SPCR

Hello,

so along with my Seasonic S12II I ordered a new HTPC case for myself. My old LC03 had serious airflow problems and I was planning on getting a TV card which would have added more heat inside. So I got myself the Silverstone LC20 and I have to say it really is a nice and well designed case.

The components are still the same (edit: here's a link to the old HTPC thread http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=166653): Abit NF7, underclocked and undervolted Barton 3000+, GF6800, 1GB of Kingston DDR and 160GB Maxtor. The new Seasonic found a home in this setup. Like I said, future plans are to get the TV card and also a 500GB SATA drive. I found a cheap (10€) PCI 2x SATA card for this setup that works nicely with Debian. Oh, and I also picked a 52-in-1 card reader to go into the 3,5" bay on the front panel.

First a pic off the overall case. It has dedicated PSU and CPU air intakes.



Motherboard installed...



Here's the HDD bay. It will take two 80mm/92mm fans. Unfortunately suspension is a bit hard if you have a fan in place, so I once again used a little airguide to solve the problem. I have NMB-MAT 92M1A at 5V blowing on the right side. The airflow is directed left over and under the suspended HDD.







For the case cooling I got myself a real treat, two new NMB-MAT 80L1A from Dorothy Bradbury which are simply great. Very very smooth, which allows me to run them at 6V without any real noise.



The CPU has a small airguide,that prevents the fresh air from the side vents being sucked straight out of the case. The CPU cooler has a 80M1A at <6V and naturally soft mounted with fan mounts.





The PSU is the new Seasonic S12II 380W, modded with a low speed NMB-MAT 120mm.



And here's a few overall shots of the case... I will redo the cabling after I get the SATA drive, simply because the PSU cable along with HDD IDE cable are a bloody mess. But overall, even with all the fans and the Maxtor HDD I have to say the setup is very quiet. The most audible part is, as you probably guessed, the Maxtor HDD. With a good, quiet HDD the thing would probably be silent (and that's the magic word I rarely use).







Thanks for looking!

- Aleksi

PS. I hate IDE cables....

pretty nice! think you could post a front view of the case?

Thank you Sir!

Damn that's hard to photograph with bad lighting, and shows all the nice fingerprints. Ideal surface for those precious nut reflection pics

Looks awesome inside and out! (hope you cut some holes in the sides of the AV shelf so the system doesn't suffocate )
I'm still deciding whether to build my HTPC in a Fusion Black or your case's black twin /w VFD, so I appreciate any pics I can find on builds using those cases (most reviews aren't very helpful as they don't focus on noise and thermal management anywhere as much as I'd like- good thing I found SPCR).

Hi hybrid,

thanks for the nice feedback

Actually the case is "pushed over" from the rear of the shelf, so it has decent air intake possibilities.

I also thought about the NSK2400, but was pushed towards the LC20 as I liked it's apperance and structure more. Also the possibility of using ATX boards was a plus.

Nice, those silverstone cases look sick. Did that heatsink come with the case, or is that an off-the-shelf part?

That heatsink is actually an Aerocool GT101 (if I remember the number correctly). A bit tightly spaced, but otherwise a good heatsink.

hybrid2d4x4 wrote: I'm still deciding whether to build my HTPC in a Fusion Black or your case's black twin /w VFD

The Fusion only takes MicroATX motherboards. I would have gone with this one if it took full sized.

I am now looking at the Antec Sonata III MiniTower Case - Piano BlackW/500W PSU. It's not a HTPC case but it has a good PSU, fan included and takes full size motherboards. And its also cost effective.

Show me a HTPC case like the Fusion that takes full size MB and i will be very interested.

kyone wrote:Show me a HTPC case like the Fusion that takes full size MB and i will be very interested.

Antec Fusion Max.

Aleksi wrote:That heatsink is actually an Aerocool GT101 (if I remember the number correctly). A bit tightly spaced, but otherwise a good heatsink.

Actually that is HR-101. Very good heatsink. I've used GT-1000 and and HR-102 myself. I really liked GT-1000. It has farwider fan spaces but also heavier.

My brother uses HR-101 to cool his 3200+ Barton. HR-series from Aercool is one of the best coolers for Socket-A.

But I love your build. You've prooven that HTPC machine can be build from older components. Well done.

Moro,

yep I think you're right about the Aerocool model.

Thank you also for the nice comments, always appreciated!

This setup would be perfect if I just needed a DVR / HTPC and it has served its purpose very well (although it really can't run HD movies). I've been running a socketA HTPC for about three to four years now. I'm actually in the process of moving the components from this case to my old Silverstone LC03 case and giving it to my brother's father-in-law.

My plans are to update my HTPC to AM2 X2, Radeon 34x0 along with a few 500GB HDDs in order to make the thing a file server, HTPC and a part time server for other applications. Will naturally update here when the time comes.

-Aleksi

So I finally got around to updating my HTPC. Here are the specs:

- Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H mATX with two sticks of 800MHz Kingston ValueRAM and a X2 4850e (45W)
- The CPU cooler is Ninja Mini (which for some reason is oddly a bit tilted sideways, temps are OK though).
- Seasonic S12II 380W (with a NMB-MAT RB120L)
- A Samsung DVD drive (SATA)
- Two Seagate 7200.11 750GB
- Technotrend T-1500 DVB-T card with CI-interface

I’m using the build as media center / PVR and I’m running XP and Debian as dual boot. Debian has MythTV running which is what the PC will be running 99% of the time.



The hard drives were not suspended, instead I used sorbothane blocks for cutting down the vibrations. The bottom HDD has two layers of sorbothane on each corner and the two disks have a single layer of sorbothane pieces between them. I used some elastics to create a small pressure downwards on both HDDs (although the sorbothane is quite sticky and keeps them in place quite well). The fan for the HDDs is NMB-MAT 92L1A with a small airguide and it’s running on 5V.



I also built two airguides for the Ninja Mini, the side vent is ducted directly into the heatsink (and has Acoustipack inside it). The other airguide is a bit bigger and is used for directing air over the northbridge and Ninja. The rear fans are NMB-MAT 80L1A running at <6V.



Overall I'm really happy with this build... and that is something I rarely have achieved. Really low noise level, fans are smooth and don't really generate airflow noise as they are running so slow. The biggest noise source is probably the Seagates (which aren't THAT bad if you look at the SPCR review).

Thanks for looking!

Nice build, I use the same method for the drive(s) in my HTPC (see sig).

Now I need to convince the wife to let me upgrade it to a 780G-based system!!

Hi and thanks for the reply!

If you find a good way to get an approval from your wife, then let us know also! I think I've used all of my excuses for a couple of years...

I thought I'd write a few things down for Google, as I'm sure there are people experiencing problems with this board...

- WinXP/Debian install requires the SATA DVD to be set to "Native IDE" in BIOS
- XP install OK with the manufacturer SATA drivers for the HDDs (I used a slipstreamed version, made with nLite).

I initially run BIOS F3 and realised there were odd lockups when GRUB tried to load either Debian / XP. Basically it seemed like the SATA drives were not present. I then discovered, that having ANYTHING plugged in into the USB ports would cause this. Removing USB devices cut down the lockups significantly. After updating to BIOS F4 I haven't (yet) had these lockups.

I installed Debian with the latest stable release (2.6.18 ) and did not experience problems. Updated the kernel to latest unstable 2.6.25 and it works OK.

Will now start playing around with the powernow_k8 module. The module works OK, but the voltages are a bit on the high side (AFAIK it gets the volts/MHz table from BIOS). Will probably attempt to patch it or write a patch myself for it.