[axbmcuser]

I'm very very much a silent lover, so here my experience regarding fan noise:

D54250WYKH (i5, stock intel case, internal 2,5" SATA SSD)

I was willing to give the stock case a try before buying passive.

Fan control set to AUTO min 25 max 100.

Result:
Incredibly(!) silent while using OpenELEC. Fan stays at 25% all the time for me while watching fullscreen media. 25% means dead silent for this case. You can make the fan spin up very little and for a short time when you make stuff like putting transparent menus over a running video or transparent background video while going to homescreen. But even then the fan spins up only very little stops again almost right away when you resume watching media in normal fullscreen.

Summer isn't quite there yet but i've been happy for month now. No need for passive in my case.


It may be different for you if you live in a area with permanent high temperatures or you want to run windows.


I can only recommend buying the larger nuc case (H-models) with 2,5" option and trying it out with fan control auto 25-100. You may be surprised.


If i ever feel the need to switch to passive, i found the Akasa Tesla H a good option. Not the smallest case, but because of that larger surface it should do better than some smaller cases as some tests seem to confirm (afair).