Having only a single case fan ruins it, because noise is heard at the loudest and if a second fan is same noise as previous then will add a very negligible noise of 1% per fan, so 1 fan 30 db, second fan 30.3 db and so on, if a third fan is added, 40 db then the noise will be at the loudest, so 40db. Meaning adding any case fan will render this fanless design useless x noise. This fan is only good if no components inside the case generate large amount of heat, for this fan to work as supposed to, gpu and everything else needs to be passively cooled too. Noctua will have to create a gpu fanless design to accompany this.
A psu fanless design is needed too. Be quiet has them on sale. GPU fanless design will have to follow cpu fanless design, Also buying this for the 9900k is pointless, a 3700x will be perfect for this, 65 watts tdd and as high as 100 watts full load.
Ideal GPU would be the ones with maximum of 75 watts given gpu fanless design follow this.
Agreed, if it's "passive" it cant have fans. I was just commenting on the usage case discussed above about a case fan and it's noise level. You can have 1 or 2 low flow quiet case fans that provide just a bit of air flow and no discernible noise.
I wonder if there is a way to seal the desktop case completely, no air in, no air out, that will truly eliminate the dust, I wonder of electronics survive in vacuum ambient.
"The biggest effect is that vacuum is a lousy conductor of heat. Spacecraft cabins (such as those of the Apollo Command Module or LEM) that must be evacuated must either be powered down during the event (as early Soviet capsules did) or must use fluid heat exchanges to carry away heat (as did Apollo).
If nothing is done, even the modest heat production of common electronics will quickly build up to damaging levels."
You can vacuum your pc desktop with watercooling through a pipe, everything needs to be watercooled, radiator must be outside and a pipe connection to your pc, I used to do that.
A hot box/oven? Heat would have to escape through the case itself then, and that's not good. Fanless, this would work best in a perforated, or open case. It would take years for it to get dusty indoors unless there were air blowing on it (AC, open windows).
At 1atm and Earth normal composition, you lose about 30% or so of heat through radiation and the rest through conduction and convection. That is why spacesuits have to have liquid cooling systems. For spacewalks, back to the ship if tethered. For non-tethered use in space or on an airless body (like the moon), they use an ice/evaporative cooling system to chill a liquid cooler built in to the suit backpack. EVA's are usually not limited by Oxygen/CO2, but by how much refrigerant can be carried along. That said, operating in shadow/at night it might be a limitation on Oxygen/CO2. Even with the low emissivity of the space suits, you are still picking up something like 100-200 watts of heat IIRC per square meter of insolation and only shedding a dozen or so per square meter that is in shadow. If you were operating entirely in shadow, you'd still have to deal with the metabolic heat generated by the astronaut, which isn't shed quickly enough by radiation from the space suit or the possible limited conduction through whatever part of the astronaut is touching something (okay, maybe if you laid down you could cool off faster than warm yourself metabolically. But there is also a fair amount of insulation in the suit).
To your supposition, if the inside of the case is not in vacuum, the electronics will still be shedding heat through conduction and convection (well and radiation). The issue is the heat would be shed through conduction, convection and radiation of the case itself. Most cases don't have a whole lot of surface area and often aren't made of materials that conduct or convect heat very rapidly. A (somewhat) open case design is transferring heat inside, to air that is then moved out of the case and replenished from room air that is cooler. Rinse and repeat. The fans moving the air greatly increase the rate of convection. If your electronic were mounted in such a way to increase conduction to the case body and the case body were either constructed of high K materials like Aluminum to help shed heat, and possibly with a surface designed to increase surface area, you could do that. There are a couple of sealed case designed out there like that. Heck, that is how most phones and tablets are constructed.
Now, I'm by no means an audio engineer or know anything about the physical properties of sound waves, but what I've always read is that adding a second sound source at the same sound pressure level at roughly the same distance from the listener doubles the sound pressure level - i.e. a 3dBA increase. I.e. a second 30dBA fan next to one already there increases the noise level to 33dBA. As I said, I don't actually know if this is correct, but it makes sense logically given that you're putting twice the energy into pressure changes in the air - this must affect _something_, unless the pressure changes are cancelling each other out. This is of course not perceived as a doubling in noise given that our hearing doesn't work linearly, so a 1% _perceived_ increase is probably not far off. Then again, the noise floor of most living spaces is somewhere around 30-ish dBA, so adding the first fan might not be noticeable at all, depending on its location, the direction of airflow, the design of the case vents, and so on.
Other than that, there are fanless GPUs out there - quite a few. None in the high end, of course, but heck, there's even one in the pictured case! Lots of GTX 1050s and 1050Tis, probably 1650s on the way.
here in my house I have many servers and all of the fans are around 30 db, have hundreds of them, when i add a 40db or even a 50db, the loudest sound comes from the the 40db if x 30db, or 50db x 30db or 40db x 50db, so the loudest will be heard very easily, the other hundreds 30db will be heard too but will have no impact like a 40db or 50db and if I distant myself from the room, i will hear only the loudest sound. My test was, add 1 fan 30db, add 10 30db, 31db, add 20 30db 32db, each 10 added 1db.
This article explains much better than I did. "Adding Sounds or Noises together on the Decibel Scale In real life, several sources of sounds often occur at the same time. One may be interested to know what results when one sound is combined with another, i.e. the addition of sounds.
Adding 60 apples to 60 apples results in 120 apples. But this is not the case with sounds when they are expressed in decibels. In fact, adding 60 decibels to 60 decibels gives 63 decibels. The following formula explains the general principle of adding sounds on the decibel scale. Please click on the demo button to see the details.
One can use the above formula to add three sounds together - 60 dB, 65 dB and 70 dB. Please click on the demo button to learn how to use the formula to add the three sounds together. "
In the example above is 2% if you add a second but a third and the next so no will reduce and reduce, in the end like my case 100's fans at 30db, sounds 35db.
"Although the ear can distinguish the rise in level between one or two pins dropping, it cannot distinguish between 10,000,000,000,000 pins and 10,000,000,000,001 pins or even 10,100,000,000,000 because it is not a linear device. It can, however, distinguish the significant multiplying of the energy of the sound. When this sound is doubled this is equated to a rise of 3dB (decibels), using a logarithmic scale*. In a work context, this means that a small increase in the number of decibels results in a huge change in the amount of noise and, as such, the potential damage to a person’s hearing. Let’s look at a few examples. If the pin dropping has a sound level of 10dB (decibels) then two pins would have a level of 13dB. 10,000,000,000,000 pins would have a level of 140dB and 20,000,000,000,000 pins a level of 143dB."
Actually it would be a volume increase of 3dB if you went from one fan at X noise to two fans each at X noise. You'd have twice the sound level (which is a 3dB increase). So if you went from a case with one fan at 30dB and then upgraded it to have 4 fans at 3dB, you'd end up at 36dB (two doublings of sound pressure, from one to two and then two to four).
Price. It might be patented, but they can't patent a heatsink, which is what the case panels are if you boil it down. Give your panels some surface area, add heatpipes to get them warm, it'll work. HDPlex and Streacom both make good passive cases, but they do hobble themselves a bit by using only the short sides as heatsinks. Of course, the Airtop also uses a custom motherboard and GPU mount, which makes it easier for them to implement.
This would probably work best in conjunction with a case designed for convection cooling. Are there any such cases publicly available?
The other part of the puzzle is GPU cooling... I was surprised to see that Arctic apparently no longer sells their fanless GPU coolers, so options here are limited. And is Noctua also planning on releasing a fanless X570 chipset cooler? That 40mm fan is probably going to be louder than the rest of the system put together.
Cooler Master ATCS (Active Thermal Convection System) 840, which IMO is still the best case the company ever made. No plastic, No glass, pure performance.
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svan1971 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Perfect for cases without glass doors.svan1971 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
and no doubt a few case fans would help.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Having only a single case fan ruins it, because noise is heard at the loudest and if a second fan is same noise as previous then will add a very negligible noise of 1% per fan, so 1 fan 30 db, second fan 30.3 db and so on, if a third fan is added, 40 db then the noise will be at the loudest, so 40db. Meaning adding any case fan will render this fanless design useless x noise. This fan is only good if no components inside the case generate large amount of heat, for this fan to work as supposed to, gpu and everything else needs to be passively cooled too. Noctua will have to create a gpu fanless design to accompany this.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
A psu fanless design is needed too. Be quiet has them on sale. GPU fanless design will have to follow cpu fanless design, Also buying this for the 9900k is pointless, a 3700x will be perfect for this, 65 watts tdd and as high as 100 watts full load.Ideal GPU would be the ones with maximum of 75 watts given gpu fanless design follow this.
goatfajitas - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
They make some great quiet fans... Cant be heard at all, with a low airflow of course.samerakhras - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
passive cooled PC are not only for the low noise , they are for zero dust ..a True Passive PC should have ZERO FANS ... to eliminate the dust coming inside as well
goatfajitas - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Agreed, if it's "passive" it cant have fans. I was just commenting on the usage case discussed above about a case fan and it's noise level. You can have 1 or 2 low flow quiet case fans that provide just a bit of air flow and no discernible noise.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
I wonder if there is a way to seal the desktop case completely, no air in, no air out, that will truly eliminate the dust, I wonder of electronics survive in vacuum ambient."The biggest effect is that vacuum is a lousy conductor of heat. Spacecraft cabins (such as those of the Apollo Command Module or LEM) that must be evacuated must either be powered down during the event (as early Soviet capsules did) or must use fluid heat exchanges to carry away heat (as did Apollo).
If nothing is done, even the modest heat production of common electronics will quickly build up to damaging levels."
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-effect-of-vacuum...
Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
You can vacuum your pc desktop with watercooling through a pipe, everything needs to be watercooled, radiator must be outside and a pipe connection to your pc, I used to do that.Showtime - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
A hot box/oven? Heat would have to escape through the case itself then, and that's not good.Fanless, this would work best in a perforated, or open case. It would take years for it to get dusty indoors unless there were air blowing on it (AC, open windows).
azazel1024 - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
At 1atm and Earth normal composition, you lose about 30% or so of heat through radiation and the rest through conduction and convection. That is why spacesuits have to have liquid cooling systems. For spacewalks, back to the ship if tethered. For non-tethered use in space or on an airless body (like the moon), they use an ice/evaporative cooling system to chill a liquid cooler built in to the suit backpack. EVA's are usually not limited by Oxygen/CO2, but by how much refrigerant can be carried along. That said, operating in shadow/at night it might be a limitation on Oxygen/CO2. Even with the low emissivity of the space suits, you are still picking up something like 100-200 watts of heat IIRC per square meter of insolation and only shedding a dozen or so per square meter that is in shadow. If you were operating entirely in shadow, you'd still have to deal with the metabolic heat generated by the astronaut, which isn't shed quickly enough by radiation from the space suit or the possible limited conduction through whatever part of the astronaut is touching something (okay, maybe if you laid down you could cool off faster than warm yourself metabolically. But there is also a fair amount of insulation in the suit).To your supposition, if the inside of the case is not in vacuum, the electronics will still be shedding heat through conduction and convection (well and radiation). The issue is the heat would be shed through conduction, convection and radiation of the case itself. Most cases don't have a whole lot of surface area and often aren't made of materials that conduct or convect heat very rapidly. A (somewhat) open case design is transferring heat inside, to air that is then moved out of the case and replenished from room air that is cooler. Rinse and repeat. The fans moving the air greatly increase the rate of convection. If your electronic were mounted in such a way to increase conduction to the case body and the case body were either constructed of high K materials like Aluminum to help shed heat, and possibly with a surface designed to increase surface area, you could do that. There are a couple of sealed case designed out there like that. Heck, that is how most phones and tablets are constructed.
Valantar - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Now, I'm by no means an audio engineer or know anything about the physical properties of sound waves, but what I've always read is that adding a second sound source at the same sound pressure level at roughly the same distance from the listener doubles the sound pressure level - i.e. a 3dBA increase. I.e. a second 30dBA fan next to one already there increases the noise level to 33dBA. As I said, I don't actually know if this is correct, but it makes sense logically given that you're putting twice the energy into pressure changes in the air - this must affect _something_, unless the pressure changes are cancelling each other out. This is of course not perceived as a doubling in noise given that our hearing doesn't work linearly, so a 1% _perceived_ increase is probably not far off. Then again, the noise floor of most living spaces is somewhere around 30-ish dBA, so adding the first fan might not be noticeable at all, depending on its location, the direction of airflow, the design of the case vents, and so on.Other than that, there are fanless GPUs out there - quite a few. None in the high end, of course, but heck, there's even one in the pictured case! Lots of GTX 1050s and 1050Tis, probably 1650s on the way.
Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
here in my house I have many servers and all of the fans are around 30 db, have hundreds of them, when i add a 40db or even a 50db, the loudest sound comes from the the 40db if x 30db, or 50db x 30db or 40db x 50db, so the loudest will be heard very easily, the other hundreds 30db will be heard too but will have no impact like a 40db or 50db and if I distant myself from the room, i will hear only the loudest sound. My test was, add 1 fan 30db, add 10 30db, 31db, add 20 30db 32db, each 10 added 1db.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
But the interesting thing was that the 40db was heard very easily even with the 100 fans 30db, so i guess 100 30db was around 35db all of themMetroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
This article explains much better than I did."Adding Sounds or Noises together on the Decibel Scale
In real life, several sources of sounds often occur at the same time. One may be interested to know what results when one sound is combined with another, i.e. the addition of sounds.
Adding 60 apples to 60 apples results in 120 apples. But this is not the case with sounds when they are expressed in decibels. In fact, adding 60 decibels to 60 decibels gives 63 decibels. The following formula explains the general principle of adding sounds on the decibel scale. Please click on the demo button to see the details.
One can use the above formula to add three sounds together - 60 dB, 65 dB and 70 dB. Please click on the demo button to learn how to use the formula to add the three sounds together.
"
https://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/noise_education/web/ENG...
Daeros - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
3bd louder takes twice the power to produce, but is *just* noticeable. 10db sounds twice as loud.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
In the example above is 2% if you add a second but a third and the next so no will reduce and reduce, in the end like my case 100's fans at 30db, sounds 35db.Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Here is another important hing to consider."Although the ear can distinguish the rise in level between one or two pins dropping, it cannot distinguish between 10,000,000,000,000 pins and 10,000,000,000,001 pins or even 10,100,000,000,000 because it is not a linear device. It can, however, distinguish the significant multiplying of the energy of the sound. When this sound is doubled this is equated to a rise of 3dB (decibels), using a logarithmic scale*. In a work context, this means that a small increase in the number of decibels results in a huge change in the amount of noise and, as such, the potential damage to a person’s hearing. Let’s look at a few examples. If the pin dropping has a sound level of 10dB (decibels) then two pins would have a level of 13dB. 10,000,000,000,000 pins would have a level of 140dB and 20,000,000,000,000 pins a level of 143dB."
https://pulsarinstruments.com/en/post/understandin...
azazel1024 - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Actually it would be a volume increase of 3dB if you went from one fan at X noise to two fans each at X noise. You'd have twice the sound level (which is a 3dB increase). So if you went from a case with one fan at 30dB and then upgraded it to have 4 fans at 3dB, you'd end up at 36dB (two doublings of sound pressure, from one to two and then two to four).konbala - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Wonder why there isn't more fanless design like Airtop's, probably it's not easy and it's patented...Valantar - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Price. It might be patented, but they can't patent a heatsink, which is what the case panels are if you boil it down. Give your panels some surface area, add heatpipes to get them warm, it'll work. HDPlex and Streacom both make good passive cases, but they do hobble themselves a bit by using only the short sides as heatsinks. Of course, the Airtop also uses a custom motherboard and GPU mount, which makes it easier for them to implement.sonny73n - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
Wow great concept! Nobody has ever thought of it before - a chunky 20 pounds heatsink hanging on your motherboard.Valantar - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
You need to work on your metric-to-gibberish conversions.mobutu - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
well it might be 94 degree celsius but slap a quality fan on it, undervolted so it spins at ~300rpm, and you get a nice 60-70 degree celsius.do the same for the gpu
and the psu can totally get by being 100% passive, just get a nice platinum one which is very efficient.
and I can guarantee you you won't hear it, not even in a silent/quiet anechoic studio chamber.
(ofc, quality components so no click-clack nor electronic noises etc)
Metroid - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
yeah, any wind power and the thing cools down so fast and a lot, totally passive is overkill.JDG1980 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
This would probably work best in conjunction with a case designed for convection cooling. Are there any such cases publicly available?The other part of the puzzle is GPU cooling... I was surprised to see that Arctic apparently no longer sells their fanless GPU coolers, so options here are limited. And is Noctua also planning on releasing a fanless X570 chipset cooler? That 40mm fan is probably going to be louder than the rest of the system put together.
Metroid - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
If there was a way I would put that nf-f12 on the x570 chipset but for that to work flawless, a 12x12 heatsink is a must.bigvlada - Saturday, June 8, 2019 - link
Cooler Master ATCS (Active Thermal Convection System) 840, which IMO is still the best case the company ever made. No plastic, No glass, pure performance.And you can put a "53GHz" PC inside. :D
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/coolermasters-crazy-...
wrkingclass_hero - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Memorty?vidal6x6 - Saturday, June 8, 2019 - link
http://uploaddeimagens.com.br/imagens/power_pc-jpgDo you say Passive ??? Dual xeon L5630 32gb ecc... this chipset has 21w TDP, when summer hits i will put the xbox 360 heatsink "jasper"
vidal6x6 - Saturday, June 8, 2019 - link
The only problem I see in this setup is coil wine...the x5675 95w can run with no fan, but hits 70ºc the L5630 maximum temp 53ºc
khamac - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
this concept has one biggest flaw that the mainboad must be place horizon and face up to have best heat transfer in tubes.