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.

[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.

[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 ;-)

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

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.

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]

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 12058624) (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /var/www/open.neurostechnology.com/includes/menu.inc on line 1224 ...
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

[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.