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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sheh - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
I think most of the visitors here are US-based. Though yes, C would be better. :)Jaaap - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
On the Thermal Performance page, at the rop you say:... because it is quite common for improperly designed thermal solutions to *not* prevent processors from reaching their maximum permissible junction temperature.
not prevent?
sheh - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
AKA, let CPUs overheat and start throttling.sheh - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
...the woes of double negative. :)ganeshts - Saturday, December 22, 2012 - link
Yes, it conveys that bad thermal solutions allow the processor to reach Tjmax. Throttling results and there is a loss in performance.mobutu - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
I hope you'll do a full stress test on the CPU and GPU simultaneous because it is not enough if the 150W picoPSU holds this setup only on idle and low-stress.Also please find out from Streacom when the 180W and particularly the 250W will be available for purchase.
Interested in a i5/i7 + 7770 setup powered by that internal 250W max PSU.
Thanks for the review!
Subyman - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
I was interested until I saw the price. I know people will pay a premium for silence, but $430 seems somewhat excessive.agentsmithitaly - Sunday, December 23, 2012 - link
I know it has been already already debated, but measurement units are quite inconsistent in Anandtech's articles.Sometimes they report both Celsius and Fahrenheit for temperatures, as well as inches and millimeters for length measurements, in this case we see only metric units for the case weight, dimensions, celsius degrees for the ambient temperature, and only imperial units for case temperatures.
Is it possible to have International system of units on all articles? Not only for the international visitors I'm sure Anandtech has, but also because this is technology website, which I think it could be considered as science. And scientists use metrical units, including NASA ones. You remember what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter, right?
Apart this, keep up the good work guys!
Landiepete - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
I have a FC8 Evo case waiting for a build, and I'm going to try and build a HTPC with an AMD A10 on a mini-itx board. The A10-5700 has a 65W TDP AND 7660D graphics on board, and performane should be quite sufficient for HTPC. In a pinch I could try the 5800, but the 100W TDP might be just OTT;Incidentally, streacom does a nice infrared remote kit to go with their cases.
cerietke - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
I don't know about the FC8, but for my FC5 the mini-ITX options available would not work due to something being in the way of the heatpipes (if you haven't you may want to check on that). Streacom told me they tried 95 W TDP processors for the FC5, but can only recommend them in areas with considerable airflow. My A10-5700 is already getting near 80 C, though so far I haven't been able to confirm or deny whether the case is to blame.