan on posting a more thorough assessment (with install pictures) but the highlights are:

1. Yes completely passive designs DO work.

2. Have a P-M overclocked to 2.236 (172X13) ghz. Idle: 38, Load 47

3. Have a 7800 GT, using a modified mcubed borg heatpipe system (used an old Zalman HD80 in place of mcube's mounting mechanism). Idle 45 Load 67 (These are great numbers for those not used to Video card temp tolerances)

4. Used the i915 Aopen ATX P-M board. Had to replace the fanned northbridge with a zalman northbridge by using thermal epoxy [no motherboard screw mounts]. It's a good board for the normal stuff, but a terrible overclocker. I'm happy with the max overclock but would have preferred to get to 200mhz FSB (for a 2.6ghz P-M). BTW, this board DOES allow you to run EIST so when in idle state you can throttle down and undervolt the P-M even further.

5. The install took some doing and I probably wouldn't recommend new system builders to try it. The heatpipes do bend very nicely (for those used to Zalman's heatpipes, these ones are made to be pliable). However, you may still end up bending things too much and want to start from scratch. Unfortunately there are no spare heatpipes supplied.

6. Space is an issue, make sure you use the recommended fanless psu (the Silverstone). The fanless Antec has a deeper profile and that may be an issue in the case.

7. I already use external SATA as my hard drive system, so I did not need to mess around inside the case with my HD storage. Also, the heat and power requirements of the HD's do not impact the powerload/temps inside the case, since there are no hard drives in the case.

8. System temp: idel 40, load 60. The northbridge is pretty hot but after two weeks of burn in no issues.

all in all I am quite pleased but am stilll tweaking the system...

Mar.
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Post by Mar. » Sat Oct 08, 2005 9:06 am

That case would be crazy. Even better, make it from one piece of milled aluminum.... hah.

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Sun Oct 09, 2005 6:10 pm

IF huge blocks of aluminum weren't so expensive I would. That would raise the material cost from about 400-500 USD to over 3000 USD.

Sgtpoky,

If you can please post some pics of your rig as it sounds like a nice one.

Hezz

Hezz
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Post by Hezz » Sun Nov 13, 2005 10:15 am

Update on mother of all case.

Things are going a bit slow right now as school and other things are sapping my funds but I am making some slow progress.

After reading some of the other posts on experiences with water cooling I think that I am going to take a different approach with the mother of all tower case. I had wanted water cooling because I felt that it is the most efficient. I still feel that way but I am mostly concerned about having a no maintenance rig that never requires any concern. Even if it doesn't cool quite as well.

In this regard I have decided to make the case completely passive with no fans or pumps of any kind. The case outer topology will remain essentially the same except that the lower module will become a passively cooled power suppply instead of a reserator water tank.

This will leave me a large space above the motherboard where the PS used to be that will be used for a large passive heatsink that connects to the outer wall heatsink.

There is also a nice side benefit to this approach in that since the PS will have access to such overkill cooling. I can basically gut an inexpensive power supply of good quality instead of buying a expensive quiet supply.

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