[mythtv-users] Successful Myth Install - 2 Questions
Dewey Smolka
dsmolka at gmail.com
Thu Oct 5 03:36:12 UTC 2006
>
> Thanks for the reply. I was curious myself if I could just disable the
> rear fans as well. The video card and PSU are fanless so presumably
> would be fine. The only other thing generating heat is the CPU (Pentium
> D805) which has an enormous heatsink/fan combo.
>
> Do you have any experience with any fan controllers? I thought I might
> buy one of those and enable all the fans but at significantly lower
> speeds. Most of the reviews I read for various models seem to imply that
> they are only able to throttle the fans down a limited amount, which
> seems kind of silly to me.
>
> I hope I don't have to abandon the case. It's very pretty and don't
> think I'll get a refund!
You need to be very careful about temperature. Yes, capture cards and
video cards can be passively cooled but you still need to get the heat
they generate out of the box. HDDs generate a lot of heat, and if
there's no airflow the disc will fail rather quickly. Same with the
CPU heatsink/fan assembley -- it needs to be moving cooler air or the
CPU will overheat leading to underclocking, random reboots, and
ultimately catastrophic failure.
Fan speed is generally controlled by BIOS through on-board temperature
sensors. I haven't really looked at 60mm fans, but I have an 80mm
Antec fan with a manual speed switch on it -- it's the only fan other
than PSU and CPU that's in my system (mid-tower with PVR, video card,
and 3 HDDs) and keeps the system cool enough while running at low
speed. There may be similar models in 60mm.
Either way, you'll want to carefully monitor system temperatures as
you're trying to set this up. I can't remember the name offhand, but
there's a nifty little gnome applet for monitoring CPU and MB
temperature data, and hddtemp works great for monitoring disc
temperatures.
If you can keep your system within tolerance limits while under a full
load and fans at a low and quiet speed, then go for it. But if you go
too far sacrificing adequate temperature control for quiet operation,
you can expect some serious HW problems.
Good luck
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