How Neuros Built Their Nearly Silent HTPC

JoeBorn writes "Neuros has a blog posting discussing how they created their latest 'thin' HTPC to be nearly silent. Instead of using a net-top architecture (Atom or the like) they used a full 2.7GHz CPU and put their effort into making that nearly silent. The article talks about their efforts on fan selection, placement, control, and vibration dampening. This route was chosen to 'give more headroom' for CPU-hungry apps (web and otherwise) including Adobe Flash. Their solution costs $279; is this an appropriate trade-off for a device powering your TV?"

Comments

Damping, not dampening.

[newdsfornerds]

Vibrations may be damped. Vibrators may be dampened.

Re:Damping, not dampening.

[j0hnyquest]

i feel sorry for the poor lonely fool who voted this witty comment as 'offtopic'.

Re:Damping, not dampening.

[zach_the_lizard]

My good sir,

I request more information on these devices called "vibrators" and how they may become dampened. A quick search through the literature seems to suggest that the female of the human species uses it a kind of cleaning device. I give you my sincerest thanks in advance.

John C. Cluelessicus
Director of Research into the female sex,
Local Dungeons and Dragons fan club

Re:Damping, not dampening.

[Compuser]

Judging by the style of writing I expected the signature to read:

Dildongo Longo
Central sperm bank of Nigeria

Re:Damping, not dampening.

[The Clockwork Troll]

Haha, cleaning device, what a douche bag.

What about power?

[Hatta]

An HTPC is likely to be left on 24/7 for recording, etc. Being power efficient is important under those circumstances.

Re:What about power?

[hairyfeet]

I don't know if I would want to go single core for an HTPC. I have built a few for customers and while an HTPC doesn't need to be a monster you also don't want it to become bogged down, especially if they may want to do a little transcoding or light gaming on it as well.

If it were me I would probably build it around something like this as the dual core Sempron only uses 64w but still gives them decent performance. Add a fanless ATI 4xxx series for hardware transcoding, a nice micro ATX HTPC case, And windows 7 HP x64 and you would have a sweet little system.

In the end an HTPC all comes down to trade offs. While some like to have quiet above all, my customers prefer having an onboard burner and a big fat HDD so they can keep all their favorite movies/shows/music loaded and ready to go. With Win 7 HP X64 and a wireless card so they can surf and watch Internet TV as well as their cable/sat they are happy little campers, And if they are happy, then my wallet is happy ;-)

Re:What about power?

[drinkypoo]

If it were me I would probably build it around something like this as the dual core Sempron only uses 64w but still gives them decent performance.

The Aspire Revo (or another Ion-based solution) can do 1080p H.264 via VDPAU under Linux or presumably under Windows as well, costs $199 with HDMI, VGA, 6 USB, 1GB RAM and 160GB disk, and GigE. And probably draws under 30W peak for the whole system... I guess, maybe a whiff more while the disk spins up, but since it's 5400 RPM, that's probably not a big drain either. The only fan in the whole system is a tiny CPU fan. Since we probably won't have to deal with any more arduous video codecs for several years, the Revo nettop is probably the best bet on the market right now. The only thing it's lacking is IR and as we all know you can add that later. So if you REALLY care about power, you'll use Atom/Ion or later Atom/Tegra, which brings full system power consumption down below the TDP of your chosen CPU.

Re:What about power?

[drinkypoo]

Here is why I don't care for the "pre builts" like the Revo: Sure it can handle the media now , but what about in the future?

Are you expecting a new HD video format in the next four to five years, the typical lifespan of a piece of consumer electronics? By the time you need to upgrade the video card you'll want to upgrade everything else too, because you'll be able to get twice as much CPU for half the TDP.

When building an HTPC I MUCH prefer having a PCIe slot so that the box isn't ham-stringed later on down the road.

Hamstrung.

It also gives them plenty of upgrade options, as they could later on go for one of the 95w quads (Which is what I personally have, an AMD 925 and it is VERY quiet) if they need more processing power, or if they get a larger display or need more transcoding punch they can have me slap in a 5xxx series later on.

That costs almost as much as buying the Revo in the first place, between parts and labor! It makes far more sense to just buy another PC and leave you out of it.

The problem I find with pre built solutions is they too often end up like laptops-throw aways.

And what will be done with the CPU and video card pulled OUT of the machine? It won't be worth building anything around them; they'll be throw-aways. The Revo barely uses more material than the CPU and video card you suggest upgrading. Meanwhile, the Revo makes a dandy hand-me down, can probably be resold for at LEAST $75 meaning that it will pay for itself handily, and meanwhile uses far less power, saving money on a daily basis.

I prefer to make sure the machine can keep doing the job for many years, which means it needs the ability to change with the times and grow as their needs grow.

I've been using an Xbox for many years. The Revo is more powerful compared to the mainline PC now than the Xbox was when I started using it as a media player, with XBMC. The Xbox was $70 (IIRC, at the time I bought it used) which made it a better deal, but the Revo is still a better deal than expecting people to pay for CPUs, video cards, and labor, when they could simply swap in the Revo and install some live distribution which includes XBMC or MythTV, as appropriate.

For me it is all about providing value to the customer and keeping the machine for as long as possible (because money don't grow on trees around here) which means expandability and plenty of options.

For you, it is all about milking the customer for hourly charges, to pay your bills. That's okay, but don't pretend it's better for the consumer. It would be better if they could simply buy a Revo preloaded as a media center, and they could sell it or use it as a low-end PC when they're done with it. They could have another media player in the kitchen, for example, connected to a sub-$100 LCD. But really, installing Ubuntu, adding the XBMC PPA, installing xbmc-standalone, and setting the login for a user session to XBMC is not very difficult.

silentpcreview

[illaqueate]

silentpcreview.com is where users should go. the linked story isn't any different from the many forum posts describing silent systems people have made

Re:silentpcreview

[Colonel Korn]

It's pretty easy to make any non-gaming system completely silent. Just get a giant heatsink, a 120mm Nexus or similar fan for it, and a fan controller, and put it in a nice vibration mitigating case like an Antec Solo. silentpcreview.com is definitely a great source of information for making it all work.

Re:silentpcreview

[illaqueate]

Even gaming, if you aren't massively overclocking a good tower heatsink is good enough to run with little air flow. The main issue is the video card, however one would not hear the video card typically over sound unless the ambient temperature is high. There are of course aftermarket parts for the video card as well.

Another issue with any system, not only game systems is the sound of the hard drive. Many hard drives, especially older hard drives become loud over time. It doesn't matter how much you dampen the vibration. The best results depend on getting the right model (some Samsung and WD are popular right now if I'm up to date)

Re:silentpcreview

[illaqueate]

Technically yes, it's not silent, however most are aiming for quiet not so much perfect silence (good fans running in 800rpm are relatively quiet). It's possible to do silent, however you run up the price sometimes in aftermarket parts doing that. Once you get fanless then you notice the sound of the hard drive, so you put in an SSD instead, etc.

The ghetto method to do perfect silence is to put the computer in another room, for example in the closet of an adjoining room then run an hdmi cable (to the receiver) and usb (to a hub) through the wall (also optical/analog sound if the sound is not hdmi). It's what I do.

Re:silentpcreview

[illaqueate]

Some HTPC cases are compact. With all the components in a limited space the temperature of the components can rise more than systems built into larger cases. The ambient temperature in your environment may also be lower than what other people are using their system in.

Re:silentpcreview

[LordVader717]

Going completely fanless is often overkill. A decent fan at minimum power will hardly make any noise.
If my computers much quieter than my TV, my Stereo system, and all my consoles, I really don't see the point in crapping out over a power supply.
DVD drives are the biggest problem, which is why I just always copy the DVD to a hard drive before playing it.

Re:silentpcreview

[PopeRatzo]

There's silence and then there's silence. I've built a half-dozen system for my little project recording-studio and none of them register over 20dB. With a little baffling, they don't register at all anywhere near the microphones or audio monitors.

And they're really nothing fancy, built mainly in rack-mount server boxes with some additional soft stuff inside. I've got a new i7 system that has a lot of horsepower and it's still right around 20-25dB. SSDs were key because the loudest thing were the rumbling hard drives. Still pretty expensive, though.

On the other hand, my wife does fluid dynamics modeling (other side of the house) on an HP workstation that sounds like a '67 Harley Shovelhead in comparison. I'm going to have to get her a pair of those ear protectors the guys who work on airport runways use so she doesn't go deaf.

Slashvertisement

[migla]

"This is one slashvertisement I'd like to read", I thought to myself, but I was disappointed, because I expected lots of pictures and details, which I didn't get.

Re:Slashvertisement

[JoeBorn]

Here's a review of the device with pictures, etc: http://www.geardiary.com/2010/04/10/review-neuros-link/

Oops

[TubeSteak]

Fatal error: out of dynamic memory in yy_create_buffer() in Unknown on line 0

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I gave up hitting refresh after so many memory errors.
Try the Coral Cache until their server comes back to life:
http://open.neurostechnology.com.nyud.net/content/Silent_HTPC

Re:Oops

[sgbett]

Hah, the coral cache has cached the error!

Re:Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon:

A Silent HTPC
Tue, 04/06/2010 - 22:13 -- Joe

We've just released a practically silent Neuros LINK v1.2 (codenamed "Phantom") and figured some of you would be interested in the process.

Of course, there are easier ways to create a silent computer, the easiest being a net-top solution, with an Atom processor or the like. We've decided not to go that route with the LINK simply because we didn't want to make the sacrifice on CPU horsepower. Sadly, as we all know, there are still plenty of web apps and inefficient video streams that require CPU cycles. Instead, we architected a full power PC to be silent (or silent to an excellent approximation anyway) Click more to see what it took, or if you just want to buy, go here: we're good with that too.

1. Low power components: (45W CPU, no optical drive or HDD, nothing extra) less power means less heat generated in the first place, thus less for fans to need to remove. Although its a 2.7GHz CPU, the Sempron 140 still only consumes 45W, so we felt that was a nice tradeoff between performance and a manageable amount of heat.

2. Better Fans: We employed large, expensive, 120mm fluid dynamic bearing fans that are about as quiet as computer fans get. In fact they are pretty much silent save for the air they move.

3. vibration dampening neoprene mounts dampen any vibration before it causes noise. Vibrating sheet metal is a great source of very annoying noise and strategically placed vibration dampeners are very important.

4. Intelligent Fan control: We implemented the PWM (pulse width modulation) scheme to control fan speed throughout the system so that the fans would spin down (in a coordinated way) under normal use and only spin up when needed under heavy load (or in a closed cabinet where airflow is limited).

5. Elimination of most moving parts in addition to reducing power (and heat), the elimination of optical drives and harddrives means the elimination of the noise they generate. The flash drive used on the LINK is obviously silent (certainly to the unaided ear anyway)

6. Intelligent fluid dynamics of the entire system. One of the obvious benefits of controlling the whole system is that we have access to architect all the assembled parts when together, not just individual pieces. Thus we were able to replace the 70mm CPU fan with a larger, quieter 120mm fan that generates enough excess airflow that it can be used, in conjunction with a well placed power supply fan, to draw air to cool the north and south bridge chipsets of the motherboard well. If you open the case of the LINK, you'll find the components form a carefully developed airflow channel that covers the CPU, GPU, memory and power supply. Although the power supply is capable of running passively without a fan at all (it only operates at maximum ~40% of capacity in the LINK) we placed another fluid dynamic bearing fan to draw air into the power supply because it aided in creating the airflow channel needed. It also gives more headroom in case you do want to expand the LINK.

Although not obvious at first glance, there are a host of important details that were necessary to reduce noise levels to the level you'll find in the LINK. As one example, open the LINK case and you may notice there are standoffs that separate the main fan from the case by 10.5mm This distance was arrived at through careful research and testing. Place the fan too close to the case vents and turbulence is created that generates audible noise, too close to the heat sink or other components and you disrupt the airflow channel and not only generate noise, but also adversely affect the cooling.

So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means

The Full Article

[theY4Kman]

We've just released a practically silent Neuros LINK v1.2 (codenamed "Phantom") and figured some of you would be interested in the process.

Of course, there are easier ways to create a silent computer, the easiest being a net-top solution, with an Atom processor or the like. We've decided not to go that route with the LINK simply because we didn't want to make the sacrifice on CPU horsepower. Sadly, as we all know, there are still plenty of web apps and inefficient video streams that require CPU cycles. Instead, we architected a full power PC to be silent (or silent to an excellent approximation anyway) Click more to see what it took, or if you just want to buy, go here: we're good with that too.

1. Low power components: (45W CPU, no optical drive or HDD, nothing extra) less power means less heat generated in the first place, thus less for fans to need to remove. Although its a 2.7GHz CPU, the Sempron 140 still only consumes 45W, so we felt that was a nice tradeoff between performance and a manageable amount of heat.

2. Better Fans: We employed large, expensive, 120mm fluid dynamic bearing fans that are about as quiet as computer fans get. In fact they are pretty much silent save for the air they move.

3. vibration dampening neoprene mounts dampen any vibration before it causes noise. Vibrating sheet metal is a great source of very annoying noise and strategically placed vibration dampeners are very important.

4. Intelligent Fan control: We implemented the PWM (pulse width modulation) scheme to control fan speed throughout the system so that the fans would spin down (in a coordinated way) under normal use and only spin up when needed under heavy load (or in a closed cabinet where airflow is limited).

5. Elimination of most moving parts in addition to reducing power (and heat), the elimination of optical drives and harddrives means the elimination of the noise they generate. The flash drive used on the LINK is obviously silent (certainly to the unaided ear anyway)

6. Intelligent fluid dynamics of the entire system. One of the obvious benefits of controlling the whole system is that we have access to architect all the assembled parts when together, not just individual pieces. Thus we were able to replace the 70mm CPU fan with a larger, quieter 120mm fan that generates enough excess airflow that it can be used, in conjunction with a well placed power supply fan, to draw air to cool the north and south bridge chipsets of the motherboard well. If you open the case of the LINK, you'll find the components form a carefully developed airflow channel that covers the CPU, GPU, memory and power supply. Although the power supply is capable of running passively without a fan at all (it only operates at maximum ~40% of capacity in the LINK) we placed another fluid dynamic bearing fan to draw air into the power supply because it aided in creating the airflow channel needed. It also gives more headroom in case you do want to expand the LINK.

Although not obvious at first glance, there are a host of important details that were necessary to reduce noise levels to the level you'll find in the LINK. As one example, open the LINK case and you may notice there are standoffs that separate the main fan from the case by 10.5mm This distance was arrived at through careful research and testing. Place the fan too close to the case vents and turbulence is created that generates audible noise, too close to the heat sink or other components and you disrupt the airflow channel and not only generate noise, but also adversely affect the cooling.

So how quiet is the Phantom? 20 dB or less typically, but if that means nothing to you, put a different way, sitting on the couch 6 feet away, its probably less

silent HTPC and silent site

[roman_mir]

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Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1048576) (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/includes/theme.inc on line 890 ...

- it's so silent, nobody can hear it scream.

Atom

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I know I've posted this on every single discussion involving the Atom ... but I have to say it again:

The Atom processor is amazingly powerful. The Atom 330/510 are dual core, 2 threads per core processors @ 1.6ghz. They are fucking amazing. And if your apps are well developed, and they can take advantage of multicore machines, it's a very powerful platform. I've seen some netbooks (based on Atom 270, single core, 2 threads) with windows that just crawl at doing just about anything but basic web browsing. But that's because windows sucks, not because Atom sucks. Try getting an Intel mini-atx Atom 510 based mobo and put 4 gb of ram in there. Using the embedded GMA intel card, I can run compiz at full speed @ 1990x1200 with all visual effects turned on, plus chrome with 30 open tabs, while gcc is compiling something on the background and still have a great performance. One of the appliances I develop (security) is based on an Atom 330, and we can run 16 ffmpegs encoding MPEG4 video @ 720x576 just fine. And you can run the 510 essentially fan-less by just adding a slightly better heatsink. It uses very little power, it runs very well, and completely quiet. For a completely silent machine, all you need to do is get one of this mobos in their 12v version, add an external laptop power brick, remove the fan and add a better heatsink. Or just use the 270 version (single core, 2 threads) that is completely fanless out of the box.

Noone needs a fucking 2.8Ghz dual core processor just to run flash video, all you need is a better OS and a little optimization.

BTW: This Intel mobos I'm mentioning are mini-atx and retail for ~$80, processor and everything. That is, mobo+cpu for 80 bucks. Nothing beats the Atom.

Re:Atom

[spire3661]

For MY personal PVR needs, an Atom just isnt going to cut it. My HTPC server uses alot of CPU power to detect and edit out commercials as well as compress the video into various formats. An Atom would choke on that workload. Also, encoding is the wrong word to use there, you are NOT encoding 16 streams, you are merely laying down 16 data tracks. Thats about as impressive as saying you have 16 torrents going at once.

Re:Atom

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In all probability, then, if GPU accelerated Flash is fully baked by the time they start shipping these as a full commercial product(rather than the current "gamma" geek/prerelease stuff), they'll take advantage of having a socketed board, and just stuff it with a cheaper, slower, lower-power CPU.

My understanding is that this product has been in development a while, and that GPU accelerated flash has been, at best, a roadmap item for much of its history.

Re:Atom

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

No, I used the right word, I am encoding.

I use a card with 8 SAA7134 chips that deliver 25 FPS (PAL) @ 720x576. That's 8 V4L devices delivering MJPEG video. I do motion detection on all 8 channels, and re-encode that as both Theora AND FLV at the same time. So I have 16 motherfucking ffmpegs doing encoding. The motion detecting daemon delivers raw video to all 16 ffmpegs, 8 output Theora and 8 output FLV. So, yes, I am encoding 16 videos at a time.

Re:Atom

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I am playing back 8 720x576 channels at qmin 1 qmax 1 on that machine. How about that?

Re:Atom

[jedidiah]

...like what the other guy said about ethernet.

What you put in front of the TV is not necessarily the thing you are going to transcode or commflag with.

The whole beauty of not using a Tivo is that you can separate functions like this. The monster Quad Core with 8TB doesn't need to be shoehorned into a silent HTPC case.

It can noisily go about it's business in an entirely different room.

Fan = not silent.

[Kenja]

Its quiet, not silent. Last silent system I built is carved out of a solid chunk of aluminium. No fans, no moving parts at all.

Re:One Big Bitch, Then Another

[Minwee]

my bitch is w/ the 3000 series wireless ms keyboard and mouse. anything approaching 6' and performance just dies.

This is a problem which could be solved through the use of something called a "wire". There's no reason why your wireless receiver needs to be buried inside your computer.

I am not impressed.

[trum4n]

I, a 22 year old nerd, have been building fanless, high performance machines that are silent since the 90's. My first PC I built when I was 12 was silent. A fanless gaming machine. Rubber o-rings kept the loudest part, the hard drive, from making noise. The power supply fan was removed, and the case slotted to allow passive convection cooling. This is a really unimpressive "break through." My 2 cents.

Re:I don't get it.

[JackSpratts]

a box like this can easily become the primary way to play your stored music. if i had one that's what i'd use it for. i may watch a few movies a week - but music runs all day every day at my place, often very quietly, streamed off several external hard drives attached to a computer in an upstairs closet. silent yes, but impractical to control, and as for remote access, forget it.

RTFA

[Xtravar]

Power = heat. Their very first point in the article...

1. Low power components: (45W CPU, no optical drive or HDD, nothing extra) less power means less heat generated in the first place, thus less for fans to need to remove.

Re:RTFA

[Yvan256]

It's part of their power-saving plans.

Re:Wasted money on fluid bearing fans

[JoeBorn]

I'm from Neuros (to get that out of the way) You shouldn't lump ball bearings in with fluid bearings. Fluid bearings combined the long life of ball bearings are are practically silent. But you are right about going big and slow. That's why the product uses a 120mm fan that's speed controlled, in typical use its under 1000 rpm and pretty much dead silent.