[Boogieman]

Hi

I have just finished building my HTPC and thought I would share my experience.
Sorry about writing in english but thats just to make it readable for more people.

System setup
------------
Case:		 Silvestone GD01MX
PSU:		  Cooler master silent pro M500
MoBo:		 Gigabyte 790FXTA-UD5
CPU:		  AMD Phenom2 X4 945 (95W)
Memory:	   Corsair BallistiX 2*2 Gb  (PC3-10600, 7-7-7-24)
GPU:		  Sapphire HD5700 Vapor-X 1Gb
HD:		   Intel X25-M 80Gb (SSD)
CPU cooler:   Noctua NH-U9B (1 fan installed - MoBo controlled)
Chassie fans: 2 * Noctua NF-R8 (MoBo controlled)
OS:		   Windows 7 (x64)

After reading loads of review on power supplies, CPU's, cooling, specs i finally made a decision and went for the package above.
The last decision was to go for the GD01MX case.
I originall opted for the Silverstone LC13-E due to looks, but realized that i needed some kind of remote control and display to be able to play music without turning on the plasma AND to integrate it with the rest of the home theatre setup
The GD01MX that is basically the same case but with split front and a separate bottom door with card readers, firewire, USB and some other good connections behind it. Also the drive bay differs a bit. But I will come the good and bads later on, so lets start.

1. Added some insulating tape below the power supply to make sure no rattle could occur.



2. The silent pro came with dual gaskets which is rare. Few have understood why there are two, but there is an idea also with the rear one since it prevents and possible rattle of the rear of the PSU towards the frame, so I installed both gaskets as shown. The first time i powered up the PSU a faint spark noise was heard. I thought it was "kaputt" but after inspecting where the noise came from I saw that inside the PSU they had added gas-diodes to kill any current spikes (the gas ignites and creates a small light arc when killing the surge and can be seen from the rear of the PSU), both for power on and power off. Very nice, since this prevents unwanted power on/off spikes travelling to your MoBo




3. The rear covering plates for the card slots were not very tight originally.


To fix this I bent them a bit on the middle and also bent out the tab at the end a bit to be able to fully seat them.


The results was...very tight, no rattle and minimum air leakage (to later be able to route the air the way I want)



4. The best place to hide cables without inflicting airflow was beneath the drive bay. Since there were a lot of single cables for the display and front connectors, I simply used plastic insulated steel wires (the kind you use for plastic bags in the kitchen) to cluster them and made sure that no bare metal was seen or could touch the MoBo area.



5. I fitted the SSD in the middle between the air intakes and put the drive bay in place. (My thought was to have one air path for the GPU on one side of the SSD and one for the CPU on the other side)



6. Here comes the tricky part. The display takes the power directly from the 12V ATX via an adapter. This adapter is big and bulky since it consists of one male and one female contact and a small contact for the display. After a lot of fiddling I managed to squeeze it in between the two drive bays. When later on fitting the 5,25 inch drive bay one must take care to press down the cables, keep the connector in angle and at the same time carefully slide in the cage without damaging the cables...its a TIGHT fit.



7. I mounted the Blu-ray reader to the cage


and used the small rubber insulations to minimize rattle (I used them as much as I could on screws for HD, cage and other places where I expected rattle to occur.



8. The standard fans were replaced with the more silent noctuas, GPU card put in place, CPU and cooler was mounted and the cables were routed to allow for as good air flow as possible


9. Here yu can see the downside of the display - it covers allmost the entire intake area. But more about airflow further down


10. Lid on and the case was finished


I installed Speefan to be able to monitor temparatures and fan speeds.
I also installed GPU-Z since speed fan could not detect GPU temp and fan speed.

After running Prime 95 turture test I found that the best position for the CPU cooling fan was as installed in the pictures, closest the the vent, blowing air into the box. This also helped cool down the north bridge some degrees. Adding another fan lowered the temp some degrees more, but the added noise was simply not worth it.
The temps were very stable allready with CPU at full load keeping temps for CPU/case 52/37 C.
- Moving the fan to the other side and of the cooler to suck air raised the temps to 55/40.
- Blowing from the other side gave 59/38
- Two fans gave 48/41 (cool CPU but probably turbulence with rear fans increased case temp)

I also tried running furmark to see that GPU was not running to hot and saw no drastic temperatures even though the GPU fan sped up to an audiable level.

Overall the case is very quiet. In a quiet room (no music or movie):
- At no load like druing normal web browsing it is not audible at 2 meters (my sweet spot).
- Even during CPU stress I have to fight to hear the fans.
- When the GPU fan spins up it is audible. I plan to exchange with a passive cooler when they arrive. I was opting for a passively cooled 5750 but realized that if I wanted to play in full HD the 5770 was a better choice.
And for future games i can run crossfire in full PCI 16x with 2*5770 cards. (Today this MoBo is one of the few AMD MoBos that support full 16* speed in 2*Xfire. In 3*XFire all 3 cards run at 8* PCI-E speed).
- Oh, I allmost forgot to mention the noise level of the PSU....well that is becuase it certainly is non audible even as close as 30-40 cm's. I very faint hum can be heard if I put my ear to it, but that is about it. And so far the power levels seems very stable from the SpeedFan monitor.
- And of course the SSD is dead silent...and blistering fast. Win allmost 7 loads before I have finished powering the plasma

I will probably come back with a more extensive review as I get some games and movie software in the rig.
Right now I am streaming 1080p mkv's from my NAS and the GPU totally offloads the CPU.
Having 4 720p movies running simoultaneously only loads each CPU kernel by about 10%.
So for a movie-box it is a bit overkill, but I intend to use it as a full media center for gaming, music, movies and what-not

This post has been edited by Boogieman: 09 February 2010 - 02:58