2014-05-11, 13:31
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
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