2014-03-24, 18:58
Hi all,
I built my first HTPC setup last year to specifically run Openelec XBMC in my lounge. It all worked great accept for one thing - FAN NOISE. It bugged me for months and months and I tried all sorts of tricks to cure it but there was always an audible whine in the background when the media audio level dropped. I finally made my biggest break-through at the weekend and thought I would share it plus all my experiences leading up to it as well. Even if most of it isn't completely relevant to your equipment I hope it will provide some inspiration if you're suffering from a noisy setup. It is possible to get good quiet results on a tight budget without having to go fan-less.
So, I should first outline the components that make up my system and the reasons behind choosing them (not always just down to cost ;-)
MOTHER BOARD
This is an Asrock B75M R2.0 which I bought here for under £42. This board has all the sockets I need at a good price with great reviews. Enough said.
CPU
Just a cheap and cheerful Intel Celeron G550 2.60GHz which I bought for about £28. Way enough grunt to run XBMC.
RAM
I just chucked 4GB into it with passive metal heat dissipators stuck on them - why not, it's cheap and maybe future proof..
GPU
I saw a great post on this forum (which eludes me at the moment) about the Nvidia GT630 and how well it works with Linux and most types of video. After checking out the Nvidia specs I decided that the low profile GT-430 would also be up to the job. I got it from here for £30.
The GPU is probably the most important part of any HTPC as far as I can tell. I had struggled for years to find an off-the-shelf media player that could handle all my different types of video files. I've tried Xtreamer, Dune, Netgear, Raspberry Pi, Android TV boxes, Asus Revo, Lenovo and NONE of them could do everything I wanted. The biggest issues that cropped up for me were getting interlaced video to play properly with the correct frame rate (so it still looks interlaced on the TV), getting 23.976p content to play at the right frame rate (with a TV that supports it of course), and lastly getting PGS subtitle support (patchy support for this in off-the-shelf players). My GT-430 solves all of these issues (well, XBMC solves the PGS issue).
CASE
I found a good looking low profile case called a Powercool HTPC-006 which you can pick up from here for less than £53. My main reasons for purchasing this case were the low profile, the low cost and the nice finish. It has an IR receiver built in but I wasn't sure if that would work under Openelec, and I don't need the optical drive flap at the front.
POWER SUPPLY
After a bit of forum searching I found a brand that people were recommending for it's quiet operation - Seasonic. I found that RS Components had one that had plenty of current handling (300W) and most importantly, would fit inside my Powercool case. Picked it up for under £40.
So, after assembling it all I found that the black level wasn't correct, they were lifted so that dark areas of the screen were grey. However, this was easily corrected by creating a text file called xorg.conf which contains some setting options to force limited colour space. Here is the text I used (again I can't find the post that I got this from..). Just copy and paste the lines of text below into a blank text file and save it as xorg.conf in the "Configfiles" folder of your machine. Or add the lines into the xorg.conf file if it already exists. Please take advice from posts by other forum members on this if you're unsure as I am no expert! To me, it looks like there are more options than I actually need but it works so I don't think I'll change it.
******************************************************************************
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen"
Device "nvidia"
DefaultDepth 24
# Option "ColorRange" "Full"
# Option "ColorRange" "Limited"
# Option "ColorSpace" "RGB"
Option "ColorSpace" "YCbCr444"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection
***********************************************************************************
So, as mentioned at the start, the remaining issue was primarily fan noise.
When I first got the machine I went into the BIOS and set the fans to have a target speed of "Level 1" and to have target CPU temperature of 50 degrees celcius. I didn't experiment too much with these settings at the time. I guess I just didn't want to be running the CPU at the maximum of 65 degrees and thought that having target fan speeds was a bit silly anyway so why not go for Level 1 (although I admit I'm probably misunderstanding something here).
To look into the noise I opened the case and just listened. I thought that the case fan (included with the Powercool case) was pretty noisy and that the CPU stock fan was also quite whiny. My main concern was the case intake fan, being that it is the one nearest the outside of the case. I upgraded it to a Nanoxia Deep Silence 120mm PWM which was so much better than the Powercool fan - basically inaudible. I added a silicone gasket to further prevent any vibration transmitting to the case and a magnetic dust grille to keep the dust out.
At the same time I decided that if I was taking lots of nice clean cool air into the case I should also be trying to expel the warm air out the back. As the Nanoxia Deep Silence fan was so good and inaudible I decided on another fan from the same range - the 60mm version. The challenge was how to create a nice clean cutout at the back of the case to screw the fan to and allow the air to pass out with no impedance. My solution was to basically cut up the PCI blanking plate at the back of the case. I was able to trim away just the right amount of metal and still leave me with enough material to drill holes into for the fan screws. It works well enough. The result is a really good airflow that is inaudible when you're more than a couple of feet away from the machine. I assumed that the good airflow would help allow the CPU and GPU fans to run at a lower speed.
Still there was a whining sound which would come and go, so clearly it wasn't helping enough.
I thought the CPU fan was probably the main cause so I swapped the stock cooler out for a larger one with better noise performance but this was a disaster as it was slightly too tall to fit the case! I actually couldn't find a quieter CPU fan anywhere that would fit inside the case so just stayed put with the stock cooler.
Whilst inside the case I tried holding and pushing on various parts of the chassis to see if there was a resonance being setup in some of the metal work. I found that a few areas were a bit dubious so set about stuffing sheet rubber into cracks where noise seemed to be emanating from. I also lined lots of the chassis edges with gaffer tape to make the exterior case fit more snugly to the chassis and eliminate metal on metal contact. This all seemed to help.
While on that line of thought, I put the case back together and placed some closed cell foam sheeting underneath the feet on the base of the case. This really reduced the noise quite a lot. Basically, the resonance that was already in the case had been passing into my wooden TV cabinet and was being amplified further. The closed cell foam I used was about 15mm thick and looks like this stuff. However, I was aware that all I was really doing was mitigating the existing noises rather than curing them and there was still more noise coming from the box than I wanted.
A couple of months went by and it was still niggling me. I went into the BIOS again to have a look at those temperature settings in case any gains could be made and I noticed that the Active Processor Cores setting was on the default setting of "ALL". As XBMC hardly puts any demand on the CPU (with the Nvidia installed) I wondered whether setting this to "Auto" would have any benefit. Sure enough, the fan noise went down a fair bit after doing this.
One week went by and I thought, "this thing is still making more noise than I want". Can I do any more?? So I went inside the case again and unplugged all of the fans: CPU, GPU, Large Intake and Small Exhaust. I then plugged them all in individually to gauge the noise level from each fan. I tried to do this quickly to avoid CPU or GPU overheating!
First of all I was comforted by how quiet the power supply fan was. This Seasonic PSU is amazing. I plugged in the CPU fan and discovered that it was whining a fair bit. However, just touching the plastic turn posts on the cooler (that you have to turn in order to clamp it down onto the CPU) got rid of the whine. These horrible plastic clips were resonating and causing a whine. By slipping some small pieces of thin (2mm) sheet rubber in between the tops of the posts and the cooler body I was able to eliminate this resonance noise completely and I was really impressed by how silent the stock Intel cooler is with this mod. Be very careful not to poke your fingers into the spinning fan blades!!!!
I plugged in the Nanoxia intake and exhaust fans and heard almost no increase in noise. You have to get your ear quite close to hear them. Again, very comforting.
Lastly, I plugged the GPU fan back in and heard the most surprisingly loud whining fan noise. I should have guessed it from the start - this crappy little cooler fan that they use is terrible! I'm not sure if it's worse because mine is an Asus badged GPU but I suspect the Nvidia branded ones are the same.
I thought to myself - how on earth am I going to replace that little fan with something better.. But before I even tried searching for an upgrade it hit me that my gorgeous little Nanoxia exhaust fan was sat right next to the GPU card, on the same side as the GPU cooler. I wondered if it would be possible to build a simple duct stretching out from the fan intake to the GPU cooler so that the exhaust air is pulled around it before exiting the case.
All it took was some carefully placed pieces of duct (ha!) tape and I had built just that. It's difficult to describe exactly how I constructed the duct but it only took a little bit of creativity and skill. An important step though is to place a little piece of tape to connect one of the GPU fan blades to the cooler so that fan doesn't spin up with the air flowing over it.
I put the case back together once again - the little screws and chassis threads are now getting quite worn out! I powered up and started playing an interlaced H.264 HD file. I left it for a bit to see what happened to the GPU temperature and to my delight it didn't go above 50 degrees celcius. With less hungry files it was down to just 40 degrees!
To my even greater delight, I could now no longer hear any noise coming from my HTPC!!
I hope it stays that way.
I built my first HTPC setup last year to specifically run Openelec XBMC in my lounge. It all worked great accept for one thing - FAN NOISE. It bugged me for months and months and I tried all sorts of tricks to cure it but there was always an audible whine in the background when the media audio level dropped. I finally made my biggest break-through at the weekend and thought I would share it plus all my experiences leading up to it as well. Even if most of it isn't completely relevant to your equipment I hope it will provide some inspiration if you're suffering from a noisy setup. It is possible to get good quiet results on a tight budget without having to go fan-less.
So, I should first outline the components that make up my system and the reasons behind choosing them (not always just down to cost ;-)
MOTHER BOARD
This is an Asrock B75M R2.0 which I bought here for under £42. This board has all the sockets I need at a good price with great reviews. Enough said.
CPU
Just a cheap and cheerful Intel Celeron G550 2.60GHz which I bought for about £28. Way enough grunt to run XBMC.
RAM
I just chucked 4GB into it with passive metal heat dissipators stuck on them - why not, it's cheap and maybe future proof..
GPU
I saw a great post on this forum (which eludes me at the moment) about the Nvidia GT630 and how well it works with Linux and most types of video. After checking out the Nvidia specs I decided that the low profile GT-430 would also be up to the job. I got it from here for £30.
The GPU is probably the most important part of any HTPC as far as I can tell. I had struggled for years to find an off-the-shelf media player that could handle all my different types of video files. I've tried Xtreamer, Dune, Netgear, Raspberry Pi, Android TV boxes, Asus Revo, Lenovo and NONE of them could do everything I wanted. The biggest issues that cropped up for me were getting interlaced video to play properly with the correct frame rate (so it still looks interlaced on the TV), getting 23.976p content to play at the right frame rate (with a TV that supports it of course), and lastly getting PGS subtitle support (patchy support for this in off-the-shelf players). My GT-430 solves all of these issues (well, XBMC solves the PGS issue).
CASE
I found a good looking low profile case called a Powercool HTPC-006 which you can pick up from here for less than £53. My main reasons for purchasing this case were the low profile, the low cost and the nice finish. It has an IR receiver built in but I wasn't sure if that would work under Openelec, and I don't need the optical drive flap at the front.
POWER SUPPLY
After a bit of forum searching I found a brand that people were recommending for it's quiet operation - Seasonic. I found that RS Components had one that had plenty of current handling (300W) and most importantly, would fit inside my Powercool case. Picked it up for under £40.
So, after assembling it all I found that the black level wasn't correct, they were lifted so that dark areas of the screen were grey. However, this was easily corrected by creating a text file called xorg.conf which contains some setting options to force limited colour space. Here is the text I used (again I can't find the post that I got this from..). Just copy and paste the lines of text below into a blank text file and save it as xorg.conf in the "Configfiles" folder of your machine. Or add the lines into the xorg.conf file if it already exists. Please take advice from posts by other forum members on this if you're unsure as I am no expert! To me, it looks like there are more options than I actually need but it works so I don't think I'll change it.
******************************************************************************
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen"
Device "nvidia"
DefaultDepth 24
# Option "ColorRange" "Full"
# Option "ColorRange" "Limited"
# Option "ColorSpace" "RGB"
Option "ColorSpace" "YCbCr444"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection
***********************************************************************************
So, as mentioned at the start, the remaining issue was primarily fan noise.
When I first got the machine I went into the BIOS and set the fans to have a target speed of "Level 1" and to have target CPU temperature of 50 degrees celcius. I didn't experiment too much with these settings at the time. I guess I just didn't want to be running the CPU at the maximum of 65 degrees and thought that having target fan speeds was a bit silly anyway so why not go for Level 1 (although I admit I'm probably misunderstanding something here).
To look into the noise I opened the case and just listened. I thought that the case fan (included with the Powercool case) was pretty noisy and that the CPU stock fan was also quite whiny. My main concern was the case intake fan, being that it is the one nearest the outside of the case. I upgraded it to a Nanoxia Deep Silence 120mm PWM which was so much better than the Powercool fan - basically inaudible. I added a silicone gasket to further prevent any vibration transmitting to the case and a magnetic dust grille to keep the dust out.
At the same time I decided that if I was taking lots of nice clean cool air into the case I should also be trying to expel the warm air out the back. As the Nanoxia Deep Silence fan was so good and inaudible I decided on another fan from the same range - the 60mm version. The challenge was how to create a nice clean cutout at the back of the case to screw the fan to and allow the air to pass out with no impedance. My solution was to basically cut up the PCI blanking plate at the back of the case. I was able to trim away just the right amount of metal and still leave me with enough material to drill holes into for the fan screws. It works well enough. The result is a really good airflow that is inaudible when you're more than a couple of feet away from the machine. I assumed that the good airflow would help allow the CPU and GPU fans to run at a lower speed.
Still there was a whining sound which would come and go, so clearly it wasn't helping enough.
I thought the CPU fan was probably the main cause so I swapped the stock cooler out for a larger one with better noise performance but this was a disaster as it was slightly too tall to fit the case! I actually couldn't find a quieter CPU fan anywhere that would fit inside the case so just stayed put with the stock cooler.
Whilst inside the case I tried holding and pushing on various parts of the chassis to see if there was a resonance being setup in some of the metal work. I found that a few areas were a bit dubious so set about stuffing sheet rubber into cracks where noise seemed to be emanating from. I also lined lots of the chassis edges with gaffer tape to make the exterior case fit more snugly to the chassis and eliminate metal on metal contact. This all seemed to help.
While on that line of thought, I put the case back together and placed some closed cell foam sheeting underneath the feet on the base of the case. This really reduced the noise quite a lot. Basically, the resonance that was already in the case had been passing into my wooden TV cabinet and was being amplified further. The closed cell foam I used was about 15mm thick and looks like this stuff. However, I was aware that all I was really doing was mitigating the existing noises rather than curing them and there was still more noise coming from the box than I wanted.
A couple of months went by and it was still niggling me. I went into the BIOS again to have a look at those temperature settings in case any gains could be made and I noticed that the Active Processor Cores setting was on the default setting of "ALL". As XBMC hardly puts any demand on the CPU (with the Nvidia installed) I wondered whether setting this to "Auto" would have any benefit. Sure enough, the fan noise went down a fair bit after doing this.
One week went by and I thought, "this thing is still making more noise than I want". Can I do any more?? So I went inside the case again and unplugged all of the fans: CPU, GPU, Large Intake and Small Exhaust. I then plugged them all in individually to gauge the noise level from each fan. I tried to do this quickly to avoid CPU or GPU overheating!
First of all I was comforted by how quiet the power supply fan was. This Seasonic PSU is amazing. I plugged in the CPU fan and discovered that it was whining a fair bit. However, just touching the plastic turn posts on the cooler (that you have to turn in order to clamp it down onto the CPU) got rid of the whine. These horrible plastic clips were resonating and causing a whine. By slipping some small pieces of thin (2mm) sheet rubber in between the tops of the posts and the cooler body I was able to eliminate this resonance noise completely and I was really impressed by how silent the stock Intel cooler is with this mod. Be very careful not to poke your fingers into the spinning fan blades!!!!
I plugged in the Nanoxia intake and exhaust fans and heard almost no increase in noise. You have to get your ear quite close to hear them. Again, very comforting.
Lastly, I plugged the GPU fan back in and heard the most surprisingly loud whining fan noise. I should have guessed it from the start - this crappy little cooler fan that they use is terrible! I'm not sure if it's worse because mine is an Asus badged GPU but I suspect the Nvidia branded ones are the same.
I thought to myself - how on earth am I going to replace that little fan with something better.. But before I even tried searching for an upgrade it hit me that my gorgeous little Nanoxia exhaust fan was sat right next to the GPU card, on the same side as the GPU cooler. I wondered if it would be possible to build a simple duct stretching out from the fan intake to the GPU cooler so that the exhaust air is pulled around it before exiting the case.
All it took was some carefully placed pieces of duct (ha!) tape and I had built just that. It's difficult to describe exactly how I constructed the duct but it only took a little bit of creativity and skill. An important step though is to place a little piece of tape to connect one of the GPU fan blades to the cooler so that fan doesn't spin up with the air flowing over it.
I put the case back together once again - the little screws and chassis threads are now getting quite worn out! I powered up and started playing an interlaced H.264 HD file. I left it for a bit to see what happened to the GPU temperature and to my delight it didn't go above 50 degrees celcius. With less hungry files it was down to just 40 degrees!
To my even greater delight, I could now no longer hear any noise coming from my HTPC!!
I hope it stays that way.
