Has anyone tried passively cooling any of the more recent Pentium/i3's? This is for an HTPC. I'll have a 200mm fan pulling fresh air in and I was wondering if I could get away with sticking something like a CM Hyper TX3 EVO, without the fan, on a Pentium 4560.
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Passive cooling
- Thread starter benjii
- Start date
Well the old thermalright ultra 120 could back in the day.
I remember reading a review where it it got rated quite low as it didn't come with a fan, even though it's a good cooler, the manufacturers expected you'd choose your own fan, but it did ok fanless regardless.
Might be a bit too big for an htpc though!
If you have bios options for it, a good pwm fan cooler, on a lazy fan profile will still be pretty damn quiet. Especially if it's a media centre rather than a gaming machine.
For example the pc in my Sig is barely audiable, running a coolermaster hyper 212 evo pwm, and a single 120 mm pwm exhaust, an arctic cooling something or other.
I remember reading a review where it it got rated quite low as it didn't come with a fan, even though it's a good cooler, the manufacturers expected you'd choose your own fan, but it did ok fanless regardless.
Might be a bit too big for an htpc though!
If you have bios options for it, a good pwm fan cooler, on a lazy fan profile will still be pretty damn quiet. Especially if it's a media centre rather than a gaming machine.
For example the pc in my Sig is barely audiable, running a coolermaster hyper 212 evo pwm, and a single 120 mm pwm exhaust, an arctic cooling something or other.
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A fave subject of mine! I have used a passive heatsink just the cheap artic one on an i3 4370 and a host of AMD AM1 socket cpus.
I have also used a cheap heatsink with a fan and undervolted the fan using voltage reducers to make it completely silent.
I have also used a cheap heatsink with a fan and undervolted the fan using voltage reducers to make it completely silent.
Soldato
- Joined
- 6 Sep 2016
- Posts
- 11,660
I run my HTPC CPU passively with large heatsink tower (forgot what it's called) I just have a single Noctua 12cm case fan. Not a modern CPU, Socket AM2
I'll do a worst case scenario test and run realbench on it, just to be sure. Now I just need to find the right heatsink! Ideally I want to spend around £20 on the heatsink. I was going to get the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro, however there's the Antec A40 which has 1 extra heatpipe. Although I'm not sure how much difference that makes on roughly the same fin surface area.
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Don't forget to undervolt also, everything undervolts chipset, CPU and memory.
It depends how stable your PSU is but you can go very low, DDR3 at 1.3v, CPU under 1v at load, 20% off chipset voltage if not overclocking.
You can measure real difference in how much heat/fan noise you can reduce from a system, for example you can take 10 degrees of a CPU peak temp, 5 degrees of a chipset temp, if done correct the computer will remain totally stable.
It depends how stable your PSU is but you can go very low, DDR3 at 1.3v, CPU under 1v at load, 20% off chipset voltage if not overclocking.
You can measure real difference in how much heat/fan noise you can reduce from a system, for example you can take 10 degrees of a CPU peak temp, 5 degrees of a chipset temp, if done correct the computer will remain totally stable.
Never owned a H110 chipset but expect so, every gigabyte motherboard i've owned in last 10 years has full voltage control.
It'll be in a small cabinet with a small hole at the back, with only a 200mm fan pulling at the front, I may well need to undervolt the CPU. Time will tell, I'll post an update here when all the stuff arrives this week, for future reference.
Yes but it all helps, you can normally take at least 10% power usage of any intel CPU if running stock, more if the PSU is putting out good regulation.
You can also reduce chipset voltage to get system temps down.
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I realise that but a pentium or i3 is so low power draw it's not going to be necessary and even a 200mm fan op is 'huge' cooling I've run them on much much less.
