Streacom's FC10 and Nano150: Building a Fanless Ivy Bridge HTPC
by Ganesh T S on December 22, 2012 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- HTPC
- Fanless
- Ivy Bridge
Concluding Remarks
Building a passive system might be more challenging compared to assembling an actively cooled one. However, the satisfaction of seeing a PC up and running without making even the slightest noise has to be experienced to be appreciated. The assembly of the Streacom FC10 was made more challenging than necessary, thanks to the faulty user guides uploaded initially. However, Streacom has fixed the problem now, and they have also posted a system builders guide for customers of their fanless cases. If one were to nitpick, it would be the PCIe slot spacing (which may leave some users with no option but to do a case mod) and the fact that only pico-PSUs are supported. The chassis could have been designed to accommodate a full-sized PSU (some excellent relatively high power fanless options are available from Seasonic) given that the current version is sized to even accept ATX motherboards.
We have used the Streacom FC10 chassis and the Nano150 PSU to successfully build a completely silent HTPC. In the next part of the three-part series, we will look at the performance of the PC for general workloads (synthetic benchmarks) and also its suitability for HTPC purposes (including decoding and rendering benchmarks as well as network streaming performance).
Thank You!
Thanks to Streacom, Perfect Home Theater, Asus, G.Skill and Intel for providing us with the testbed components for our three-part HTPC series.
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Hardcore69 - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
I built myself an Antec ISK HTPC, then promptly replaced with a WD Live Gen 3 less than 3 months later, which plays back 99% of whatever else you need played back. No mess and no fuss. The reason companies barely focus on anything HTPC is that it is only for the hardest of the hardcore geeks and also completely unnecessary.Death666Angel - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
So, your WD Live Gen 3 plays games as well? Great, hit me a link and I'll buy one!Gigaplex - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
You want a media player that does games too? Try a console like a PS3.Sivar - Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - link
PS3s and X-Boxes are nearly useless as media players because they don't play MKV files.The formats the consoles do play do not support subtitles so those subtitles need to be stored as a completely separate file, kept in the same folder as the video file, and make a bit of a mess. Lack of MKV support is an instant cross-off when even $40 Android-based media players support it.
Cardio - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
Even with the discount from the MSRP of $430. If you add some necessary add-on's the price is $511.50 + shipping. That is really absurd as far as I am concerned. The size is also just too large for somethiing you intended to use as an mini ITX HTPC or even a mATX. What is the attraction here? Silent is just not that hard to achieve. Cooling doesn't have to be passive either. Have made a number of HTPC's that are inaudable and run much cooler that this thing.ganeshts - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
It is all a matter of perspective and styling. What is silent to me and you needn't be silent to someone with very sensitive ears. The size of the FC10 is no different from any other A/V component in the rack (say, an AV receiver)colonelciller - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
I agree completely on the case size... there is a new case in the pipeline from Streacom that is way smaller while still being passively cooled. I'm waiting on that one :)Aikouka - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
Streacom already has a smaller and silent case called the FC8 Evo. I know because I own one! ;)bse8128 - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
Could you please add a version of the image with temperature in Celsius which at least 90% of the world population uses? Thanks!ganeshts - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
Sure, will do that in the second part of the series.