(2012-06-06, 22:14)lrusak Wrote: [
It's just not really possible without a fan. Convection beats conduction ten fold. Just having a slight breeze over the heatsinks makes all the difference.
I don't care how good your hearing is there is just no way you can hear a low rpm fan in a silent case from your normal seating position. To each their own I guess
What's not possible without a fan? These days, quite a bit is possible without a fan. While they don't officially talk about it, Streacom have commented that 95W TDP A8s work well in their cases....even the A6 is already very powerful for XBMC, Aeon Nox is very smooth with it for example, and the new trinity chips like the A10 at 65W or if you want to live on the edge the 95W version, will absolutely fly with XBMC I'm sure. And trinity + 1 is reputedly less than a year out, which will also have 65/95W version of course, so it's really hard to see from an XBMC perspective what you can't do with a machine with passive cooling these days.
I'm not, BTW, claiming to have super ears, it's just that my house at night, with kids in bed, is
completely silent - we live in the 'burbs next to a park basically, and you can't hear a thing usually - it's pin drop silence. I sit @ 3 metres (= 9ft I guess) from a 50 inch screen. No AC, no nothing. I often watch with subs so I won't disturb my wife (currently recovering from brain surgery), or my young kids. And in this environment, I have tried with fans, but there's still a hum. It's not wildly offensive, or high pitched or anything, but it's there. And I personally wanted it not to be there....so I made it so.
As you say, to each their own. One nitpcik - you mean heat transfer by convection. Convection itself is really just molecular movement. Pet peeve, although yours is definitely the popular usage.