[mythtv-users] How hot is your system?

[Stephen Tait]

>
>I've got a 2.8Ghz P4 with Zalman flower cooler, Nvidia MX440, 1
>PVR-350, 1 PVR-250, a Nebula DigiTV, 2 HD's (80Gb + 120Gb) and an NEC
>DVDrw all in a Kanam Accent HTPC case.
>
>The CPU runs at about 48 degrees Celsius normally. It goes up to about
>55 when I start compiling stuff and I have seen it at over 60 when I
>tried to load it a bit for testing. I don't know what the case
>temperature is, but it never feels all that hot.
>
>Does this sound like a reasonable temperature for the CPU?  It seems
>happy enough and isn't unstable at all, but like I said, I've never
>built a PC before.

I don't have any temperature data other than sticking my hand down the back 
of the box and feeling how hot the air coming out is. Whilst the Zalman is 
very quiet, it's not the worlds most powerful cooler - I bought a so-so 
ThermalRight with a 60mm fan, and used an adapter to mount an 80mm fan on 
it. I then run this at 7V so that it pumps about the same amount of air as 
the 60 but is far quieter. The chip is an Athlon 2400 Thoroughbred B, other 
equipment includes a passively cooled GeForceFX MX400 or something, DVDROM 
(region free, natch ;^), an Audigy and the ubiquitous PVR-250. At the 
moment there's just an 80GB seagate in it, but I'm about to add a spare 120 
seagate I've got knocking around in an XFS LVM. As yet the system doesn't 
seem that hot, and is pretty quiet - the loudest component by far is the 
cheapo 400W PSU, which I'm eventually going to replace with an Antec 
TruPower which (for those unfortunate enough to have never used them) are 
very, very quiet and exceptionally stable and also come with handy "fan 
only" molex connectors which supply reduced voltage (which varies according 
to a temperature diode in the PSU itself).

Case is a purdy mATX CoolerMaster 610 which has just a 60mm fan at the back 
for exhaust. Air is drawn through two grilles in the side.

As an aside, are those Accent cases any good? I contemplated buying one, 
but here in the UK they're expensive (~£200 from kustompcs.co.uk, which 
incidentally have some quite good forums about quiet computers, although 
they're very windows-centric) and plumped for the cheaper (and IMO 
prettier) CoolerMaster.

As another aside, those of you with Zalmans will almost certainly want to 
get rid of the active HSF on the northbridge, if you have one. The fans on 
these things are very noisy and are typically the first things to die on 
their arses. With that 92mm blowing down onto practically the entire 
motherboard, you can replace the northbridge cooler with one of Zalmans 
excellent northbridge heatsinks without fear of it overheating.

Some of you might want to consider underclocking the system as well, esp if 
you're using PVR-250's or similar and don't need honkloads of CPU power 
(thanks to the evil but great nVidia drivers, MPEG decoding on this machine 
uses very little CPU) so that you end up with a much cooler chip. I 
considered doing it myself, but the Myth machine also acts as a distcc and 
dvdrip node, so I really want as much CPU power as possible. What would be 
*really* nice would be something a la SpeedStep [TM, R, C, etc] which 
automatically drops the clock as soon as your system drops below a certain 
load. IIRC the newer Athlon cores have something like this (Cool 'n' 
Quiet?), but if anyone has further info on this I'd be much obliged!

Just my 2p...