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Mini-PC w/o Fans?
blinky2 asks: "I just read this article on Tom's Hardware about small PC-cases. I would really like to have a small box next to my current one for development stuff etc. Here's the problem: I don't want to have any fans in it, and case like the one in the article needs heavy cooling. Is there anything out there that is small and doesn't need any cooling? the box should run 24/7 here in my room and i don't want to hear some noise while I sleep. A case like the SAX01 from Gigabyte would be nice, too. BTW, there is no need for a high-performance box: something like 300-500 Mhz with a moderate amount of RAM would be enough." A while ago, Ask Slashdot tackled this very question, has the intervening time made such a system a practical possibility?
NEC makes a fanless Crusoe server, but I don't think they sell them outside Japan. Also, the Netwinder 3100 was a fanless server, but Rebel.com is no more, so you'll have to find it used.
Get an ABIT NV7M micro atx Nforce chipset motherboard. Softmenu III allows you to underclock and undervolt your processor. Buy the XP1800 (good value for quiet & fast). I have an old Swiftech MC462 that can cool my XP1800 to sub-40c when I reduce the multiplier to 7.5 and voltage to 1.65 without a fan. I put a paper tube around the top of the heatsink to take advantage of the chimney effect. Remember, air MUST move but you can let the chimney effect do it for you. Nforce allows tiny design because no pci cards are required for a full fetured system. Slow hardrive @ 5400rpm or 40 Gb IBM 2.5 inch laptop drive willl be coolest. 36x max cd or 4-8x dvd for reduced noise/heat. Sorbothane shockmount everything. Get a vastly over rated powersupply 460w and throttle the fan down with a rheostat. The power supply will never be working at full load so you can safely reduce the fan rpm. Should be nearly silent, 800 to 1000mhz depending on how cool your processor is and cost less than 600 bucks. Oh, don't use paper for your chimney, that was just for test purposes.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Hey Cliff, the link is incorrect.
Easy choice for cooling a small case. Get a liquid cooling system like one from Koolance. It would be quiet and cheap and sounds like what you want. But I don't think Koolance offers solutions for small cases so try a different company. Liquid cooling is the most efficient way of cooling a small case so go with it. Then you can add a fast processor, hard drive, and other extras and not worry about heat.
--Metrollica
Getting a fanless power supply has been a problem plaguing quiet-pc enthusiasts for some time. The company TKPower has manufactured them, but have been unwilling to sell to either individuals or small vendors.
Finally, Silicon Acoustics (who also sell the fanless 866MHz VIA C3 processor) have managed to wrestle some power supplies from TKPower. At $200, it is a bit steep, but is the only real safe way to have a fanless power supply. The form factor isn't standard ATX, but it is electrically compliant. If this could fit into that Gigabyte appliance case along with a C3, that'd be the way to go.
Ian
I think the best CPU/Motherboard combination for your purposes would be a Socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K6-III+ (note the +) 550mhz. If you set the clock multiplier to 2, you can easily get 600mhz out of it. Being a laptop CPU, it's cooling requirements are low, and you can get away with a 100% passive cooling system(Think: large heatsink, no fan, or a very small/quiet fan). Combine this with a pizzabox case with holes or a screen in the top and sides for ventilation, and a small fanless power supply, and you have a small, very quiet system. You may also want to consider lower RPM hard drives, their not as fast, but are quieter and produce less heat.
For example the PCM-9572 with a low power Celeron 500 (no fan), 8MB video mem (3D!) and up to 256MB RAM. Costs about US$ 1k together with a MicroBox chassis (MBPC-300-9572F) and the matching external 50W power supply (PS-55A).
--
Du Deutsch -> Du gehe Symlink
As Tom's says, the 3 supplied fans are quite loud.
I went to Radio Shaft and picked up a couple centrifugal fans which are almost silent but move a lot of air. And once I decided voiding the warrenty was an option, I replaced the powersupply fan and the rear exhaust fan. A resister on the CPU fan helped quite that one. Finally with rubber insulation between all the body panels and the fan mounts, and a nice coat of black paint to match the TV and reciever it works pretty nicely.br>
With these mods the sound is hardly noticable above the already existing sounds in the apartment like the 'fridge and A/C.
One problem I would still like to solve is figuring out how to push the FSB down to 100MHz when using a stock 1GHz PIII. This would let me slow the CPU fan down even more than it is currently.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The old iMacs are quiet (don't know about the new ones) and pretty compact.
Some kits with dials are sold for this job, though you can do the same thing by doing some math and calculating what resistor to get. Plenty of details are in the links below;
http://www.cocoon-culture.com/lib/noise-report/c om puter-noise-report.htm
http://www.hardware-corner.net/guides/fanbus_1.p hp
http://people.freenet.de/s.urfer/fan_control.htm
http://www.overclockers.com/tips746
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The key here is you need to generate less heat, and/or use a method to remove heat to another location silently.
Examples of the first method (make less heat) would be:
Get a laptop that doesn't have a fan.
Use an older computer or SBC (P100, etc)
Examples of the second method would be:
Using heat pipes to move heat away from the processor to a convection cooled heatsink
Water cooling to a convection cooled heatsink (requires a method such as one discussed recently, or a silent pump)
A seperate noisy bit located in another area (forinstance - you have the noisiest part of your air conditioner outside your home)
Which method you choose depends on the processing power you need, and your budget.
But then, you probably already knew this and were hoping for something in the 'cheap', 'little work', 'high power' bin. Unfortunately nothing currently exists that fulfills all three. If you really don't mind a low power system, then you can experiment with a k6-2 running at 200MHz or so, with a 300w PS. You'd have to put a big fanless heatsink on the k6-2, and arrange the case such that natural chimney effect airflow will go past all the major components and through the fanless 300w ps (which should be providing less than 100w). Don't put more than a single 5400rpm HD in there (or diskless boot, if possible - look at cheap compactflash - ide adaptors), and skip the cd and floppy unless absolutely needed. Use an all-in-one low end motherboard.
-Adam
Has anyone done any comparisons on what a simple paint job will do? Take the same system, measure temp in beige, then paint it black, white, etc.
Also, would black crinkle paint do any better than flat black or glossy? Crinkle paint might be an idea for the guy who wanted to build a retro looking PC a while ago.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If you want to stick with an Intel processor, you may want to look at the 0.13u version of the Celeron processor and cut the bus speed down to 66Mhz (if the chipset supports it) and cut down voltage (if possible). That should reduce the power consumption (and thus heat dissipation) by a fair amount.
Just 1 week ago, this link:3 /154524 9&mode=thread
/ products/datas heets/mpc.asp
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/1
showcased two micro PC's from Dgital-Logic
http://www.digitallogic.com/english
Which were both fanless and tiny.
Does nobody actually read Slashdot any more? How shoddy can you get??
A little planning goes a long way...
Why not pick up a used laptop? 300-500 MHz will probably run about $500 or so. You could build a quieter desktop (laptop disks can be heard when they seek), but I would think it'll be quiet enough even in a bedroom. And you get the added bonus of portability.
I have K6-III/450 on 24/7 in my room. I replaced the power supply with an ultra-quiet one but not the CPU fan, though they are available too. I lucked out with a couple very quiet disks (one from my TiVo and a new 160 GB Maxtor).
It's quiet enough that I can watch TV or listen to music and not be bothered by the white noise. And I got used to the noise it does make so I have no trouble sleeping.
If I replace the CPU fan the machine will be *very* quiet.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Apple's G4 Cube, aside from looking cool with the right lighting, tackled this problem. Their solution was to put HUGE heatsinks on the CPU and vid card chips, leave a large area at the top of the case for hot air to get out, perforate the bottom profusely and stand the machine about 4-6" off the desk, letting convection do the cooling.
They also pulled out the power supply, which I think would be a must for ANY fan-less system. Putting this heat-generating monster outside the case significantly drops the temperature (and provides the user a GREAT foot-warmer).
Finally, as many other readers have said, look at ways to reduce heat generation - slower or cooler CPU & vid card, lower RPMs on your hard drive, etc. The G4 can blow quite warm when I'm giving it a workout and it's only 400MHz, I think anything over 5-600 may be beyond the limits of convection cooling.
/~mikeg
Of course this still doesnt address the hard drive noise - With no fans you really notice the clicking of your disk, as well as the disk spin noise if you have 7200+RPM disks.
Maybe it's time to look at some of the solid-state disk postings too?
/~mikeg
i've had the same problem, athough i was a big x86 fan, their processors just ran too hot. the second problem is the need for a cooling fan for the power supply makes noise. currently i'm running a powerbook 550 ti, which the fan comes on about every 15 minutes with one display. i'm sure you could pick up a powerbook 400 for about 1200$ and the fan would come on even less.
if you're just doing coding, might i suggest an old mac LC II? i have a terminal emulator for mine, and telnet to my powerbook (OS X). the scsi hard drive is noisy, but there's no reason you couldn't put the hard drive on the other side of the room (scsi spec calls for 6m cable lengths for that model). you could also boot it from a floppy without any hard drive. a mac LC I or II runs about $5. it makes an excellent webserver also. rj-45 network cards go for about ten bucks on ebay, and 1 gig scsi hard drives can be found used for about 10 dollars.
moox. for a new generation.
I thought about yanking my loud cpu fans off my BP-6 and just put in some monster heatsinks, maybe underclock them a bit and watch the temperature. Seems like there's not too many places you can get a 4"-6" heatsink, they're all rather short with fans attached. Bummer.
Anyone know if a Peltier cooler uses fans or are they pretty quiet?
An off-the-shelf, self-contained water-cooled computer from Calm PC...
This system is reasonably priced (for what you get), it relatively small, and is completely 'fan-less'. A review of the system can be seen here and it was discussed on Slashdot here.
Of course, this is not exactly a 'mini-PC'; however, I would assume that someone who is fairly instrious and has a bit of time on their hands could mod the cooling system to a different case or simply mod the case appropriately to fit their needs!!!
Just a thought...enjoy!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
If you didn't want to go with water-cooling, (such as ripping apart a koolance 1U case), you could instead just go with a convection-cooled style case similar to the Mac cube (iCube?).
Plycon sells a nice assortment of different heat-syncs, the one you would be particularly insterested in is this one, it's designed to use a moving air current to cool the CPU rather than a direct fan. If your using a slower or underclocked CPU, it probably won't take very much to keep it cool.
Your biggest problem will most likely be finding room for a large enough heat-sync that doesn't require a fan of some sort.
Also, if you have allergies, a device that accumulates -- and heats! -- dust is not the best thing to have around.
Disk drive manufacturers are catching on. Noise emission means wasted energy, greater power consumption and heat. A while back, the only drives I'd buy were Fujitsu and IBM just because they were quiet and stayed cool.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Some of the VIA C3 chips can run with just a heatsink. They even have a list of suggested heatsinks and other parts to build a quiet PC. They are probably the best x86 solution you can find without making this a major home project. You did mention that processing power wasn't a concern and the main drawback of the C3 is that it's FPUs run at half the processors clockspeed.
ThinkGeek has a nice lil subcompact system on their website at
h tm l
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/computing/5868.s
Its not silent, but its compact yet still well featured.
Suspend to RAM before going to sleep.
'Nff said.
Someone wrote up a detailed suggestion for creating a fanless PC at the Linux Terminal Server Project:
http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/fanless_howto.html
(I'm too tired to bother with HTML (sorry), or even log in for that matter.)
I just bought a Sony VAIO GR250P laptop - for the specs. And it was cheap! ($1500 or so.)
But was VERY surprised, as a silence freak and hater of fan noise, that this thing must have no fan or something. It's TOTALLY SILENT!
The only thing you EVER hear from it is the itty bitty sound of writing data to the hard drive. And you know if THAT'S the only sound you hear, the rest is pretty damn quiet.
Anyway - I've been following the "How to Make a Silent PC" threads on Slashdot with great interest, and I think I accidently stumbled across a much easier solution.
This thing is a silent powerhouse 1000 mHz, 256meg RAM, intel 10/100 ethernet, 20gig hard drive box, ready to go. Highly recommended. So is my girlfriend's new Apple iBook.
Look into it. Much easier than the days you'll spend trying to make your own quiet PC.
If you make changes to an image that you don't like, it's often simple to roll it back.
I use it all the time at work, and have ten "machines" that I bounce among all day.
Check it out: well worth the $300.
One idea that I did not see anyone mention is a thermoelectric cooler. A TEC (also called a pelimiter juction) is basicaly a solid state heat pump. Apply a current and one side gets hot while the other gets cold. Because it has no moving parts it is silent and has a low failure rate. They are often used to cool lasers. You would put the TEC between the CPU and heat sink, with some thermal grease. The heat sink would then get hotter than the CPU. Note that if the hot side of the TEC gets above the melting point of solder then the TEC will self destruct, so you will still need a large heat sink and good air flow. A small TEC is about $20 US.
I am interested in the noise issue also, and am looking at the following solution: For noise reduction, try using the new Northwood procs from Intel. The 1.6A GHz apparently runs very cool, so you could get away with using just a heat sink. Use the Seagate HDs as they are very quiet (Tom's also has an article on this). As for PS - the new Antec's have temp controlled fans (or swap the fans out for quieter ones). Generic GeforceMX card with heatsink should suffice for video. Should be a VERY quiet PC, for less than $500 for H/W - not sure about your other reqt though (small form factor).
Here's the set-up I'm looking at:
Approx Prices (on sale):
Antec Case: $50
Mobo: $100 (depends on mobo)
CPU: $100
HD: $100
GC: $50
RAM: $50 (to start)
Sound: $50 (search NewEgg for Audigy, or get mobo with sound)
There's quite a few laptops that can be had fairly cheap I think I might suggest looking into older Powerbook laptops. Older PC laptops in many cases are clunky, hot, and I wouldn't REALLY trust them to be on 24/7. If you avoid the Powerbook 5300s you'll probably land a keeper. A particular model of note is the PB 2400 which is/was a subnotebook. It weighs about four and a half pounds and leaves the floppy and CD drive as external devices. You could stick YDL on it to do your coding work, it has revitalized many a Powerbook that is unable to run OSX. If you wanted a little more power you can find Wallstreet (older G3 based Powerbooks with 12 or 14 inch screens) PBs hovering around 500$ sometimes. Lombards and Pismos go for a grand or more if in good condition. Even if you went with a PC laptop it would probably be a bit more useful overal to you than a dedicated MiniPC sitting in your bedroom.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I originally considered using a laptop in a MiniPC application, but I wasn't able to find any really good prices on a working laptop with a broken display, and was concerned that a laptop is much more likely to be stolen than a small beige PC box.
We ended up using the old DEC 'Multia' (Intel P100, not Alpha) due to the built-in SCSI and PCI bus. These are showing up cheap in bulk lots, and unlike the Alpha Multias, the Intel models do not need/have fans.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
BTW, there is no need for a high-performance box: something like 300-500 Mhz with a moderate amount of RAM would be enough.
:(
sigh, 500Mhz to me is high performance, i need a new computer.
Wouldn't the FSB slow to 100Mhz if you installed PC100 RAM?
What was the Cat No of the fans?
You mention that it needs to be on 24x7, but is this because it will be working all that time, or because you don't want to wait for it to boot up each time you come to it?
I put my desktop PC to sleep whenever I'm not sitting at it. In sleep mode the disk spins down and the fan slows right down so it is completely silent. It takes about 2 seconds to wake up when I jog the mouse. This may be worth considering.
If it's got to respond to other stimuli, e.g. an incoming call on the modem, a network request, cron, etc, you may even be able to make it wake up temporarily, deal with the request, and then go back to sleep, perhaps even without needing to start up the fan or disk. I haven't worked out how to do this yet (APMS doesn't seem as configurable as I hoped), but it is my aim.
I just put together one of these machines myself two weeks ago. Since then, I've had some heating problems and have had to replace a Celeron 1 GHz due to overheating after running a video compression job unattended overnight.
How hot does your system run after about 30 minutes of 100% CPU utilization? What kind of chip do you have in it, and are you using a PCI card in it?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
While not completely fanless, various "BookPC" style systems are very small, very quiet, and very cheap. Just get a Celeron 533 or or a VIA C3 chip, and a heatsink will be good enough for these little systems. That's more than fast enough for most code compiling.
I've used one for about 3 days when I was trying to build a multimedia box for hooking up to a TV before I settled on the higher powered (and louder) Shuttle SV24 system.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
How about this: take one big squirrel cage fan and stick it in another room. Run 2 inch ducting to the case and suck all the hot air out through that. Then use appropriately placed air vents to direct fresh air over the CPU and Video Card.
I've been looking for the same setup for quite awhile, except that I'd like it to be cheap as well and that eliminates most options.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The obvious solution is to get less sleep. Then you won't care if there's a fan in the case or not.
... my seccondary computer lives in a different room, and I usualy have to hook up a monitor and keyboard every six months...
Seriously, is locating the machine in a closet or in the room behind the wall an option? And if you don't need a monitor
The only question I have is why these things are built with fans on all the time.
Here you have a kilobuck or more worth of computing equipment and it's built too stupid to regulate its own temp?
Well it's pretty simple to do just in hardware. But you can get pretty trick putting some feedback into the machine and letting it control yourself and learn some real hacking in the process.
My first, and most successful, attempt at this was with my DFI socket 7 motherboard, AMD K6-2 450 MHz processor (running overclocked at 500 MHz), 15 MB Maxtor hard drive, etc. etc.
First off all of this is installed in a discarded Gateway full size tower case. Picked that up for $15 and got lots of room. Plus it's got a 500 Watt supply that is loafing along with what I ask of it.
I took that case and sealed it shut with clear silicone sealant. The thing is air tight for the most part. I installed a case fan up front that draws air in and, of course, made sure that the air holes in front of where that fan is installed are open. In front of that fan I've installed a HEPA filter for a Hoover, picked that up at Wal Mart for $2 and it keeps things VERY clean inside.
The HEPA filter is important because any dust that does make its way in the machine will trap heat. Dust buildup kills electronics. Stop the dust before it gets a chance to collect in your heat sink and power supply.
So now I have very controled air flow. It comes in at the bottom and exits out the top via the power supply fan port. Air passes by everything.
Then I built a small circuit that monitors temperature at 6 points. I didn't really need 6 points, but I liked a nice even number and had the components. I placed one sensor just outside the case but behind the plastic and it monitors room temp. Another sensor monitors the temp of the CPU heat sink in the center of the sink and close to the CPU. Another sensor is attached to the main chip of the video card. Yet another monitors the exhaust temp, having been placed in the airflow path just outside of the power supply fan. The remaining sensors are just sitting in the case.
With that done I now have lots of data to tell me what gets hot and when.
Now what to do about it.
I ran wires from all three fans (Case input, CPU heat sink, and power supply) to a circuit board I made. The board is powered by the computer power supply using the origional CPU fan connections but indeed powers all three fans. I have played with resistor control of the fans but found it was just a heck of a lot easier to transistor switch them.
Yet another board ties it all together. I've played with a couple of different versions of this board, one analog (or hardware) and another digital (or computer controlled). What this board does is turn certain fans on or off based upon what's getting hot and how hot it's getting.
Keep in mind that I'm still playing with all this and it's a learning excersise. In other words I haven't got the computer controlled board doing much for me.
With my analog board it turns on the CPU fan when the temp is around 110 F (approx, this isn't rocket science). Once on it won't turn off until the temp drops below 98.6 (body temp). I'm just guessing here, didn't actually measure anything here, just going by "hot" and "cool".
Anyway, if the CPU temp does not drop a couple of degrees in a few minutes, then the power supply fan comes on. If the temp climbs still or does not drop within a few more minutes then the intake fan comes on. All fans stay on until CPU temp drops back down to "normal". "Normal" is defined as some degrees above room temp.
If the video chip gets "warm" then the intake fan comes on until it drops back to "normal"
I know this is all crude. But it's great fun and I'm having a blast building and tinkering.
The most important thing I've learned so far is that the CPU fan comes on from time to time, the other fans come on maybe twice a day when the room is really warm.
And I can't be fucking things up too bad because I ain't fried anything yet and this computer runs 24/7/365. Playing Quake or compiling programs can kick the fans on but that's to be expected. Other than that it's one hell of a lot more quiet in my office.
Oh, and for those of you in "energy challenged states" (hello you Californians who want to steal our lake to make electricity to heat your hot tubs) my power use has gone down some. I don't remember the actual measurements but there was a signifigant difference measured between "all fans on" and the way it normally runs now. I measured that difference in the AC current at the input to the power supply.
So go forth, have some fun, be safe.
And maybe one day the guys designing these computers will make these stupid boxes take care of themselves.
.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I have a Dell Poweredge, a Digital Prioris, and 2 Macs (G3 and G4 towers). In each of these machines, the idle-but-spinning hard disks make more noise than the fans. This is with no reading/writing. Also, disks seem to become noiser with age.
If your machine has (decent) power management, wait for your harddisk to go to sleep and hear how much quieter your machine is.
You can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two.
Also hated noise. I simply bought HP Omnibook 4150
366MHz - you can get it for $400. I exchanged
the hard drive for ultra-quiet 20GB IBM with fluid
bearing dynamics. Now the notebook is inaudible...
Upped memory to 256MB and bought USB audio.
For $650 I have very quite, portable
and actually fast system (faster than
PIII 550 which I got at the office, mostly
due to bad 810 mainboard in it).
Kubus
Sadly, this got rejected as a news story last week.
The SignumData FutureClient!
It's German, It has no fans, It's expensive (so I've heard), It takes a P4, But It makes no noise!
H357