|  | January 25, 2011
XBMC Guide updated to version 10.0 August 06, 2010
Building a Green PC February 15, 2010
Building an ION powered HTPC with XBMC October 10, 2008
The "Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle 2008" September 12, 2008
"Florian", the DVD burning robot September 05, 2008
The "i-EPIA" May 22, 2008
The "GTA-PC" April 14, 2007
The "Digg" Case January 19, 2007
The "ITX-Laptop" December 07, 2006
The "Tortoise Beetle" |
| | | | October 02, 2006
The "DOS Head Unit" August 31, 2006
The "Janus Project" August 05, 2006
The "Leela PC" June 26, 2006
Nano-ITX in a Football May 17, 2006
The "EPIA Alloy Mod" April 11, 2006
Neatorama's Collection of Case Mods February 18, 2006
The "Rundfunker" October 24, 2005
The "ITX TV" October 06, 2005
The K'nex-ITX August 05, 2005
The "Waffle Iron PC" July 21, 2005
The "Supra-Server" July 18, 2005
The "Mega-ITX" July 07, 2005
The "Encyclomedia" May 25, 2005
The "Accordion ITX" May 16, 2005
The "FileServerRouterSwitch" May 15, 2005
The "Mini Falcon" May 13, 2005
The "Bender PC" May 11, 2005
The "BBC ITX B" May 10, 2005
The "Frame" April 20, 2005
The "Jeannie" |
| | | | March 09, 2005
The "Cool Cube" January 30, 2005
First Nano-ITX Project? January 17, 2005
The "iGrill" January 15, 2005
The "Gumball PC" December 15, 2004
The "Deco Box" December 03, 2004
The "TERA-ITX" October 06, 2004
The "Coealacanth-PC" September 17, 2004
The "Gramaphone-ITX-HD" August 26, 2004
The "C1541 Disk Drive ITX" August 25, 2004
The "SEGA-ITX" August 13, 2004
The "Quiet Cubid" August 06, 2004
The "BMWPC" July 14, 2004
The "Moo Cow Moo" July 02, 2004
The "Mini Mesh Box" June 17, 2004
Jukebox ITX May 24, 2004
The "ERN005PC" (KANA) March 13, 2004
The "Underwood No. 5" February 04, 2004
The "Humidor CL" January 23, 2004
The "Attache Server" January 22, 2004
"Racing The Light" Full alphabetical archive on right hand side of page... |
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The "amPC"
By Jamie Kitson -
Posted on July 31, 2003
The CuAl, or the amPC, or the Silent Server.
My mission, should I
choose to accept it was to build a silent web server. The
reasons were simple: I didn't want to pay someone to host
a site I could host myself and
I wanted to be able to sleep without
noisy fans keeping me awake.
The server that I was using was already very
quiet, the small PSU had a quiet 60mm fan and I had replaced
the cpu fan with
a Papst fan that one retailer described as "it literally
produces no sound whatsoever". Well I am not Clark Kent,
and I do not have super-hearing, and I can still hear it,
even running at 7v... even now, if you listen carefully,
on a moonlit night, you can still hear it wailing in my room
:) So I decided that I had to have a machine without any
fans and thought I would plump for the ME6000. That was until
I read that the Nehemiah performance gains don't merely benefit
media players, and decided that that performance gain and
the challenge of building a passive heatsink were worth the
extra £20. As for the case of the machine, I was at
a bit of a loss. Then I had a look around our garage and
found an old Cambridge
Audio A4 amp that I had blown up a couple of years ago, with
some nice big heatsinks and corresponding vents already in
it :)
The plan was to get the CPU as close as possible
to the heatsinks and then get the heat over to them somehow.
I looked
at heat pipes, which is what The Hush uses, but they looked
a bit complicated to build, and it seemed that pre-built
ones would be difficult to shape without breaking (I am still
interested though, if anyone can help me with this I would
love to hear from you). So the other obvious option was to
cut a thick sheet of a good conductor (I hear copper is cheaper
than silver :) and clamp it to the CPU and heatsinks. Looking
at pictures of the motherboard showed that the
CPU was, usefully, placed very close to one edge of the
board. Obviously
I would
need to use plenty of heat transfer gunk and I'd also been
advised that I would need to isolate the CPU from heatsink.
I thought I probably wouldn't use any of the buttons on
the front panel, as I didn't want anyone accidentally switching
off my server.
The Amp in its original, somewhat dusty, state...
...and the innards, note the lovely big aluminum
heatsinks, and the empty PCB on the left, for the optional
phono stage,
which I thought was probably just about a perfect size
for a hard disk to sit on.
The case minus the main board and heatsinks.
The case with the heatsinks.
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