The PC as a train – A very special kind of mobile Computing with the Lian Li PC-CK101

1 - The train story begins 2 - Unboxing and Accessory 3 - Power Supply Unit 4 - Optical drive in the stomach 5 - How to implement a SSD? 6 - Playing with fans for the best airflow 7 - Mainboard and CPU maximized 8 - Mainboard in green mode for a HTPC 9 - First run and conclusion

Experiment 2 – Nearly silent HTPC with the E 350

After the fans had a loud rendezvous in the first version, I now want to keep things a bit quieter. This even happens in a double sense, since you only need little CPU power for an HTPC, which in turn can also be procured almost silently (if you do something manual). A MSI E350IA-E45 is now used. AMD’s APU E350 is no longer brand-new and actually already technically outdated by new models, but such boards can be purchased very cheaply in some places and the performance is always sufficient for an HTPC. So you could have taken something else, but time was a bit pressing here as well, so I only dealt with the fan and use the board as a representative for many similar solutions.

The cover on the cooler is quickly removed, as it is only attached with a double-sided adhesive tape and can thus be easily and durably attached again after the conversion. As a replacement for the original MSI fan, which is very loud at higher speeds, we were happy to help ourselves to the Noiseblocker shelf again and installed an extremely quiet XM2, whose performance and speeds are on par with the original, but unlike the latter, it is not acoustically noticeable in any way. Not audible despite 4 cm and over 3000 rpm:

Together with this conversion, you get an ideal HTPC base. The large 12 cm fan could now be throttled, removed completely or replaced by a quiet and red illuminated one, which would give the whole thing a kind of fire glow as a realistic-looking substitute for the firing. I will also show that this can look quite effective in a video in the second part of the test.