I've built a number of Media Center PC's now, and each one has been better than the last. When I started, I enthusiastically purchased a 'Home Theatre PC' case - one of these lovely looking silver anodised aluminium cases designed to be the jewel in your HiFi crown. Building it was a joy - easy access and a solid feel. The Media Center bits consumed me for a while whilst I juggled TV cards, DVD decoder and learnt about how the system works but soon I had a working, reliable Media Centre PC for the lounge. I'd already realised that success in a Media Center would be not to play with it or add unnecessary software onto it and I left it well alone. I was however disappointed with its noise and set about trying to reduce this. There were three noise sources - the CPU fan, the PSU fan and the hard disk. Of these three, the PSU fan was the least problem and I purchased a simple fan speed controller for £6 which dramatically reduced the CPU fan noise. By now, the fan noise was very acceptable for lounge use, but the hard disk seeking clicks seemed to be magnified through the metallic case. I considered modifying the mounting of the hard disk to use either a rubber hard disk case or rubber mounting blocks but as an interim I simply left the top off the HTPC case and put the whole lot inside a teak cupboard alongside and behind the plasma TV, and shut the door. For some reason it had never occurred to me that I could hide the PC, I'd been seduced by the idea that a Media Center PC should have 'pride of place'. In reality, no I/O with the PC needs line-of-sight at all, so hiding the PC is actually fine.
My lounge media centre was left in that state for a couple of months whilst we actually used it and gained confidence that it did not need rebooting and the guide listings worked. Although it only had one tuner, I was very impressed and resolved to build another for the bedroom. Now this was a real challenge. I am paranoid about noise and a bedroom is possibly the greatest test of a quiet PC that will be left on all the time. Equally, I did not want to go down the fanless route because of increased cost and the fact that this still does not rule out hard disk noise. Eventually after the realisation above that the PC does not need to be in an impressive silver or black slimline case, I came up with a solution which I will share with you here. The result is a PC that is actually INAUDIBLE from more than two feet away and with disk activity that can only be heard if you really listen hard in the dark of a quiet night and from about 10 feet away. Anyway, here goes.
First, you will need a suitable PC case - the Antec P150. I got mine from www.overclockers.co.uk and it has three important attributes. A slow, 120mm case fan with built in 3-position speed control, a quiet PSU, and most importantly rubber-band drive mounts. Yes, you read that correctly...... Take a look at the pictures below.
The case itself is refreshingly different and refreshingly white, but anyway you will probably hide it behind something so its appearance is really rather secondary. You're going for silence remember. The key to this silence is shown in the shot below - the rubber-band drive mounts. This case allows you two method of hard drive mounting, removable sliding trays fitted with rubber block mounts or the method shown below - rubber band suspension. I've not tried the trays and although they would undoubtedly be very good, the rubber band mounting whilst appearing delicate, is excellent as you will see later.
But, first things first - we need a motherboard etc. Obtain a suitable LGA775-based motherboard that will allow you to use a Pentium 4 at a speed of at least 3.0GHz. This way, you will have enough power to avoid any video jitter and you will be able to move to high-definition and/or MPEG4 easily. I purchased an Intel D915PBL motherboard from www.mediaatlantic.com. I could have saved a few pounds by buying another make but I was playing safe, and this motherboard is really nice - Gigabit LAN, optical audio, lots of expansion.....
The next thing to install is the processor and heat sink, and this is another critical silence issue. I purchased a Scythe Ninja Fan less Heat pipe CPU Cooler which at first sight is a huge beast - a heat sink that fills the case from motherboard upwards but which with this Antec case design, sits neatly alongside the 120mm fan. This way the heat sink has no fan of its own and simply relies on the case fan. Amazingly, and as you will see, a processor temperature of 50 DegC was maintained with this thermal solution even whilst running the Microsoft Plus! Aquarium screen saver which consumes almost 100% CPU - many times more than media centre activity.
The heat sink looks very heavy but in fact it is very light, using a heat-pipe system that uses water in a vacuum to rapidly transfer heat from the processor site to the thin vanes. The heat sink must be fitted to the motherboard before the motherboard is installed into the case, since a special bracket must be applied to the motherboard underside.
Now you can install the heat sink on the motherboard component side to produce an amazing sight:
Although this looks unwieldy, you can now carefully manoeuvre the assembly into the case by simply holding the heat sink vanes. When all motherboard holes match the mounting lugs on the case floor, carefully add each screw until the motherboard is retained. You can now go on to add memory, power supply and I/O cables. (Remember to add the 4-pin power supply cable as well!). By now, it is all coming together and in the photo below you can see the installed motherboard with the heat sink alongside the case fan. The white blob resting on the top of the heat sink is the 3-position fan speed switch.
Connect up the hard disk - a SATA drive is best here because as well as being marginally faster, the cabling is a lot neater than a wide ribbon cable.
When the hard disk has been connected, the fun bit can begin - insert the disk drive into the rubber bands. The bands are twisted together before then being splayed apart to created a central 'O' through which you push the drive. The result is as shown below:
Antec advise that you don't transport the PC with this setup, but to me it seems very stable and only serious movement may move the disk.
With all cables and connections now made, there is only one change left to make. Unscrew the mountings of the Antec 120mm case fan and reverse it so that it blows into the case instead of outward. This ensures that the heat sink receives the coolest air. Now you can power the unit up and begin the installation of the operating system. You will be amazed at how quiet it is. There are three settings on the case fan, and the slowest is quite inaudible. The middle setting would ensure the lowest CPU temperature at the price of very slight wind noise but importantly there is no mechanical noise at all, and it is easy to experiment with the fan settings when you have got the system running. The motherboard comes with an Intel utility to display system temperatures and as you can see below, low temperatures are easy to achieve lightly loaded. Later I discovered that to run a 'serious' screen saver such as the Aquarium the processor temperature will rise by another 10 degrees or so. Media centre use requires much less CPU and the temperatures stay pretty much at idle values.
So, there it is a really quiet media centre PC. For those of you who are interested, my other components to complete the system were a Compro VideoMate DVB-T tuner card, an NVIDIA 6200 graphics card (it's fan less) and NVIDIA's Pure Video DVD decoder software. With these NVidia items installed, you get some nice Media Center adjustments that allow to fiddle with colours etc.
Want other information on MCE? Click here for my MCE home page page.