fanless htpc and PC system builds (post yours here)
for some of us, a 100% silent pc build is a must-have.
here, I found a nice heatpipe chassis ($200, sigh), a really nice i7 cpu chip that runs at a very low 45w (!!) and a decent enough motherboard that seems to work really well for both linux and win7. only complaint is that usb is kind of 'broken' on intel/haswell; in that my usb/spdif dongle (m2tech hiface2) does not work correctly, on either win or lin. I get around it by using onboard realtek (sigh, again) opto-spdif out. it works fine at 192k/24 and so I'm happy enough with it.
content is served by a remote NAS box in another room. I'm using a pair of 802.11ac wifi media bridges to get me a gigabit link to my home network.
intel video chip (hd4600) can actually do pretty good video at 1920x1080p/120hz. this is my first time using 120hz tv's (vizio m-series 39") and I have to say - WOW - so much improvement over 60hz flicker-fests
parts used:
cpu: haswell 45w i7 chip (4 real cores, 8 threads), the i7-4790t
ARK | Intel® Core? i7-4790T Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz)
case: streacom fc8-evo
Amazon.com: Streacom ST-FC8B EVO HTPC Aluminium Fanless Chassis Black: Computers & Accessories
ram: 16gb low profile
Amazon.com: Crucial Ballistix Sport Very Low Profile 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3-1600 1.35V UDIMM 240-Pin Memory Modules BLS2K8G3D1609ES2LX0: Computers & Accessories
psu: pico-psu 160w (overkill, but not too expensive)
Amazon.com: Mini-Box picoPSU-160-XT High Power 24 Pin Mini-ITX Power Supply: Computers & Accessories
disk: samsung ssd
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-120GB-mSATA3-Solid-Retail/dp/B00HT2RNSO
for some of us, a 100% silent pc build is a must-have.
here, I found a nice heatpipe chassis ($200, sigh), a really nice i7 cpu chip that runs at a very low 45w (!!) and a decent enough motherboard that seems to work really well for both linux and win7. only complaint is that usb is kind of 'broken' on intel/haswell; in that my usb/spdif dongle (m2tech hiface2) does not work correctly, on either win or lin. I get around it by using onboard realtek (sigh, again) opto-spdif out. it works fine at 192k/24 and so I'm happy enough with it.
content is served by a remote NAS box in another room. I'm using a pair of 802.11ac wifi media bridges to get me a gigabit link to my home network.
intel video chip (hd4600) can actually do pretty good video at 1920x1080p/120hz. this is my first time using 120hz tv's (vizio m-series 39") and I have to say - WOW - so much improvement over 60hz flicker-fests
parts used:
cpu: haswell 45w i7 chip (4 real cores, 8 threads), the i7-4790t
ARK | Intel® Core? i7-4790T Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz)
case: streacom fc8-evo
Amazon.com: Streacom ST-FC8B EVO HTPC Aluminium Fanless Chassis Black: Computers & Accessories
ram: 16gb low profile
Amazon.com: Crucial Ballistix Sport Very Low Profile 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3-1600 1.35V UDIMM 240-Pin Memory Modules BLS2K8G3D1609ES2LX0: Computers & Accessories
psu: pico-psu 160w (overkill, but not too expensive)
Amazon.com: Mini-Box picoPSU-160-XT High Power 24 Pin Mini-ITX Power Supply: Computers & Accessories
disk: samsung ssd
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-120GB-mSATA3-Solid-Retail/dp/B00HT2RNSO
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Looking good. My experience is that fanless CPU is not required. PSU, HD and optical drive is the noise makers. Therefore I have a silent 80mm Nexus fan on the CPU but fanless PSU and do not use the optical driver for anything alse tha rip DVD's and CD's. I can't hear the fan at all.
Music and movies is on a NAS in a different room.
Music and movies is on a NAS in a different room.
fanless is not required, but it sure is a nice goal, and for a long time it was a hard to reach goal, given how hot pc components used to run.
you have to agree, though, that removing ALL noise is a benefit and, all else being equal, everyone would prefer a silent system to one that makes noise, right?
local disk is mostly just the boot and o/s's. all music and movie files are stored on a remote 'share' (NAS). that centralizes the file system for everyone in the house (no matter where they are) and it also moves the noise to some 'comm closet' area that you can pick for your noisy room some people move their noisy boxes out into the garage or into a far closet or a spare room.
and for a long time, wireless speeds were just not sufficient for remote-mount of NAS systems. but now, with gigabit wifi (802.11ac) you can finally consider having your NAS be across a wifi link, too. it makes it a lot easier to 'remote' your NAS if you don't have a cat5e cable having to weave its way thru the hallways and such.
for the wireless link, I'm using a pair of asus wifi routers in media-bridge mode. I'm only going about 10 feet distance between bridges (just crossing a short hallway) but I'm getting reasonable speed, as seeon from the web gui:
1300 or 1.3gigabits/sec. remember, its a very short distance and as you go farther, it will go down in speed quickly. if you try to go thru walls, the 5ghz signal starts to weaken to where 2.4ghz has to be used and you won't be able to get full gig speeds over wireless. but, over time, I expect wifi to get better and better, so for now, this is about as good as it gets for wireless remote disk and network access.
I liked this case so much, I built 2 of them. one using a lower cost i3 haswell and the bigger system using the i7 haswell. the tv room is dead quiet and now, so is my work room. and they all mount the same NAS remote storage - it really is common storage for every computer in the house
you have to agree, though, that removing ALL noise is a benefit and, all else being equal, everyone would prefer a silent system to one that makes noise, right?
local disk is mostly just the boot and o/s's. all music and movie files are stored on a remote 'share' (NAS). that centralizes the file system for everyone in the house (no matter where they are) and it also moves the noise to some 'comm closet' area that you can pick for your noisy room
some people move their noisy boxes out into the garage or into a far closet or a spare room.and for a long time, wireless speeds were just not sufficient for remote-mount of NAS systems. but now, with gigabit wifi (802.11ac) you can finally consider having your NAS be across a wifi link, too. it makes it a lot easier to 'remote' your NAS if you don't have a cat5e cable having to weave its way thru the hallways and such.
for the wireless link, I'm using a pair of asus wifi routers in media-bridge mode. I'm only going about 10 feet distance between bridges (just crossing a short hallway) but I'm getting reasonable speed, as seeon from the web gui:
1300 or 1.3gigabits/sec. remember, its a very short distance and as you go farther, it will go down in speed quickly. if you try to go thru walls, the 5ghz signal starts to weaken to where 2.4ghz has to be used and you won't be able to get full gig speeds over wireless. but, over time, I expect wifi to get better and better, so for now, this is about as good as it gets for wireless remote disk and network access.
I liked this case so much, I built 2 of them. one using a lower cost i3 haswell and the bigger system using the i7 haswell. the tv room is dead quiet and now, so is my work room. and they all mount the same NAS remote storage - it really is common storage for every computer in the house
+1
SO? Software Player? Playback chain? Lessons learned for future builds?
PS: can you change the title of the thread? Maybe make it generic - Silent PC builds
I would like to post my build and my setup too
updated the thread title to make it more generic.
software player is whatever o/s I'm booted to at the moment. for movies, its still win7 since linux video has not quite caught up to the speed of the win7 intel drivers. I hope it gets there some day, but for now, vlc on win7 is my video playback app. for audio, I tend to use foobar2000 on win7. and when I'm booted into win7, I can stream amazon video from amazon prime.
if I boot into linux, then I'll use mpd as the audio player and then I can use a web interface (even via a phone or tablet) to control the music playback.
I do find myself staying in win7 for the 'movie pc' almost all the time. I rarely use the windows box for anything else. almost never touch the web browser, don't install weird things to the system and I try to avoid taking windows updates since some of them can actually be toxic (think: ftdi-gate, when the ftdi driver bricked many of our usb/serial dongles via normal windows update!)
not too many lessons learned on this build. I can say that the intel chipset for haswell has some kind of strange usb bug where audio over usb is not stable; it stutters, like some flow control or buffering problem is going on. happens identically on win and linux, which is VERY odd and indicates its not the o/s or drivers doing this. I used to use an m2tech hiface2 usb/spdif dongle but that no longer works on haswell. I should try reporting it as a bug, but for now, I simply use the onboard realtek pci-e based spdif-out in the form of toslink. I did test it and it does work fine at even 192k rates, so its quite acceptable for all but the most critical playback uses. I don't lose sleep over it. realtek is 'ghetto' but the digital audio I hear seems fine enough to me, once it gets into an outboard dac system.
Not regarding CPU. My knowledge is a couple of years old, so something migh have changed. I could have made it fanless, but that would have reduces the CPU liftetime. And a good fan is silent. With the lid on my Nexus Psile cabinet is on, it's completely inaudible, even with my ears close to cabinet.
motherboard: gigabyte b85
( www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KRUX0PU )
latest released drivers, nothing special. since the video is intel, there are not driver updates as often as nvidia, but then again, intel updates don't tend to break anything, which nvidia sometimes does.
os is regular win7, not media center or anything special.
( www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KRUX0PU )
latest released drivers, nothing special. since the video is intel, there are not driver updates as often as nvidia, but then again, intel updates don't tend to break anything, which nvidia sometimes does.
os is regular win7, not media center or anything special.
the pico-psu is very common these days. its a whole switching psu that takes in a single voltage (either fixed 12, or variable range 12-19; you have to be sure which one you have, so don't always assume that they will take 18v like a laptop. most will, but some are meant to be ONLY 12v in).
it creates all the atx voltages locally and sits inside the atx motherboard socket.
external 5amp brick is all you need and those are always fanless.
I gave links to the key parts in my post, so you could add up the parts that you would need. roughly, case was $200, cpu (i7) was $300, ram was a few hundred (but you could run fine with as little as 4gb these days). disk is whatever you want to put in, figure $75 for an entry level ssd up to a lot more if you want big and fast and modern.
its a general purpose computer and I can build source code on it (very fast, 8 threads looking like 8 cpus), I can do video encodes and playback, run photoshop, pretty much everything other than high-end games. onboard intel video has been doing a great job for any video file I throw at it, but oddly when I had an old tv that was 1366px across (720p) and 60hz, the video looked very jittery and shakey during panning events. keeping all else the same but swapping in a recent 120hz tv at 1920px, the video got BETTER by 2x or 4x, subjectively. looks very smooth, like a hardware based BD player! not sure why the tv would matter, maybe its the 60 vs 120hz true refresh, but I was surprised and super happy to learn that 120hz refresh is real (on some tv's) and that this video system on the i7 haswell easily supports true hd at full res and 120hz, even over hdmi (which a lot of people said can't be done, you often need dual-link to get to 120hz at 1920). I think this may be all at hdmi 1.4 spec level, though.
it creates all the atx voltages locally and sits inside the atx motherboard socket.
external 5amp brick is all you need and those are always fanless.
I gave links to the key parts in my post, so you could add up the parts that you would need. roughly, case was $200, cpu (i7) was $300, ram was a few hundred (but you could run fine with as little as 4gb these days). disk is whatever you want to put in, figure $75 for an entry level ssd up to a lot more if you want big and fast and modern.
its a general purpose computer and I can build source code on it (very fast, 8 threads looking like 8 cpus), I can do video encodes and playback, run photoshop, pretty much everything other than high-end games. onboard intel video has been doing a great job for any video file I throw at it, but oddly when I had an old tv that was 1366px across (720p) and 60hz, the video looked very jittery and shakey during panning events. keeping all else the same but swapping in a recent 120hz tv at 1920px, the video got BETTER by 2x or 4x, subjectively. looks very smooth, like a hardware based BD player! not sure why the tv would matter, maybe its the 60 vs 120hz true refresh, but I was surprised and super happy to learn that 120hz refresh is real (on some tv's) and that this video system on the i7 haswell easily supports true hd at full res and 120hz, even over hdmi (which a lot of people said can't be done, you often need dual-link to get to 120hz at 1920). I think this may be all at hdmi 1.4 spec level, though.
linuxworks, cheers for the info. The PS sounds like its just a step-up transformer.
Yep, saw the link re: components. Much easier to ask you than do the individual tally though
Re: flickering, it's interesting that you found such a difference going 120 Hz. I used to have issues with image stability (and tearing) with my 42" LCD panel. Setting the gfx card to output 50Hz sorted problems for me.
Yep, saw the link re: components. Much easier to ask you than do the individual tally though
Re: flickering, it's interesting that you found such a difference going 120 Hz. I used to have issues with image stability (and tearing) with my 42" LCD panel. Setting the gfx card to output 50Hz sorted problems for me.
the PS derives all the right atx voltages (3.3, 5, -5, 12, -12). so its several dc/dc converters all in one package.
there are 2 kinds of pico-psu: ones that take ONLY 12v in (and the 12v rail on its output is passed thru, so if you have a 12v input too high, your computer sees too high of a 12v, also, which is not good). the other kind takes 'wide range of voltage' and regulates every single rail, but those are harder to find and cost more. they are more meant for car use (where the 12v input isn't reliable and can go up and down).
there are 2 kinds of pico-psu: ones that take ONLY 12v in (and the 12v rail on its output is passed thru, so if you have a 12v input too high, your computer sees too high of a 12v, also, which is not good). the other kind takes 'wide range of voltage' and regulates every single rail, but those are harder to find and cost more. they are more meant for car use (where the 12v input isn't reliable and can go up and down).
Silent Fan?
There are no such things, and they also generate electrical noise.
Fan specs are just loin cloths for the uninitiated. Measure the SPL using a linear scale in a quiet environment, and ther will be significant low frequency noise well above environment.
There are no such things, and they also generate electrical noise.
Fan specs are just loin cloths for the uninitiated. Measure the SPL using a linear scale in a quiet environment, and ther will be significant low frequency noise well above environment.
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