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Absolute Silence - Server Build & Turemetal UP10 Case Review

F1308

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Hmmm... same cost as an nvme SSD but with transfer speeds of a 10-year old HDD? Not sure about that... but it would be great for a video camera!

U3, A2....4K @60Hz in your pocket !!!!
 

pierre

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View attachment 90606

The Turemetal UP10 is not a cheap case by any means (it runs between $700-$1000 depending on options, shipped to US). It is also not a quick solution, with my lead time being about 7 weeks - including discussions with Mical Wong about configuration, etc. It's also about the farthest thing from lightweight... about 25lbs (before adding any hardware). This is definitely not a "my first build" kind of chassis... but it is very well made, and an amazing performer as well. As a bit of a bonus, he often live streams his assembly of cases, and notified me of when the marathon run which included my case would be up on YouTube.

The case looks great for my use case (core i9 9900 that can run at 135w for a long time). I will order one if it can fit my motherboard. My issues so far with passive cooling are summer time: indoor temp goes to 30+ celsius and then temp control in the case doesn't work that well.

I don't understand why PC case makers are not working harder on improving cooling. I see server at work with 2 large processors (500W) being cooled by small fans (ok noisy and fast) but the difference is mostly in air flow propagation.

They build a tunnel with a V shape with a fan or two at the low part of the V, the processor is just after that, hot air then go out of the case. This is extremely efficient. They could also make cases with large fans, optimise airflow (we still have the cables in the box, fans blowing through disks pushing hot air inside over the proc etc ...).

Water cooling helps a bit but only a bit (noise wise), when my GPU start to compute then noise skyrocket.

The Turemetal gives me hope (with possibly 1 or 2 fans inside for hot days).
 

Stephen

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I have been building my own systems for 30 years, and my experience is: when it gets hot, active cooling is the only solution. During hot summer season, passive cooling systems get too hot to be safe. Today fans like the Noctua line up are so effective, that the balance quietness/heat leans toward ultra quiet semi-passives fans with a variable speed. And I Add a small heatsink to every sensitive/heating part of the system.
 
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sharpty

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@Stephen Noctua now makes a 200mm 800RPM fan :D You just need a case the size of a refrigerator for it to be useful. (or a mini-ITX cube chassis)

I've always wanted to do a custom water loop but use a (mostly) silent external pump and a performance all-aluminum car radiator. I would think that you could get away with no fans and just rely on convection currents. Zalman made a passive external radiator back in the day, pretty radical design, but i think it's slick.

1604321785929.png
 

Robbo99999

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I'm also a bit of a PC enthusiast, and I'm a fan of quiet but powerful air cooled systems, but a powerful system like this passive one (well CPU, not so much the GPU) is the pinnacle of low noise & low fuss. Yeah, so that's a nice build, I'm not sure how it would fair with an RTX 3080 attached to it!? It would need to deal with the heat of a 340W GPU to cool the RTX 3080.
 

Timbo2

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Thanks for sharing! I also enjoyed seeing Domo-kun.

In the old days pure passive rigs always risked motherboard component failures. I'll be curious how you make out long term. I've built one purely passive rig when it was much less common. I wasn't happy with temps and have had a low speed fan blowing across the whole heatsink case. You can't hear it. The good news for me is that <knock wood> it's been running now as my HTPC for about 6 years now.
 

Worth Davis

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Awesome review! I have been building silent rigs since the Antec tower came out that silentpcreview had a hand in - SSD have certainly helped the overall cause and complexity of builds. I have been using a laptop for Roon server, but you might have pushed me into making a dedicated silent PC instead.
 

Docevil

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This isn't really a fully passively cooled build though. I've considered the Corsair SF line and can tell you the Corsair sf450 power supply has a 92mm fan that automatically turns on at 90 watts power draw. Anandtech reviewed it and the fan turned on when it got to a temperature of 33 degrees C, Tom's hardware showed the fan starting at a 40 Watt draw with temps being between 36 to 45 degrees C. The TDP is 100w for your GPU and 65w for your CPU so even under medium loads you will hit 90w usage just on the CPU/GPU load alone and the fan will likely start even on low loads based on internal temperatures.

Edit: Not trying to be negative or put down your build which is wonderful, just letting you know, there is still a fan in there and it is likely running a lot more than you realize.
 

Docevil

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@sharpty That graphic was for ambient temperatures between 28-30 degrees though and at a distance of 1 meter which may or may not be farther away than you sit, my tower is more like a half meter away from me for example. Op said his cooling fins were 45 degrees under heavy load, it'll be even warmer than that inside the case. The graph above this graphic shows sound output at ambient temps of 36-45 degrees which are probably more typical in normal usage and above 45 degrees internally under heavy load if the fins are 45 degrees... 165w TDP for just the CPU and GPU tells me the whole system probably draws somewhere in the range of 200-250w under heavy load and that would put it in the 28-32db range at 1 meter. Op also described hearing a "coil whine" under heavy load which might have actually been the fan. Again, not being negative, really like the build, has a very cool aesthetic/high end look and is likely very quiet but the op seemed more concerned about dust and cat hair than sound so just pointing out that there is still a fan in there that is likely running at least some of the time and that this is still a concern.

JexfEahZ9HEVmjKheEMsm8-970-80.jpg


Edit: fixed spelling mistake
 
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JohnBooty

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but more importantly it's also a dust magnet which requires regular cleaning and lengthy annual maintenance on the loop.
FWIW, for anybody considering dipping their toes into liquid cooling, it doesn't necessarily have to involve maintenance and extra effort depending on use case.

I have a Corsair H50 all in one liquid cooler (approx $50) and it's closed loop, totally maintenance free so far for a couple years. Runs cool and have a nice overclock going on my gaming PC with zero effort. Probably my favorite PC purchase of all time. Reviews of this unit say it is "only" as effective as a good air cooler. Considering the price is comparable to a good air cooler, I considered that a huge win... same price, same cooling, but I get to delete a noisy fan from my PC? No-brainer IMO.

One caveat is that these all-in-one closed loop solutions probably have a lifespan and I'm not sure how suitable they would be for a server running 24/7.

For me, my gaming PC is (unfortunately) only running a few hours per week so it was not a concern.
A thing of the past !!!!
1 TB micro SD cards are around 250 US$...
Even better, perhaps (depending on use case) 2TB USB-C SSDs from Samsung are regularly hitting $250 and under recently on Amazon. I have really been impressed with mine. I am getting close to 450MB/sec transfer speeds on my 2015 Macbook w/ USB3. I think that represents a saturation of USB3 and they might go a bit faster on USB-C, not sure.

https://www.amazon.com/deal/9531335c?showVariations=true
 

F1308

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FWIW, for anybody considering dipping their toes into liquid cooling, it doesn't necessarily have to involve maintenance and extra effort depending on use case.

I have a Corsair H50 all in one liquid cooler (approx $50) and it's closed loop, totally maintenance free so far for a couple years. Runs cool and have a nice overclock going on my gaming PC with zero effort. Probably my favorite PC purchase of all time. Reviews of this unit say it is "only" as effective as a good air cooler. Considering the price is comparable to a good air cooler, I considered that a huge win... same price, same cooling, but I get to delete a noisy fan from my PC? No-brainer IMO.

One caveat is that these all-in-one closed loop solutions probably have a lifespan and I'm not sure how suitable they would be for a server running 24/7.

For me, my gaming PC is (unfortunately) only running a few hours per week so it was not a concern.

Even better, perhaps (depending on use case) 2TB USB-C SSDs from Samsung are regularly hitting $250 and under recently on Amazon. I have really been impressed with mine. I am getting close to 450MB/sec transfer speeds on my 2015 Macbook w/ USB3. I think that represents a saturation of USB3 and they might go a bit faster on USB-C, not sure.

https://www.amazon.com/deal/9531335c?showVariations=true


But my phone accepts up to 2 TB micro SD (on the making), so no latitude given to those bricks...Also, many phones will offer 1TB internally soon. Add 2 TB via SD card and...end of game. (And an unlimited 5g or 6g data connection....)
 
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Stephen

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@Stephen Noctua now makes a 200mm 800RPM fan :D You just need a case the size of a refrigerator for it to be useful. (or a mini-ITX cube chassis)

I've always wanted to do a custom water loop but use a (mostly) silent external pump and a performance all-aluminum car radiator. I would think that you could get away with no fans and just rely on convection currents. Zalman made a passive external radiator back in the day, pretty radical design, but i think it's slick.

View attachment 90903
@Stephen Noctua now makes a 200mm 800RPM fan :D You just need a case the size of a refrigerator for it to be useful. (or a mini-ITX cube chassis)

I've always wanted to do a custom water loop but use a (mostly) silent external pump and a performance all-aluminum car radiator. I would think that you could get away with no fans and just rely on convection currents. Zalman made a passive external radiator back in the day, pretty radical design, but i think it's slick.

View attachment 90903
If you have space... :) But channeling wisely airflow using good fans is more than enough for me, I manage to get less noise than my office room at night (22db) at 50cm.
 

Sal1950

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2 TB Micro SD :eek: Who would have thunk it 10 years ago. LOL
 

XeCutor

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Interesting write up. Completely silent PC's are amazing, I have a quiet workstation but I wouldn't trade that for my silent PC for media use. My primary music source is a HTPC that's not entirely unlike this one, but the chassis is much much older. I've updated the whole internals a couple of times and have had 2 passive PSU's fail under warranty, third one still going strong. How much older you wonder? Well, look at these official pictures with included SCART connector and even an optional slot for a floppy (or any external 3.5" bay) on the rear. https://www.quietpc.com/hfx-classic-case
 
OP
digicidal

digicidal

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This isn't really a fully passively cooled build though. I've considered the Corsair SF line and can tell you the Corsair sf450 power supply has a 92mm fan that automatically turns on at 90 watts power draw. Anandtech reviewed it and the fan turned on when it got to a temperature of 33 degrees C, Tom's hardware showed the fan starting at a 40 Watt draw with temps being between 36 to 45 degrees C. The TDP is 100w for your GPU and 65w for your CPU so even under medium loads you will hit 90w usage just on the CPU/GPU load alone and the fan will likely start even on low loads based on internal temperatures.

Edit: Not trying to be negative or put down your build which is wonderful, just letting you know, there is still a fan in there and it is likely running a lot more than you realize.

That is true and was actually an intentional selection. It is off most of the time actually because of the lag on normal operation loads - I have not seen it turn on nearly that early however regardless. In my experience it was inaudible in every situation, and in the worst was a light "whoosh" similar to the GT's and Noctua fans provide. If one of my workstations was on at the same time I couldn't hear it even with my head against the case... so I taped a piece of paper over the exhaust side to observe when it came on.

Part of the reason I oriented the PSU "upside down" was that any situation in which it would come on would require full loading of the CPU or a medium load of both CPU and GPU. In these cases, the stagnant air in the enclosure would also likely begin to affect saturated sinks on the VRM, PCH, RAM, and SSD - so despite not being the best for the PSU... I set it to pull that hot air off the board to assist pulling in fresher air. I originally planned on going with a Silverstone NJ450 PSU for a fully passive build... but then the PSU is also radiating heat down into the already hot airspace. I figured that had a chance (slim but present) of pushing things far enough that I would be forced to add a fan to circulate the body airspace... which would do much more drawing in and depositing of dust/hair than an upside down 92mm fan which is quiet and thermally controlled by hardware.

In my use case I will never load the GPU at all. The original plan was to pass it to the roon VM for rendering improvements if I used it locally for some reason. Unfortunately this was flawed... as apparently Nvidia only wants to allow "workstation" class GPUs to be passed properly as IOMMU devices. I'm investigating vbios hacks that may mitigate this, but as it is... I'm just going to run it as the display for ESXi... so 0% utilization (but at least turning off the IGP will free up 100% of system RAM for VM usage and reduce CPU draw slightly as well).

In normal operations - 4-6VMs (2 Win, 2nix) running SQL, www, infrastructure, roon as well as a dummy workstation desktop or two - it's pulling between 49W and 83W from the wall. Due to the efficiency of the PSU it's reasonable to estimate 46W-78W as the actual consumption of the components themselves. The PSU fan hasn't come on at all in the time I've been monitoring it. So yes, you are correct that it's possible that a small amount of dust & hair could wind up in the PSU eventually... in my experience the PSU is often fairly clean even in a system with every other fan completely caked with dust.
 
OP
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I replaced all of my user's workstations with NUCs in Akasa cases about 5 years ago to great success. They're still all running great and no issues whatsoever - but they're definitely lower spec NUCs than the NUC10i7FNH used in that one. They make cases for almost every generation and model NUC. They also have an ITX case which is similar to the HDPlex offerings coming out soon.
 
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