Impactics C3LH-B experience

Enclosures and acoustic damping to help quiet them.

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Dutchmm
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Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by Dutchmm » Sat Aug 02, 2014 9:26 am

Has anyone any experience of this case? I am thinking about buying a fanless i7 system from At Last!. My main use at the moment is photographic editing and development, large spreadsheets, and small database projects. I anticipate at some time running eclipse for some java development. I don't game, and I am not interested in video encoding ...

I am not over worried about the storage and memory implications of the choice. More about cooling (although the CPU is a low power Haswell 4785T), because it gets quite warm in the summer here in Italy. And I demand silence, hence the need for fanless.

The company also has a design based on an earlier chipset (wouldn't worry me) but with the Akasa Euler case. Given that Mike was decidedly lukewarm about the Euler's quality, and that it doesn't allow for a Blu-Ray burner (buy a 24Mp camera, shoot RAW, and see how fast you fill up those DVDs!), I am not so keen. Also there is a large difference in terms of the number of USB connections.

Thanks in advance for your experiences.

Mike

quest_for_silence
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Re: Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by quest_for_silence » Sat Aug 02, 2014 1:40 pm

Hi Mike,

I can't speak about that specific Impactics, but you should better point out your thermal requirements (saying you're worry for our rather hot italian summer, I mean is not enough): usually passive, heatsinked enclosures (even massive ones) lead to higher load CPU temps (>70°C) than normal desktop ones, even with cool CPU (like a frugal Celeron G1820), so IMHO you should define what's acceptable to you.

Dutchmm
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Re: Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by Dutchmm » Sat Aug 02, 2014 11:47 pm

My ambient has a ceiling of about 32. After that I turn on the air-conditioning in the bedroom next to my study. This morning the ambient was 26.

My current idle is about 13/14 over ambient. That's with the CPU fan spinning about 760. I ran a long (90 minute) development batch of AftershotPro2 this morning. The CPUs ran at 100% nearly the whole time. CPU went up gradually from 15 to 26 above ambient. Fan speed went up from 900 to 1040. All of this is within the thermal specs of my motherboard and CPU (Core2Duo 6750).

Normally, I wouldn't develop anything like as many photos all at once. But while the trial is unrepresentative of real life, the system I'm thinking of buying won't have a fan to contain the increase in heat once processing starts to tax the cores. After 10 minutes (which is more representative of my normal use), we were already nudging up from 16 above ambient, and the fan was already up in the 900s.

Now, bearing in mind I know pretty much nothing about any of the sciences (Flanders & Swan's "Laws of Thermodynamics", and Tom Lehrer's "Elements" excepted), I wanted to get some idea of what running fanless is like in real life. Mike Chin sounds relaxed in his Euler review about running idle at 7 above ambient - which could mean as high as 39 for me. Would that be a problem in the long term? I like my PCs to last 6 or 7 years. I see from Intel's website that the specified max TCase for the i7-4785 is 66.35c.

And really, what I wanted to hear is: has anyone any real life experience of using an Impactics case? It hasn't been reviewed on SPCR, so I have to appeal to those who frequent the forum, and hope someone can throw some light (even, if I am lucky) have used both Euler and Impactics.

I hope this makes my needs a little clearer.

Vicotnik
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Re: Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by Vicotnik » Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:09 am

Don't worry about idle temps. Today CPUs are pretty efficient at idle, power draw is less than 5W.

Full load on the other hand.. I own a few passive PCs and after half an hour of heavy continues work the chassis is warm to the touch and I worry not so much about the CPU but mostly for all the other stuff in the box. The motherboard, SSD etc isn't really made to work inside a hot box with no ventilation and no air movement.
So for any heavy work like encodes etc I use a proper fan cooled system.

quest_for_silence
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Re: Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by quest_for_silence » Sun Aug 03, 2014 7:27 am

Dutchmm wrote:And really, what I wanted to hear is: has anyone any real life experience of using an Impactics case? It hasn't been reviewed on SPCR, so I have to appeal to those who frequent the forum, and hope someone can throw some light (even, if I am lucky) have used both Euler and Impactics.
It's still not a first hand opinion, but it might be of some usefulness for your reasonings: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Impa ... S_Coolset/.

Dutchmm
Posts: 106
Joined: Thu Aug 09, 2007 9:06 am

Re: Impactics C3LH-B experience

Post by Dutchmm » Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:30 am

Thanks guys! Since I am not given to encoding video (and I have no ambitions to become the next Spielberg) I think I shall go with this one. I know it's rather lazy of me to buy a ready made solution rather than build it myself, but the longer I have been retired the less free-time I seem to have. Go figure!

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