Small Form Factor New Atom board arrived

Water?

On the older epias you could use a zalman nb hs, either that or try to couple it to the case your holding it in thats what i did with my epia m.

 

mmm water cooling, i'd probably go for beer instead

I am going to buy a Zalman NBF47, looks like it will work with the hook and loops attachment that this mobo uses, just have to keep fingers crossed that it fits (think it will be tight with the clips for the passive cooler on the atom chip itself).

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=413050

 

I've not found the fan to be that noisy but I'm running it in a full ATX case and its under my desk, I've also stuck it with a near silent 425W Hyper PSU (it was only £25 at the local shop) and its really a fantastic little machine for NAS, DHCP, PXE, Running Teamspeak etc duties.

The CPU never gets much above room temp even when compiling data and the hottest the n/bridge has been was about 45C when transferring a fair few GB across the network for a couple of hours.
I have no other case cooling (though I need some for the hard drives) and set drives to spin down after about 20 mins.

Tis a great little machine now for the money.

I've also had no issues with Debian4.0 on there using the stock kernel its just dandy.

 

The Zalman NBF47 fits... however it only fits after use of pliers. This is because there are only two loops on the motherboard and the brackets are orientated wrong for these clips (it would be fine if all four loops were fitted to the motherboard).

Bending the hook on each bracket around by 90 degrees (and praying the metal doesn't fatigue and snap off!) enabled me to successfully fit the heatsink. It's a bit dodgy and not quite as securely fitted as I would like, but it does the trick.

In my case I now run at the following temps...

CPU - ~60 c
Internal - ~43 c
Remote - ~49 c

As far as I can tell the 'Remote' sensor in bios is the Northbridge? This is in a NOAH mini-itx case with one fan on the side for airflow (and im yet to tidy up cables).

The system is a lot quieter now

BioSniper, im amazed your cpu never gets above room temperature if mine is running at 60 c?

 

How about using some thermal apoxy, along with your fudge that should keep evey thing nice and solid. Do nb's have thermal cut off?

Biosnipers is in a full size atx case, that's a lot of air for one of these things.

 

some thermal epoxy would be nice but that's £8 ish, almost 20% of the price of the entire mobo/cpu hehe. might be useful investment for other projects as well though.

My CPU runs at 50+ even with the case lid off and loads of airflow which is why I was particularly suprised at biosnipers low temps.

 

Good point.

As for the CPU temps, have you had the HS off and checked it doesn't need lapped?

 

yeah it's def worth a check, thanks

 

any new pics?

 

Well, the fan on the North Bridge today has decided that its going to make the worst noise known to man, it actually sounds like its going to fail which is great considering its technically only been running 10 days (16:43:43 up 10 days, 18:19) according to the uptime command.
It's also rapidly getting hotter, its sitting at about 40C now. I'm actually slightly worried and think that I should power it down just incase.

Looks like it will be time to dig out one of those large blue Zalman sinks (which are all attached to spare main boards that I want to sell at the moment) and try and strap it down.

 

You shouldn't even need the fan - Gigabyte has the exact same layout and I was told that the fan is only on the northbridge for a "worst case scenario" environment.

 

is there alot of static air in its case?

I am worried now as i have been eyeing up such motherboard for the last few days.

 

In my case? yeah, I dont have any case fans at all and I really should just to cool the drives if nothing else.
Thing is Bindi the Gigabyte has a much better, more substantial looking, heatsink.

I will give it a go with the fan disconnected shortly, see what kind of temps I hit and how fast.

::edit::

Ok, that Hit 50C after just a few seconds of being disconnected (about 30-40s). I don't think I'm willing to run it without a fan until I either get some more case cooling or a bigger heatsink that I can apply.

 

50 isn't anywhere near dangerous and 30-40 secs is a quite a while to grow 10 degrees.
If Intel aren't too silly the CPU will have on-die temp monitoring and will throttle when too hot (90-100+). Try it and see if it ever rises above 80 without the fan (if you dare )

 

The fan isn't on the CPU, its the Northbridge which also has the IGP on it as I understand.

 

me want new pics, in its home.

 

Im defo interested in one of these but that fan is crap, needs to be passive.

 

Fitted a copper passive northbridge heatsink to mine and a bigger aluminium northbridge heatsink to the CPU (with a DIY shim as the core is tiiiiny). The standard retention clips are fine if you bend them a bit, otherwise it puts too much pressure on the NB and CPU. I think I was getting about 60oC - 70oC under load for CPU and NB with no airflow or fans (it was stable though). I'll double check later. Just been faffing about with different options at the moment.

 

Fibre, did you use the aluminium heatsink that you took off the northbridge on the CPU?

With one 80mm case fan's worth of airflow in a small case mine usually sits in the high 50's. A friend has also purchased it, and his temp is similar. The zalman passive NB cooler I fitted is doing a great job.

Here is my sensors output:-

Code:

smsc47m192-i2c-0-2d
Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at 2000
+2.5V:       +2.54 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.32 V)
VCore:       +1.15 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +2.99 V)
+3.3V:       +3.47 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.38 V)
+5V:         +4.82 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +6.64 V)
+12V:       +12.31 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max = +15.94 V)
VCC:         +3.49 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +4.38 V)
+1.5V:       +1.58 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +1.99 V)
+1.8V:       +1.77 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +2.39 V)
Chip Temp:   +36.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
CPU Temp:    +56.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
Sys Temp:    +45.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
cpu0_vid:   +2.050 V

smsc47m1-isa-0680
Adapter: ISA adapter
fan1:       1328 RPM  (min = 1280 RPM, div = 4)
fan2:          0 RPM  (min = 1280 RPM, div = 4)

Reading the article at Toms Hardware on Atom I am disappointed with the power usage (the reason I bought this pc). They are right, although the chip itself is excellent, having a 4W chip makes little difference if you have a chipset drawing 20W+. I hope for the next iteration they work on the platform power-usage as a whole.

However, I do love my new little server machine, and it's taking a hell of a lot less power than leaving my gaming machine running.

 

That's what i'm using \/

I'll double check what temps i'm getting...