Building a fanless PC is now realistic. But it still ain't cheap When it comes to PC performance the elephant in the room is heat generation. Generally, the cooler a CPU or GPU can be kept the faster it will run, hence mega-overclocked systems running liquid nitrogen cooling systems and producing mind-numbingly high benchmark scores and more clouds than your average Pink Floyd concert. For …
I recently got myself a Raspberry Pi to play with. Apparently, it runs Ubuntu and has everything your non-tecchie friends want out of a desktop PC - Chrome web browser and email.
There are no fans. The box is less than A7 and 2.5cm and the reason it stays cool? It runs off a standard (ie non iPhone) mobile phone charger..
I can't see it replacing my PC thoiugh. I wonder if it runs the GIMP?
"I recently got myself a Raspberry Pi to play with. "
So did I. I'd resisted for quite a while due to time constraints but I order a kit on Monday, it arrived on Wed. and was running an hour later. Today (Fri.) I have it running vncviewer via ssh and I'm impressed. I have a test spreadsheet for LibreOffice calc that recalculates 400000 sines. On my laptop (4-core i7 ) it takes <1 sec - on the pi ~5 secs. I'm still setting it up but wifi was easy, jut need to set it up the way I like and install more sw. I spent ~£65 on the kit but that included SD card, keyboard, mouse, power supply, HDMI and ethernet cables and USB wifi.
Try compiling vlc.
Once you are back from holiday it may be finished.
While a razzie is a very snazzy IoT and automation platform it really does not get anywhere near what you would need for a proper desktop. If you want a fanless non-x86 you are much better off with the Imagination Tech stuff or some of the higher spec SoC of dubious provenance originating from China.
"t really does not get anywhere near what you would need for a proper desktop."
It looks like a proper desktop to me. I've got a web browser, image viewer, full LibreOffice, compilers, VLC, etc - the test spreadsheet suggests the performance is not too shabby but I'll know more in few weeks esp. when I've installed more demanding software. I'd not expect a 4-core 900 MHz ARM with 1GB of memory and an 8GB SD card to be too spritly but I'm really rather suprised. No, I'm not going to render HD video or even process too many RAW photo files but I will be testing it - and no I'm not going to be compiling vlc ( but I don't need to) but I will be compiling a lot of my own C programs so I'll have a reasonably comparison.
"but I will be compiling a lot of my own C programs"
Just compiled a little C client program (~75 lines) that opens a socket & queries a set of sensors on a PIC microcontroller controlled by a server on my network . Apart from altering the server name to an ip address as the pi doesn't yet have that in hosts the program compiled and ran perfectly
>How about a really noisy computer in another room, and a decent HDMI & USB KVM Extender...
That's how a lot of music studios do it. You can make the computer as quiet as you want but unless it's completely silent it's no use. Of course, the age of the SSD has made this less vital as often it was the HDD that was making the noise.
I built a PC recently, in a media centre case. Space is limited so I had to stick with fans and the largest CPU cooler I could get in. It's silent for most things, and I set it to spin the fans up when it gets too hot, usually when I'm playing games and have the headphones on anyway. One SSD and 3 HDDs which store infrequently accessed data and spin down when not in use.
I've got a few Raspberry Pis, one of which stays on all the time. It's in the loft though so it doesn't matter. I might see if I can get steam on it, with streaming from the Windows PC (with the games). Steam works fine streaming to my laptop's crappy display.
Does it even run on Arm?
Pretty much what I have apart from the KVM extender, I use an rf mini KB and touchpad and an rf remote for media stuff. The HTPC is a venerable, 10 years old, Q6600 with 4GB RAM and a 16TB media tank attached via USB 3.0, housed in the basement and hooked up to my living room 52" plasma with a long VGA/audio cable. One of the HDMI channels on the TV is hooked to my gaming PC, (hex core, 16GB RAM, GTX 750 Ti, and rf full KB and mouse), which sits next to the HTPC in the basement.
"How about a really noisy computer in another room, and a decent HDMI & USB KVM Extender..."
The idea is not new.
Here's a writeup from from September 2000: Building diskless X terminals with Linux
Footnote: I first learned of the company concerned via The Register. If I remember correctly they did a rewrite of the El Reg website in that era,
and the really noisy computer in another room, using ooodles of power could be put somewhere that needs heating.
Hey why not go the whole hog, a power hungry super 'puter in every room, warming an entire building up. Computer fan heaters everywhere !
For anyone not likely the sound of Concorde taking off, well some foam ear plugs along with ear defenders could help.
I guess take this too far, and a 3 phase supply from the local "leccy" company ( do we say "board" these days ? ) would probably be required.
I guess the only downside that is that the summer anyone doing this would need a fair amount of air conditioning, or maybe they could turn the computer-fan-heaters off.
But just think about the MIPS !
I did this in my flat, my girlfriend was complaining about the noise of the PC in the living room when she's watching her soaps and I'm gaming. So I drilled a 1inch wide hole through the wall into the cupboard, installed some vents on the door and left the PC in there. I even had a remote power switch connected.
Worked REALLY well until I went to upgrade my GPU and after hauling all of the brushes, vacuum cleaners and random bits and bobs out of the cupboard I realised that it was now under a thick layer of dust and squeeling like a pig from the heat.
I recently got myself a Raspberry Pi to play with. Apparently, it runs Ubuntu and has everything your non-tecchie friends want out of a desktop PC - Chrome web browser and email.
For the same money or less than a Pi you can pick up a silent thin client system, with case, power supply and storage as part of the deal. PC based and all you need to is hook up monitor, keyboard and mouse. Used of course, but those things tend not to break. Overall performance is broadly equivalent to a Pi depending on exactly what you get and that's been possible for years.
The article instead discusses general purpose workstations as a new development. How powerful you can go is ever increasing but it isn't entirely new. The system I'm typing this on is getting on for 18 months old and while it isn't ultra powerful - 8GB, J1900 quad core, 240 GB SSD - it certainly isn't too shabby for anything but gaming. Completely silent apart from when the optical drive is in use. And no, that didn't really cost a premium - £300 or thereabouts, of which £70 or so was that ridiculously expensive "do everything" optical drive.
Sorry, but I built a Streacom system with an i7 chip and 2 2.5" SSD drives w 16GB of memory over a year ago. Its been running quiet ever since.
Yes you can run a totally quiet PC. The only drawback is that you're using a laptop's power supply sitting outside of the case. (Although there's enough room and internal fitting power supplies that will work today.)
Of course, I'm running Linux on it so I don't know how it would work as a game machine. But for a DNS server, Email Server and even a web server for a SOHO... it works. I did this because my servers sit next to my desk and I was going deaf. Can't decide if it was my wife's nagging or all of the loud server fans from the 2U rack machines... :-)
Mine was totally fanless for a while - a Zalman reserator (basically, a big fanless external radiator tower) cooled the CPU, NB and GPU. It was a superb bit of kit. I had the drives in aluminium accoustic caddies and it was pretty eerie hearing only a beep at POST. QuietPC must have had a small fortune out of me ;-)
http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1084051489.jpg
Only sold it because the toddler was far too attracted to those lovely blue (and easy to reach) water pipes.
an old AMD system I had was fanless for a very short while
It actually killed the CPU? Or do you mean without any heatsink at all?
I got called in once to a system that "kept crashing". Took the lid off, spotted the fan not turning, unwisely touched the heatsink and my finger sizzled.
It worked OK until the heatsink got some way above boiling point. At which point the CPU went off the rails and the system wedged. Which gave it a chance to cool down so it worked again until the user next made the CPU try to do some real work. (Booting was/is hard-disk limited, the CPU idles most of the time waiting for seeks to complete).
Thumbs up for the Quiet PC namecheck - great bunch, only 20 minutes from here. One of the few component suppliers who recognise that if they send you a duff part, they need to sent you a replacement promptly rather than waiting until you return the faulty one.
In my case, it was more urgent (I work from home), so just drove over to see them. Had a good chat about all things PC - very evangelical folk up there near Malton.
Although you CAN build an entirely fanless PC, if your primary objective is a QUIET PC it can be a good idea to have a sensible case with a low-RPM 120mm or 140mm fan to generate some moderate airflow, as these can be basically silent while still providing some air flow (noctua fans are usually a good choice on this front). The fractal design cases are excellent for these kinds of purposes; the case doors have layers of bitumen padding attached for sound dampening.
On a similar vein, some decent high-end PSUs while not fanless, have quiet modes where they will only switch on the fan when needed. Seasonic produce both varieties (fanless and hybrid silent fan control) and are excellent units.
for mentioning the Fractal Design cases. They really help make a quiet PC.
I have an 8 core (16 threads) i7/64Gb Ram + 4Tb of SSD inside one of their cases under my desk.
My laptop makes more noise than this beast.
The above tower is running 8 VM's at the moment, including one Oracle DB and two different SQLServer DB servers.
I agree. I built my HTPC in an Antec HTPC case, with a Scythe Shuriken cooler on the CPU, a BeQuiet PSU (does what it says on the tin), and the two 120mm variable-speed fans that came with the case set to the lowest speed. You really have to practically rest your ear on it to hear it. And given that it's on 24/7, I'd rather have it very quiet and cool, rather than absolutely silent with possible hotspots that you can get in a fanless build.
We've had fanless, silent, x86-architecture PCs for at least a decade now if you were willing to pay a premium and accept lesser performance. The premium has slowly dropped away and the increasing focus in datacenters with flops per watt means that the performance hit is probably less, too. (*) Realistically though, you will still pay more and get less.
Against that, it is probably now true that for many domestic workloads (like, kitchen PC or lounge media centre) performance is no longer an issue and if you live in an otherwise silent house (so, probably no kids then) the difference between "honest, you'll never notice the fan" and "no fan" is quite significant. I am a little surprised that the concept isn't more mainstream.
(* Free plug from satisfied customer: http://www.tinygreenpc.com/.)
Had to get rid of the full tower case I had that had a Q6600 in it, not really looking for much more grunt than that as 99% of the time it would be used as a media pc more than anything, so Im looking at one of the fanless chinese import i5-5200u based mini systems ... about 300-350 should get me one of those with 16gb memory and an ssd in- should be more than capable of the odd time working with vis studio and sql server, and if I need large storage then I go to cheap external spinny disk when needed only
We use various models of Shuttles at work, most of which end up in a mess of wires underneath a till in a shop somewhere. Not having any fans means not having to replace the whole computer after the fan inevitably smothers itself in dust and dies.
Of course, we stick cheap SSDs in them as well now, they produce less heat, but can still cope with high temps better than a harddrive can. The speed up on a Atom or Celeron powered system is nice but not essential.
A few years ago now, I put together a totally fanless system - a BUC-666 case (a close cousin of the CS-80 mentioned), a CR-95 cooler, SSDs, an Nvidia Quadro NVS 450 and a fanless PSU.
It has a four-core i5 (2.9GHz 3570T) and the CPU never goes over 50C.
The peace and quiet was a revelation. I find it so much easier to concentrate without the whirring. When I run a backup to a 2.5" external hard disk, the noise of the disk is the loudest thing in the room.
The downsides are that the graphics card, which was picked for its quad-monitor support, is no good for playing any game more demanding than Solitaire, and the big heatsink sits over the memory slots on the motherboard to such an extent that two of the four DIMMs can't be removed with the heatsink in place.
For me, those are very minor issues, and a price well worth paying for the resulting silence.
" I have a couple here and love them for what they do, but while they're reasonably unobtrusive, fanless they ain't."
Agree wholeheartedly but if you can put them in another room that problem can be alleviated.
Although mine is distinctly louder than my Macs, the same is not true under heavy load. The Macs are a lot louder when their fans kick in.
But the Microserver can run at 100% utilisation of both cores for hours on end without the fans revving up any further.
"...now realistic..."
CPU/GPU performance per watt improvement is a steady trend, any demarcation point is obviously arbitrary. People have been doing fanless PCs for years already, while others will insist that they will need PCs with several fans for the foreseeable future.
So I take issue with the word 'now'. It implies that this demarcation point (26 Feb 2016) is somehow silently assumed to be superior, or somehow more appropriate, to anyone else's demarcation point (past or future).
It's arbitrary.
... a friend reused an old chimney: all the noisy hot bits went in the chimney and all the sockets were extended to the living room: one custom wall plate with and video out (VGA it was that long ago) several USB sockets supporting mouse, keyboard, media readers. He did want to have a small "status panel" lcd but SWIMBO demurred. Looked bloody good though, and you could not hear the gubbins on the other side of the wall at all.
I've often wondered if one could create a single big fat cable (bundle) to carry, say 2 x USB3, 4 x USB2, 2 x 1Gb/s Ethernet, 2 x HDMI and just run it down from, say, the attic in a single piece of trunking. Is it even physically possible?
".....and just run it down from, say, the attic....." A smug friend of mine has his PC in a rack (along with assorted servers and storage) in a closet, and the cables run through the wall to his desk. A fan and vent through the external wall to exhaust hot air out of the closet, some foam foam lining on the closet walls as sound insulation, and two of those wall plates with the bristles to run the cables through. A bit limiting on where he can have his desk but otherwise wonderfully silent.
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