Building A Home Theatre PC For The Complete Beginner, Part II: Cooling

In the second part of our series on building your own Home Theatre PC, we’ll be concentrating on the all important aspect of cooling, with a bit of a look at keeping the whole affair quiet enough that you won’t need to crank your volume to hear your movie over the fans.

The main aim here is to keep the whole rig as quiet as possible even under stress. Naturally, there’ll be some noise just from air movement through the body of the PC. You’d notice it in a dead silent room, but under normal circumstances the noise from the PC shouldn’t be enough to disturb the normal atmosphere of the living room.

In our previous article we made sure to take some additional care in choosing our hardware that we’d save some trouble when it came to both cooling and quietness of the finished PC.

When discussing graphics, we deliberately opted for a fanless video card. This alone will lead to a great deal less noise, as most video cards will have smaller fans attached, which adds to the overall sound-efficiency of the setup.

However, there was leeway for people to make their own choices when it came to video cards, and the vast majority of cards on the market do have an onboard fan. It should be noted that these fans will generally be controllable by software, which you can use to reduce extra noise, though naturally you won’t get it to be quite as quiet as a card with no fan at all.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can move on to the issue of the CPU. We opted to use an Intel processor, if only because the Intel option ran a significant amount cooler than the AMD offering. There are plenty of aftermarket coolers on that can be fitted to give a bit of extra cooling to your CPU and have the bonus of being a little quieter overall. The stock cooler on our Intel did a good job cooling the CPU, but the noise generated was considerable, and that was before taking into account the efficiency of the heatsink. For our HTPC build we chose the following Zalman cooler to add a little extra cooling and keep the noise down.

 

Product	CPU	Summary
Zalman CNPS8700 LED CPU Cooler	Socket 775	Copper heatsink with 110mm Fan

 

The above fan consists of a copper heatsink with 0.2mm copper fins for better heat dissipation. Copper is an ideal conductor and is considerably better than the likes of aluminium. The better the conductor, the more efficient our heatsink will be overall.

In addition the heatsink’s fan is a 110mm fan, which will move a far greater volume of air with less noise overall. Zalman also provides a manual fan controller to adjust the fan speed.

You can grab the Zalman cooler, here.

 

Product	Summary
OCZ Freeze Extreme Thermal Compound	Silver based thermal paste for excellent conductivity

 

A heatsink is only as good as the thermal compound used when installing it on a CPU. We chose the OCZ range of thermal paste based on good reviews and reliability.

Given the nature of our HTPC, we may want to reduce the fan’s speed to a crawl (to cut down on noise) and under those circumstances we’d want to have a good, reliable compound that can easily conduct the heat away from the CPU to our copper heatsink without a bottleneck that could cause a build up of heat.

Although you won’t use the whole tube, it’s best to keep the rest of it for future use or, who knows, you may impress a friend enough with your HTPC setup that the rest will come in handy for them.

Once we have the compound and our heatsink installed, we can look at other areas of cooling.

You can grab some OCZ Freeze Extreme, here. At €9 for three grams it’s less expensive than most per gram purchases.

 

Case Fans

Generally case fans come in two flavours, either 80mm or 120mm. While they’ll get the job done, there’s something to be said for getting a different fan to cut down on the overall noise.

Generally the bigger the fan, the more quiet it will be, with the benefit of better airflow.

 

One of the best-reviewed case fans going is the AKASA Amber Series Ultra quiet Fan 120mm. At 18db this is a impressively unobtrusive fan and we heavily recommend installing these to reduce overall noise from the case. The only real issue we have from this fan is its amber LEDs, which (depending on the placement of your HTPC) could be just a little distracting, especially for dramas. That said, who builds a HTPC to watch dramas? We thought not…

You can grab the Akasa Amber 120mm, here.

 

This was a bit of a late pick, but it does qualify by virtue of its quietness. We’re hesitant to use the pun “sleeper hit” but not hesitant enough that we wouldn’t write it.

There’s nothing too fancy here, but it does have a sleeve bearing operation and silicone pins, which mean there’s no vibration transferred to the case. These fans are certainly worth consideration if you’re serious about silencing the whole machine.

You can snag the Zalman, here.

 

Noise Dampening Material 

For the longest time, we had serious doubts about the efficacy of noise dampening materials, but they contribute a surprising amount when used in the right conditions. That said, dampening will reduce noise a slight bit in a PC even if you haven’t done your homework, but in our case we think this is a total preference pick. If you still find that the PC has some noise levels to it, you could do far worse than investing some cash in noise dampening material and some time in a bit of research into how best to use it.

The Nexus Damptek consists of 3 sheets of 40cm x 50cm hard foam adhesive material, which is reportedly enough for 2 midi towers… again, if you have a friend bowled over by your HTPC build you can always pass the surplus their way, we’re sure it’ll be appreciated.

You can grab a bundle of Damptek here.

 

In the next part of our series on building your own home theatre PC we’ll be looking at the OS options. You should subscribe to our RSS feed or visit us on Facebook where we’ll be keeping our followers up to date on the blog.