[MikeRD03]

I guess I am not the only one who likes to play some games here and there and wants a HTPC with XBMC on board. My problem here - noiseless/fanless and great gaming power is a contradiction. So in case someone in interested here is my personal answer to this problem:

Base is my two years old fanless Mini-ITX housing from HFX, the HFX micro. Although it is quite efficient getting rid of some heat, it turned out that it is not enough for a decent gaming CPU like the planed A10-6800 APU from AMD. In gaming mode, even undervoltaged, it still consumes about 100-120W power which is far too much for any passive cooling. So the plan was to build a very small HTPC with hybrid cooling! The result is noiseless/fanless unless heavy 3D power is requested from the APU.In this case a low profile cooler automatically kicks in and saves the APU from dieing the a heat death when gaming. In HTPC mode and most smaller PC games the system stays fanless and therefore noiseless.

here some pictures from my build:





in my case this save me buying a playstation 4 which relativists the higher price of the HTPC - the A10-6800 has enough gaming power even for recent game titles like crysis 3 in medium detail.

have fun,
Mike

[MediaPi]

LOVE IT thankyou for posting
For anybody interested the case looked like this before


Excellent craftmanship. can tell you took care to skill to align everything and the end result is beautiful. Wheres the pump? its not completly silent right? since the pump will give out noise or something.

I like this and would love to hear more haha

[MikeRD03]

Thanx, Media Pi. It is completely noiseless until it gets under heavy APU load for some time. There is no pump present - only the used CPU cooler has a 80mm fan which is hearable under heavy load, but off in HTPC mode with XMBC (temperature regulated)
It is really bad the HFX micro housing isn't sold any more. I still love its look even after two years! From mine there is only the pure housing left - internals are all DIY. ANd it has two USB 3.0 ports in front. The original only has one USB 2.0

[MediaPi]

Really really nice Mike. Your a man that takes care of his stuff!! can't believe it looks that good after the time you've had with it. must be a pleasure to use. Would be cool to post the specs of your beast of a machine

[Mandraxbmc]

Nice work there Mike. I only have one question , I could not see a ssd or any boot drive , USB maybe ?

[MikeRD03]

Yes, the specs of this machine are:
A10-6800 at 3,9GHz (undervolted@1,045V) , Turbo off, Samsung 840 SSD 120GB, Slim-line DVD-RW drive, 8GB memory @ 1866MHz, ASRock FM2A75M-ITX R2.0. Pico PCU, external 120W Notebook power supply, Northbridge with heatpipe passive cooled, APU passive cooled with four heatpipes, coils with heatspreader, RAM with heatspreader, integrated CPU cooler Scythe Kozuti, housing HFX micro (modified), ASRock CIR S5 wakup sensor with remote TSGP-IR01 / OS Win8.1 with XBMC Gotham (what else?)

So this answeres your question, too, Mandraxbmc. The DVD drive und SSD harddisk were not present when photographing the internals.