I bought my Silverstone ST30NF March 2006 and has been running silently and doing the job until today. I tried powering up my htpc and it was completely dead. When I then checked the psu, the red led was on (cold psu). Unplugging it from the motherboard and everything else didnt help. Led goes red/a...

That Kontron board looks like a really good package indeed. I checked the Intel docs on the SCH US15W chipset and it only consumes 2.3 watts! The whole platform would use 5 watts according to this document, but I assume this depends on the efficiency of the rest of the motherboard components. But it...

Yes, I have seen a number of these Z5xx boards which are going to be released this autumn/early next year. I will hold out and see what these offer. The one you linked say 2,3 watt TDP, but I assume they only talk about the CPU then and not the whole system, as that would have been insanely low powe...

I am working on a little hobby robotics project that in the beginning used a Via CN13000 which proved to be too slow to handle both the webcamera stream and speech recognition. So I have been on a constant lookout for a low power alternative. Half a year ago I got a D201GLY2 which performs very well...

Its been a while now, but I just wanted to follow up on my postings on my mCubed system. I got the Borg heatpipes, installed them easily and the CPU us now idling at around 38 degrees celcius and at load touches 50. The system is almost silent except for the HD which I can hear through the vertical ...

I have recently bought a Via Epia CN13000G board for a robotics project. The nice thing about these is exactly the low power usage where the total power for a complete system with a 2.5" drive, an optical drive and some usb devices would be around 30 watts with load. For my robot project, power use ...

I think mCubed is the only company that has understood and provides true silent computing today. And by silent I mean passive cooling. I have built a system using their old classic cabinet and has been very satisfied with the performance of this. The only detail I did not like was the dreaded plexig...

Well, the HD idles at about 48 degrees after 8 hours and I think thats a bit too high. It rises even higher when it is active (havent read the temps yet). A bit disappointing since I chose this Samsung Spinpoint drive because they say it doesnt generate as much heat as the competition. Since the HD ...

Thank you, yes thats the tool I was thinking of. And yes, a very fine piece of software indeed. As for the cooling, I am already using an mCubed hFX case which has these huge heatsinks on each side, specifically tailored for passive cooling using heatpipes. They also have made a CPU cooler specifica...

Yes thats what I thought too. The AOpen heatsink it utterly useless. I might have to try to shorten the screws a bit or find some way that pressure is correctly applied to the die. It might be as you say that the heatsink is askew a bit so that the whole surface isnt in contact. Someone has also ind...

Installed the new passive psu and naturally temperatures went up a bit, even undervolted at 1.1 volts the CPU will climb near to 70 degrees celcius after load for some time. Touching the heatsink (supplied with AOpen card) and its not even warm to the touch, probably arond 35 degrees celsius. So obv...

There must be something seriously wrong with this supplied cooler. After running the CPU (1.7 GHz) for 3-4 hours, the temperature is idling at around 54 degrees. If I touch (or hold) the cooler I can feel that its not even body temperature, probably around 35 degrees! This must surely mean that the ...

I have this HD cooler in an mCubed hfx case and think the temperature gets a bit too high after a while. According to the temperature reading inside SpeedFan (free monitoring sw) my HD0 reads 46 degrees celsius after a while. According to what I have read, a harddisk should be kept under 40 degrees ...

As a followup I figured out how to adjust the voltage using a piece of software I cant remember the name of just now. It seems Aopen have nerfed the Bios at some point where voltage settings are ignored for some reason. The program I use has some nice options where you can adjust any parameter of ho...

Well, the AOpen i915GMm-HFS Pentium M card is an excellent choice for a media pc. It has SPDIF output as well as 2xfirewire and 2xGigabit Ethernet. I am using this, and will equip it with one pci-e 6600gt card (for games) and a Hauppage Win-TV 150MCE. That should leave me with one more slot. Dont re...

Hi, I have this motherboard and want to follow the tip on running it on lower voltage. I have tried adjusting the voltage in the bios, but when I boot up the computer and run ThrottleWatch I see that it is still running at 1.356 volts. Is there a jumper I need to set to be able to adjust this?

Seems my CPU will idle around 60 degrees now after some hours. Dunno, but it sounds a bit too high for me. Gonna try to reapply some Arctic Silver 5 again (after cleaning the die) and refit the cooler once more and see if I can get it down a bit. Other then that I have just installed Meedio and use ...

Just recently got the mCubed case, vertical silence, AOpen card, 740 CPU and 1 GB memory! I had an Asus DVD-player lying around as well as a new Samsung Spinpoint 250GB S-ATA drive that I wanted to use too. Later I plan to add a 6600gt card I have too, but for now I will use the motherboard GPU. I t...

BTW, why does one need a full ATX motherboard for a HTPC? For high end, you need a vidcard, a HD tuner card (presumably w/a dual tuner one is available), and maybe a sound card. That still leaves one PCI slot free on a micro-ATX board. And from what I gather, many m-ATX boards have onboard video go...

I think the main goal of a HTPC, that is usually situated in the living room of a house, is absolute silence! This zalman case and the specs on the site shows that their main focus is to make the system cool enough to run some hot CPU and tons of other gear that generate heat. Even their pictures sh...

Thank you! :) I have read so many good things about this Silverstone 300w passively cooled PSU that I just went ahead and ordered that and the VFD/remote that is made for the mCubed system (seems I can get em to work fine in Meedio which I intend to run on it). I was a bit sceptical about the 300w s...

Ok, thanks all for your help. I have just ordered the mCubed hfx with a vertical silence HD enclosure. And I also chose to get the AOpen Pentium-M board instead with 1GB DDR2 memory and a Pentium-M 740 CPU. I will try this out first with normal fan based cooling and then order the heatpipes as i see...

Thanks again for your answer Pate. Yes I noticed too that the socket was placed a bit odd. And I have read some more details on this board now that makes me wonder if I can use it at all. If you look at this review: http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?page=4337&head=58 There is a section abou...

Yeah, thats the motherboard I was thinking of. Seems to be a good one and costs quite a bit less than than then AOpen cards (around 500 NOK lower price). I was going to use the borg heatpipe system on this CPU though, so I guess thats out of the question unless the Borg can fit this 478 retention br...

Thats nice to hear! This is getting all the more tempting...

Do you think the heatpipe for the 478 will fit the Pentium-M 479 socket? My provider of heatpipes say that it might be a problem and I should wait for them to get a dedicated 479 heatpipe kit.

Thanks for the quick replies. Seems I have had the wrong idea about how the PSU fan was working, thanks for clearing that out. Probably gonna try out that MIST PSU and see how its working although 500watts seems to be overkill for this system. I assume the passively cooled Silverstone 300 watt be en...

Hmm, on close inspection of the case I see that the PSU is mounted far inside the case towards the front with no exhaust possibility if the PSU has a fan. This ruins my plans of using a very silent PSU instead of a passive one.

Hi, and thanks for showing your two mCubed systems. I am in the process of making myself a htpc which has to be totally silent, or at least so silent that I will not be able to hear it on a silent evening on the sofa. :) The mCubed systems has been on my wish list for a long time, mainly because of ...