I decided to do a new thread, if somebody is interested about normal "non bling bling" htpc cases..? For a few monts now I have been doing a HTPC case with passive cooling and with ability to play Blu-ray and HD DVD material without problem. No fan allowed! I hope and maybe this gives some ideas to someone. It's a quite heavy piece of aluminium. The hull is 10mm aluminium with drilled holes for cooling and airflow. I have got the big heatsinks on the sides, from a member on the finnish DVDPlaza forum. The harddrives are in a sealed enclosure for minimum noise. The HDD heat-transfer to the aluminium hull and heatsink, works trouht elastic Softtherm carpets. I used heatpipes from Zalman ZM-2HC1 and 2HC2 HDD coolers, for the CPU and southbridge. The graphic card (Asus GF 7950GT) has heatpipes from Zalmans GPU coolers, but it seems that the card is a little bit too power greedy, so I'm going to change it to a passively cooled Gigabyte 8500GT. The PSU is a semipassive ElanVital EVP-5007 which stays fully passive under 250W load. Outside the shell and the frontpanel is 1,5mm anodised aluminium. The buttons is made by my friend who has a lathe. The project is almost finished, only some small tweaks left. Hardware: Motherboard: Intel DG965MQ microBTX CPU: Intel Core2duo E6600 Memory: Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400 DDR2 800MHz Graphic card: Gigabyte GF 8500GT passive/hdcp PSU: ElanVital ELVT EVP5007 500W 0dB semipassive HDD: 1x Samsung T166 500GB SATA, 1x Samsung SP120 250GB SATA VFD: Thermaltake MediaLab DVD-RW: Samsung SH-S183A DVD+-RW DL SATA HD DVD: XBox 360 Addon Blu-ray: NA Remote: Fully customed Phillips Pronto RU950 (TSU3000) Enjoy .
That's one of the best clean looking cases I've seen in a long time.. And the use of heat pipes is amazing! I feel ashamed to make a quibble, but arnt the full load temps a bit high? Bar that, Its a fantastic job!
How easy was it to bend those heatpipes? i was just about to contact a chap about getting a custom made heatpipe for my summer rebuild, but bending a heatpipe would be easier. Any tips on bending a heatpipe? iv bent loads of copper in the past but none thats so fragile. I like the prohect chap, a new HTPC with HD is killer, i think il wait until either Blue ray or HD DVD becomes more main steam, both techs cant last against each other, VHS againt beta max? i reckon it will be HD DVD that will win, and when it dose my HTPC will get an update! lol!
Thanks! Yes, I have also think about that, and I am aware that many wants that the CPU runs really cool, 40-50 C. I believe that this temeratures should not be a problem. The computer have been running several hours (8-10h) with varied load (HD DVD, VC1, H.264 1080p material) and the temp has been as high as 72 C. Core2Duo start throttling when it heats above 85 C, so it should be safe so long it stays under that temp (and the throttling of course dropps the temp). Harddrive temp has been max 42 C. I remember when I have a AMD Athlon "Palomino" thats idle temp was over 80 C because the heatsink was filled with dust. Havent opened it in two years. Works fine anyway.
The old Zalman ZM-2HC1 model has much better pipes, softer copper and no chrome. A lot easier to bend. But you must be careful so the pipe doesn't broke. The new Zalman pipes brokes a lot easier, you can't bend the 90 degree angle straight, the pipes brokes or sinks.
nobody could say which format would win when the aren't really established jet. I think withhin the consoles the both formats will continue(perhaps the CD will die instead). So the eassiest way to uprade a systemis to buy one of those Lg combo drives: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2126924,00.asp (gick googling)
The material is 1,5 mm anodised aluminium and the bendings are factory made, but the openings are self made, with a drill, angle grinding machine and a file.
Mod featured on Pariah's Guild ^ URL can be found here http://pariahs-guild.blogspot.com/2007/05/mods-passive-cooling-hd-htpc.html
that looks great - it fits in well with the rest of your home theatre kit. you can't tell the differance from a glance
We Finns must like things quiet, because this is already the third all-passive case project by a Finn I've seen. Awesome work!
That's a really nice build - I love the passive idea, but as above, won't it get a bit toasty under extended use? Personally, as much as I'd love to run that passively, I'd want a big, silent 120mm fan in there just to keep the air moving that tiny tiny bit, convection alone doesn't do it for me.
