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Are you a FAN boy? Fan-less vs. forced air music server / transport (passive vs. active cooling)
- Thread starter benanders
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benanders
Senior Member
- Thread Starter
- #23
Interesting - one of my computers is a Nuc that sits right on the desktop less than a meter from my ears; I don’t use speakers there, and when I have headphones on (not open-style) I’ve no way to tell if the noisy little fan is engaged. Guess it’s always relative, eh?
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benanders
Senior Member
- Thread Starter
- #24
Assuming that enclosure is plastic? I heard a couple months back there are now consumer 3D printers that’ll render with metal thread - if that takes off, exotic passive cases may no longer just be for those who have a CNC machine and software + accompanying skillset, or those who will pay others for those assets.
Edit: typo correction
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benanders
Senior Member
- Thread Starter
- #25
Fans > 120mm = better for max dB specs, and also generally avg dB level (doesn’t mean 120mm is bad…).
Water coolers IMO, nifty tech that introduce many otherwise-absent [potential] Achilles heels to a system. For a purely music storage/playback system, liquid cooling would be for show. Nothing wrong with that, nothing functionally beneficial to it, either.
I like the bigger fans because they lower the noise floor frequency.
If anything else happens with this 280mm cooler that I have I'm going to a air cooler with a 140mm or two on it. No more water cooling for me.
Yes. Current budget printers can do ABS, that is already good enough for most electronics enclosures that don't release much heat. But you need to work at quite high temperature, an enclosure for the printer, it releases toxic gases (= you can't just do it at home...). And I wouldn't use it for, for instance, amplifiers, even with fans.
The problem of thermoplastics is intrinsic: to resist a Temperature of X, you need something with a Tg > X, and the melting point will always be way higher than the Tg, so you will need to print at very high temperatures, with all the problems this brigs. The workarounds of post curing or crystallization ruin the dimensional stability... we are trapped until someone comes with something new.
Composite heat sinks already exist, will we have something (composite or pure metal) 3D printable in domestic printers any time soon? I don't know, but it would be "cool"
Last time I upgraded my workstation I moved the old one into a storage room. It´s running my Roon server among other things.
It has a powerful GPU as it´s also used for 3D rendering duties so it´s pretty noisy under full load. All my endpoints are using Raspberry Pi´s with passive cooling.
Modern PC:s are pretty tricky to get totally silent in my experience with coil whine from PSU etc even if you don´t have any fans.
It has a powerful GPU as it´s also used for 3D rendering duties so it´s pretty noisy under full load. All my endpoints are using Raspberry Pi´s with passive cooling.
Modern PC:s are pretty tricky to get totally silent in my experience with coil whine from PSU etc even if you don´t have any fans.
digitalfrost
Major Contributor
I don't run a music server, but I've been using PCs and similar appliances for a long time. I just want to say one thing: A little bit of airflow goes a very long way.
I've seen this time and time again. I put my Benchmark AHB2 into a Ikea Expedit, and it got really hot to the touch. I've put two 120mm fans behind, they run with 5V. You cannot hear them. You barely notice the airflow when you put your hand in front the AHB2. And now it's much cooler.
As nice as it is to say something runs passive and doesn't emit any noise, I think the price to pay for true passive cooling is really high, both in material required and the heat the components will achieve regardless. You can make your life much much easier if you have silent slow running fans.
I've seen this time and time again. I put my Benchmark AHB2 into a Ikea Expedit, and it got really hot to the touch. I've put two 120mm fans behind, they run with 5V. You cannot hear them. You barely notice the airflow when you put your hand in front the AHB2. And now it's much cooler.
As nice as it is to say something runs passive and doesn't emit any noise, I think the price to pay for true passive cooling is really high, both in material required and the heat the components will achieve regardless. You can make your life much much easier if you have silent slow running fans.
AnalogSteph
Major Contributor
Moi aussi. Alongside the leverage that fan control gives you these days. Also, rubber nipples.
My do-everything PC resides in a Fractal Define R5 on the floor under the desk, with both of the stock 140 mm case fans in the front, only one of which is normally active at idle, and a be quiet! Silent Wings 4 PWM 140 mm in the back which only comes on when it gets noticeably warm in there. The fan in the - slightly oversized - BQ Straight Power 11 550W is a 135 mm affair (making a tiny bit of clicking noise that would probably be inaudible if they could be arsed to decoupling the fan properly). The i7-11700 is graced by a Noctua NH-U14S cooler idling at ~250 rpm or so. No discrete GPU. Suffice it to say, the PC is barely audible if at all, even at night (and I don't have any aircon). By contrast, one of my K+H O110s seems to have a loose transformer winding, that's driving me nuts! (Good reminder to turn off power when not needed, but still.)
A computer with smaller fans can be very quiet as well though. My office PC got a 92mm BQ Pure Wings 2 PWM for the exhaust and its 80 mm cousin for the intake with decoupling (it's in a recycled mid-2000s ASUS minitower that I added a good helping of bitumen mat and some thick foam to years ago), a Noctua NF-A9 for its CPU cooler, and a BQ Pure Power 11 400W. Uses good ol' SpeedFan for fan control, and idle speed is 190 rpm CPU and ~580 rpm exhaust. The "loudest" part again is the power supply fan (which btw needed a good push for the rotor to click in properly - ah, QC at the height of the pandemic), and decoupling it would not be trivial as the fan grille is also responsible for RF shielding. Again, it's an office PC and its i5-3570S rarely sees heavy load.
Now small blower fans, those are almost always annoying in operation. I am always happy when am I done working on laptops.
D
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I'm a fanboy. (Cloud)
Multicore
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Media server is a RPi4 with the fanless alloy heat sink/case.
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benanders
Senior Member
- Thread Starter
- #36
@Doodski and @AnalogSteph thank you both for mentioning fan frequency - something I omitted but suppose cannot be fully teased apart from dB - when it comes to fan size x “irritation factor”.
The only noticeable member in my stable is a Quadro P2200 GPU. I haven’t devised a custom solution and aftermarket options are not reali$tic, in part because it’s still very low on the noticeable-becomes-distracting meter.
It seems the (limited) feedback trend so far is as expected:
Fans are a practical - though not universal - necessity for off-the-shelf [multi-disk RAID-friendly] NAS systems and also multipurpose computers with crunch power.
For kit restricted to streaming / transport duties, fans are usually absent.
Not much heat = nothing to actively treat, eh?
I agree that case fans in rigs that aren’t doing intensive tasks probably won’t be noticeable in many average noise floor situations, but I also get why this would feel acoustically unattractive in servers that sit with the rest of one’s stereo kit, or be acoustically unattractive in servers that are very near a listening position.
My stereo setup has no specific “MLP” in a fairly spacious room. Although I do not have an extra room from which an expansive server can operate, it’s not noticeable (at least audibly) in the “music room.”
Ironic that my server doesn’t actually serve my music for playback, eh!?
It’s for movies / tv PLEX. Remote friends/fam can also use it for the many TB’s of music it holds, but my own stereo draws from a separate, fan-less dedicated setup with the same music data. I don’t prefer the PLEX interface for music, and I don’t mind data redundancy.
Sort of in line with what @digitalfrost said, in my server’s case a lot of airflow need go only a little way. Instead of moving a small amount of air suddenly and quickly, it moves a lot of air slowly and continuously. I picked my chassis based on (1) how many HDD’s I could modify it to hold and (2) how much air inflow it permits (both sides have a lotta mesh). All intake is passive, accelerated by 4x 120mm exhaust fans (secured with aforementioned rubber fasteners) that needn’t high rpm’s. An additional 2x 140mm low rpm CPU fans and 1 that never spins inside the PSU round out the mix. Well, those and the Quadro’s little whirlybird.
I agree, even though my own at-this-moment stereo server->transport-> chain has no fans whatsoever.
Operation is basic, access purely local; there are as many limitations as there are advantages, but I’m enjoying fiddling with it for now.
For a larger server with double- or triple- (or… or…) digit TB’s of spinning storage, however, the rationale in passive cooling is (IMO) fleeting at best.
The only noticeable member in my stable is a Quadro P2200 GPU. I haven’t devised a custom solution and aftermarket options are not reali$tic, in part because it’s still very low on the noticeable-becomes-distracting meter.
It seems the (limited) feedback trend so far is as expected:
Fans are a practical - though not universal - necessity for off-the-shelf [multi-disk RAID-friendly] NAS systems and also multipurpose computers with crunch power.
For kit restricted to streaming / transport duties, fans are usually absent.
Not much heat = nothing to actively treat, eh?
I agree that case fans in rigs that aren’t doing intensive tasks probably won’t be noticeable in many average noise floor situations, but I also get why this would feel acoustically unattractive in servers that sit with the rest of one’s stereo kit, or be acoustically unattractive in servers that are very near a listening position.
My stereo setup has no specific “MLP” in a fairly spacious room. Although I do not have an extra room from which an expansive server can operate, it’s not noticeable (at least audibly) in the “music room.”
Ironic that my server doesn’t actually serve my music for playback, eh!?
It’s for movies / tv PLEX. Remote friends/fam can also use it for the many TB’s of music it holds, but my own stereo draws from a separate, fan-less dedicated setup with the same music data. I don’t prefer the PLEX interface for music, and I don’t mind data redundancy.
Sort of in line with what @digitalfrost said, in my server’s case a lot of airflow need go only a little way. Instead of moving a small amount of air suddenly and quickly, it moves a lot of air slowly and continuously. I picked my chassis based on (1) how many HDD’s I could modify it to hold and (2) how much air inflow it permits (both sides have a lotta mesh). All intake is passive, accelerated by 4x 120mm exhaust fans (secured with aforementioned rubber fasteners) that needn’t high rpm’s. An additional 2x 140mm low rpm CPU fans and 1 that never spins inside the PSU round out the mix. Well, those and the Quadro’s little whirlybird.
I agree, even though my own at-this-moment stereo server->transport-> chain has no fans whatsoever.
Operation is basic, access purely local; there are as many limitations as there are advantages, but I’m enjoying fiddling with it for now.
For a larger server with double- or triple- (or… or…) digit TB’s of spinning storage, however, the rationale in passive cooling is (IMO) fleeting at best.
Both of my audio(-visual) dedicated two Windows 11 Pro PCs are completely silent, no fan no spindle (ref. here).
Although they are already rather outdated as Windows 11 Pro PC, the CPU and SSD have more than enough processing-power speed and capacity for digital software player(s), DSP processing, digital music library, web browsing, YouTube, etc., etc., all of the audio signal goes into system-wide one-stop DSP center "EKIO". My latest total system setup can be found here.
Please note that I do not use these two silent PCs together simultaneously, but they are backup PCs with each other having all the same software and also digital music library (ref. here) in 2 TB data SSDs.
Although they are already rather outdated as Windows 11 Pro PC, the CPU and SSD have more than enough processing-power speed and capacity for digital software player(s), DSP processing, digital music library, web browsing, YouTube, etc., etc., all of the audio signal goes into system-wide one-stop DSP center "EKIO". My latest total system setup can be found here.
Please note that I do not use these two silent PCs together simultaneously, but they are backup PCs with each other having all the same software and also digital music library (ref. here) in 2 TB data SSDs.
Apesbrain
Addicted to Fun and Learning
My i3 server is in a utility closet next to my router. Fan noise is not an issue.
JayGilb
Major Contributor
I run a Sony Vaio all in one pc (i5 quad core). Fanless by design running Plex server.
Main File & Plex Server: Synology DS920+ located in a detached garage. The included 120mm fan is pretty quiet (for where it is), so I haven't bothered replacing it with a quieter option. I have stopped the drive cages from rattling by adding a the fluffy part of some stick Velcro to the bottom drive rails.
Application Server: Dell Optiplex 7060 micro form factor. Tiny and quiet 1L chassis; on its side, it's the same height as the DS920+ it sits next to. Server runs Vmware ESXi hypervisor and a couple of VMs. most of the applications (e.g. LMS) run in docker containers on an Ubuntu Server VM.
Backup File Server: Synology 420+ located in the attic. Stock fan with same drive cage modification as above. Data volumes are rsynced to this server from the main server over night. It doesn't do anything else, so the drives are spun down the rest of the time.
Main PC: Located in study. 5x Noctua 120mm Redux fans - 2 on the CPU cooler and 3 on the case. All fans are optimized for RPM, temperature and noise using Fan Control. This is the first PC i've built myself without water cooling it for 20 years, I still have a bit of an itch to replace the HSF with a water block and radiator. I've managed to resist so far
Router/Firewall: Located in study. Fanless Intel Celeron Chinese 'router box' running pfSense and various add-ins.
Application Server: Dell Optiplex 7060 micro form factor. Tiny and quiet 1L chassis; on its side, it's the same height as the DS920+ it sits next to. Server runs Vmware ESXi hypervisor and a couple of VMs. most of the applications (e.g. LMS) run in docker containers on an Ubuntu Server VM.
Backup File Server: Synology 420+ located in the attic. Stock fan with same drive cage modification as above. Data volumes are rsynced to this server from the main server over night. It doesn't do anything else, so the drives are spun down the rest of the time.
Main PC: Located in study. 5x Noctua 120mm Redux fans - 2 on the CPU cooler and 3 on the case. All fans are optimized for RPM, temperature and noise using Fan Control. This is the first PC i've built myself without water cooling it for 20 years, I still have a bit of an itch to replace the HSF with a water block and radiator. I've managed to resist so far
Router/Firewall: Located in study. Fanless Intel Celeron Chinese 'router box' running pfSense and various add-ins.