Shuttle ST62K HTPC

Last update: 11 dec 2004

I wanted to build a HTPC (Home theater PC).
The goal was to make it so quiet that my mother-in-law could sleep next to it while it is on. And she is picky about disturbing sounds...

The specs:
Shuttle ST62K
512MB DDRAM PC3200
Samsung P80 160GB SP1614N 7200rpm 8MB
NEC DVDąRW DL 16X IDE ND-3500 Silver
Intel P4 3,0GHz 800/1M HT S478
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2

As OS I am going to use Windows XP with Media Portal as frontend. Try it. Youīll love it!

Putting it together was a picknick. Very easy to work in ST62K. First i tried the original way, way to loud!

This is what I did to make it as quiet as possible.

First I cut the back fan grill out. A little bit better but not good enough.

I tried suspending the harddrive like they suggested on Silent PC Review. This also made a change. The humming of the drive disappeared. A little whining (high pitched noise) from the hard drive could still be heard.

Downclocking
In BIOS, I set "CPU FSB Clock" to 166 and "CPU Voltage Set" to 1.2500. The speed of the CPU was 2,5 GHz with this settings. I donīt know if these settings are ultimate but they work anyway. The PC hasnīt crashed or anything or doesnīt feel unstable.

Tried SpeedFan because I thought the fan was spinning way to fast even with BIOS fan speed set to "Ultra low". If I remember correctly it was about 2000 rpm. That could clearly be heard.
In SpeedFan, under Speeds, I set Speed01 "minimum value" at 2%. This way the fan spinned at 1560 rpm. This was also an improvement. If I set it to 1% I could not hear the fan at all. As long as the PC didnīt do any hard work, the CPU temp stays at 50°C. If I ran two instances of CPU Burn-in at once it raised to over 65C after about 20 minutes. Therefore I left it at 2%.
Now I was satisfied with the fan. I will replace it with a 12dB Papst fan. My hope is that I can do without SpeedFan if i use Papst because of the low noise it produces. But just in case, I ordered a Zalman Fanmate2, if I should need it.

Another thing I saw on Silent PC Review was the idea of mounting the fan on the outside. I did that as well, which further lowered the noise.

When I moved the fan to the outside it increased the space inside the case. That gave me an idea. At work we had a couple of old broken Fujitsu ErgoPro 452e. The hard drives in those cases was fitted inside a steel box. Sort of a noise blocker I suppose. They remind me of the SilentDrive, with the differens that SilentDrive is made of plastic.

To fit this in the case, removal of the fan encloser and moving the fan to the outside wasnīt enough. Some carving had to be done...
I donīt own a dremel or such tools, so a regular wire cutter had to do. The result wasnīt pretty but it did the job.

Before:

After: (without the DVD mounted)

Notice that I left a little bit of the 3 1/2" drive cage. I had to have something to fasten the fontplate at. I only lost about 2 cm or so.

From an old mouse pad I cut to pieces of foam rubber and put them on the drive cage to prevent vibrations if it got to close to the DVD.

I mounted the DVD drive. Then turned the hole thing up-side-down, easier that way. I placed the hard drive encloser laying on the DVD.

 

Now I took an old bicycle inner ring and cut two strings off from it. This was going to be my elastic rubber bands.

I also attached some more mouse pad piaces on to the inside of the cover to maybe prevent vibrations and noise coming out of the box.

The result is this: to be able to hear it I must be within a 20 cm range from the PC. Pretty quiet :)

Temperature

I have been running Prime95 torture test for 12 hours and the max temps Iīve seen are as follows:

The hard drive is pretty hot but it should be safe accordingly to Samsungs specs, "Operating Temperature 5~55° C".
To be safe I have set SpeedFan to go to full effect if it reaches 55°C.

Notes

With the cover on I think itīs more noisy than with the cover off. I guess the pads on the inside of the cover didnīt do much. Must find some other material...