Haven't been in here for a little while and wow, lots of responses to my little post! Thanks for all the kind words!
Yesterday I picked up a dual core AMD 3800+ and it's in the box running fine. Haven't had time to overclock it yet though. I'll get back to you when I've seen what is possible.
I've solved the hardisk temp so I'm totally happy with that now. It's not going to be really cool but not too hot at least IMHO
cotdt wrote:Can we get more pictures? Where did you obtain your parts from? i'm interested in doing something very similar.
I've documented everything with photos when building it so I'll do a real long article with tips and things to consider when building it.
Krazy Kommando wrote:WOW!
i didnt even know that was possible
Neither did I
I mean, building it 100% fanless with a AMD 3500+ and an ATI X800XL wouldn't be a problem whatsoever. But an overclocked 7800GTX and dual core AMD....
Ralf Hutter wrote:63°C load temp for the motherboard seems like it wouldn't be a very good idea for any extended period of time. No active airflow seems to be leading to very hot components on the board.
That's after hours of full load torture. With cool-n-quiet on it's much lower in it's normal state. I' don't have time to play heavy 3D games 24/7 anyway
dfy wrote:The biggest problem is my WD3200JB 320Gb SATA HD. IDLE it's ~50*C and when stressed it is going in the high 50's.
I agree. The HD temp is the most tricky to get down. I just received a Vertical Silence with heatpipe kit prototype and I'm testing it. But earlier I did solve it like this:
- Got that Zalman blue harddsk mounting thingy with a whole bunch of heatpipes running across over the HD
- Mount the disk in the Zalman
under the DVD
- Drilled a number of air intake holes in the chassi bottom panel under the same spot.
- Make sure the cabling to the MB/DVD/HD is not obstructing the convection induced airflow.
- Since my disk was SATA the long cable connectors would interfere with the floppy connector on my mainboard so I mounted the HD with it's connectors towards the front of the chassi instead.
This obviously demands that you have a decently quiet HD since it's oly rubbery mounted, not enclosed in a sound dampening box like the Vertical Silence. But the Vertical Silence heatpipe kit will solve those situations of course soon anyway.
hirafu_boarder wrote:Moving your case a little to the right may help with temperatures.
That Krell amp on the bottom shelf will be putting out a lot of heat!
Shifting the HTPC to be over the Wadia CD player may reduce the ambient temp.
It's a KSA-100S so it's got that class A bias plateau thingy keeping t's heat production down. And there's a thick wooden shelf in between the two. So in my setup it's actually no problem. But you are absolutely correct about the issue of where you put the chassi! It's vital that air flow around it is unrestricted and not pre heated.
IsaacKuo wrote:Is that a plasma display or an LCD display?
....
Plasma displays suffer from "burn-in" more quickly and to a greater extent than any other sort of display. You don't want to have any fixed imagery on it for an extended period of time.
It's an LCD. I leave it on a lot with the tv-schedule showing so it had to be a LCD due to the burn in risk.
Al wrote:I'm very impressed with the system - is it really totally fanless? I know mCubed supply an optional "safety fan" with controller... Also are you using the new northbridge heatpipe set?
Have been looking into this kit over the last few days - looks fairly pricey but I reckon it's pretty future proof, even if you do end up with a fan or two it wouldn't be very loud at all. Plus the massive heatsinks look pretty cool.
One last thing - is that an iMon VFD in the case? If so, any good?
Cheers,
Al
1. Yes totally fanless. The only moving part is the disk.
2. I didn't mount the safety fan kit. But our cat has found this warmed up place to be a comfy one so we often find her sleeping on top of the box covering up it's top air vents. So I might mount a safety fan kit mainly to wake her up and scare her away. Woooooshhhh
3. Yes I'm using a northbridge heatpipe since the Nforce4 chip is a quite hot chip.
4. Yes it's the OEM kit from iMon that fits straight in. I'm impresed with the remote, works well both in windows and within mediaprograms watching tv, dvd or whatever. But it's not as wife friendly as the euro MCE remote I just got. The MCE works perfectly within media programs and is more clearly marked and simpler to use straight of the bat. But IMHO the MCE remote works far worse in windows since there is no mouse support with it like the iMon has. I have both connected and running simultaneously so you can pick up either one at any time
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I'll keep you posted with the new AMD dual core setup
Cheers!
/Magnus Thomé
(My temps are a fair bit lower, I use Q'n Quiet (well RMclock) on a A64 3000+ Venice)
... I'm not really sure it would be that healthy to put two in either. I think it might be possible with a bit of tweaking and fiddling (extra air holes in the bottom panel and so on) but if so a close call. The problem would not be core temperatures, the heatpipes would transfer that heat out to the heatsinks properly I think from looking at my other tests. The core on the 7800GTX works very well even if quite hot too. But it's the ambient temp in the chassi that probably would get too hot which would result in other problems. For example power supply components on the mainboard and graphics cards that get very hot by themselves would have problems with heat dissipation.
