Overheating…
August 28, 2010 26 Comments
Last night I enjoyed the first 30min’s of watching a movie with a total silent HTPC until it crashed.
Rebooting it showed me an “CPU temperature error” message. I was about to get a nervous breakdown.
I could boot the HTPC again after a few minutes of letting it cool down and was able to watch the rest of the movie with the top cover removed from the case.
Guess fanless is not an option here..
Now I need to find a proper (very silent) fan to get rid of the heat.
Ok, so fanless is not an option. I guess I shpuld 12 inches fan to make it quiet. will the board be able to power and control its speed?
The board can indeed control the speed, but I’m going to let it spin at 12cm 800RPM. With a small fan 6cm 600RPM input.
Will 6 cm fans at 600 RPM be sufficient to cool this mobo down?
Hi
Have been following this board and your experiments with the build for some time now. Intend creating my own custom HTPC centered around the same board. Only thing stopping me is the non availability of this board in India. Will have to obviously wait it out till the time it arrives at our shores. Meanwhile, was wondering if you could confirm the suitability of these case for creating the HTPC (important to me as they are available in India)
Antec ISK 300-65 Mini-ITX Desktop
Antec Micro Fusion Remote 350 Mini-ITX
Which one would be better ? yes i do intend having a BD writer combo in the build
regards
Ashish
They both look good, I’d go with the most space. Remember that it could be possible that you’ll have to modify the case like I’ll have to do to put a 12cm slim fan on the top.
I don’t thinl Micro Fusion has space for 12 cm (sorry I mentioned 12 inches before, imagine that…) fan. The most is 8 cm ones. It has 3 fans but I i think they are not that quiet.
I also considered to have this case, too, but based on your experience, I don’t think I’ll take this one.
But that’s me. Don’t follow me, cause I’m lost too.
I am also building a XBMC using the at5iont-i… I am using the antec ISK 300-65 case that has one fan on the side. it blows in the direction of the vanes on the heatsink (according to the picture) so ‘ll let you know how loud/hot that setup is.
I get the MB today.
Very good, let me know.
Isn’t the case fan on the ISK 300 an exhaust fan, moving hot air out of the case ?
yes… it pulls air from a vent on the opposite side top. it’s actually a really good airflow design.
Hey richard
shall be looking forward to your your comments, as we seem to be headed the same way
I have it running with a couple of issues… first… no sound via HDMI but I am working on it…. second… in 1080p resolution on my tv I am getting some over scanning. More worried about the sound issue first.
Looking at the problems (e.g. No sound in HDMI, over scanning, overheating despite bigger heatsink, small number of QVL memory), my question remains: Is it worth it to go for 5ATIONT-I, or should I go with AT3IONT-I instead?
I have not experienced any over heating but other than compiling I have not really loaded it down much.
As far as the sound issue, I am not expecting that to be an issue. it’s a matter of finding the right setting and configuration for the drivers.
Same thing for the over-scanning.
I could not see going with an older board and surpassing the performance boost of the newer processor/ION2. I believe/hope that the QVL and ram selection will improve over time as people start using it more and more modules are found. Also, I expect BIOS updates will help too.
Richard
WOOHOO! sound is working
hey richard care to share your specs, noise levels and other issue, have you added a bd drive, how was the HD video playback if you have managed to demo that yet
BTW, I fixed the overscan issue before I left for work …
so… here is what I have…
the case is an antec ISK 300-65
I put an old 120gb 7200rpm drive in because the 4gb transcend x133 CF card and sata adapter was reeking havoc with the system.
with the fan on low and the system 2 ft away form me I have to look at the light on the fron to be sure it’s on… it’s really quiet.
No optical drive at all we have a media server for most video and a PS3 for Blu-Ray. Originally we have been using a nicely setup XBOX (orignal) with the last build and we have been using that for years.
Now we are getting tired of SD and I tried a 720p vid on the XBOX and it wouldn’t play. Also, I wanted to use it for other things too (internet, youtube, hulu, maybe mail, etc.)
Now if someone has an hour or so of 1080p 7.1 surround footage that want to put somewhere I’ll be happy to test it…. I just have no more money to put into a $300 Blu-Ray drive especially when I have a PS3 that works well.
The 720p vid I had played well and looked fantastic! I let it run for about an hour this morning without any glitches…
My next step is going to be getting launcher installed and getting firefox installed.
BTW, I built all this off the Live CD (USB actually)
Richard
BTW, one complaint I have about the ISK 300-65 is lack of a place for a IR receiver. I have a couple of XBOX DVD Kit receivers that I am planning on taking apart and mounting behind the plate where the optical drive goes… but we’ll see how that goes.
Hi,
I have the AT3IONT-I Deluxe running fanless in a lian li PC-Q07 case. Its been running fine without any coolers / fans. I was also going to get the AT5IONT-I board but it wasn’t available, so I went ahead and got the AT3IONT-I instead.
What kind of temperatures are you getting ? As far as load is concerned, I only tested it with XBMC playing 1080p content for little over 2 hours. Max temperatures I was getting on the GPU was 70 degrees celcius.
CPU temperature was about 55 degrees. I think the Ion(1) chip can take 95 degrees celcius before it starts throttling…. Not sure about the Ion2.
Any idea on what the temps were when it crashed ?
More info on the build can be found at do-it-yourself-htcp.blogspot.com
Hello,
I’ve built a HTPC with the AT5IONT-I and the Diwa (Diva) case from InWin. I have a regular size BD-player and a 8Gb SSD in it. I will later connect it to my NAS. I’m connecting the video directly to the plasma screen with HDMI and I’m taking out the sound via optical to the receiver. I’m steering the thing with a keyboard with inbuilt tracking ball. Operating system is 64 bit Ubuntu 10.04 and I’m running VLC and XBMC on it. It runs well so far but the 80mm fan is a bit too noisy so I will put in another more silent fan at lower speed. The temperatures are ok now but I don’t know will happen with the slower fan. Maybe the chipset will need some fan?
The picture and the sound is very good but I haven’t had any possibility to test with more demanding material yet.
So I have everything working. I used a XBOX classic DVD kit ir receiver and remote. Also, firefox is working too.
The quality is excellent and the audio over HDMI is so far flawless.
I have experienced no heat issues at all and the whole unit is dead silent. The case has a spot for another 80mm fan that I might get another antec tricool. on low speed you can not hear the fan unless you put your ear within 3in of the fan.
Richard
Richard,
Do you have temperature readings of the cpu/gpu with the Antec Tricool fan spinning at low speed ? (after a couple of hours of video decoding).
I’ve put my AT3IONT-I board in an Antec ISK 310 – 150 (that has the same internal layout as yours once the PSU was removed) and found that the Antec Tricool fan was bothering me (even at low speeds). I was going to replace it with a more quiet model, but found that I could run the system fanless (after 3 hours, temperatures leveled at 71 degrees for the Ion GPU, and remained there for the next 3 hours).
not sure…. I don’t know how to get XBMC to display actual temperature. Is there a command line linux utility that will display this info?
Richard
Check out the temperature section here.
I’ve created a simple script that is executed each minute, showing me the temperatures of the GPU , CPU and mainboard.
Well i moved it and now it’s broken
The IR no longer works…. it shows up under ‘lsusb’ but nothing under ‘cat /proc/bus/input/devices’
I have no idea why…
GRRRRRR!
The best case is cooling on the Antec Mini Skeleton 90.
See my configuration on my website, just play full HD movies without any problems.
You can find the specifications below systems.