Fanless workstation

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I’m located in Europe. I’m interested in building a fanless workstation which will be used mainly for development, learning networking/os’s (using virtualization) and some graphics/video/audio work (minimal games). System stability is of utmost importance and I will not be doing any overclocking. I usually hang on to a pc for quite a few years (a practice which I should maybe change as I’ve got a heap of worthless hardware laying around which will probably be tossed out). I would appreciate if I could get an opinion on the cpu /hardware.

As I really want it to be fanless, I’ve gone backwards first and identified the case - I’m thinking of either the HDPLex 2nd gen H5 (max 95W TDP cpu) or the smaller (which would be ideal if I don’t add a graphics card) HDPLex H1 v2 (max 65W TDP cpu/mini -ITXmainboard). In order to stay within the specs of the cases and have decent performance and making the system a bit future proof, I was thinking of either the i5-8400 or i7-8700 cpu’s.

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Just out of curiosity are you looking to go fanless because of dust issues or are you just looking for silence? If you are looking to go for silence then I think you should consider maybe running just one or two high end ( Noctua or similar performing) fans as it would give you alot more flexibility for CPU thermals and when run at lower speeds they are inaudible when in a case. I run 3 Noctua industrial PPC fans at the moment and I can honestly say my hard drives make more noise than the fans. I totally understand if you would rather go completely fanless though, just giving my two cents :slight_smile:

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I am not a fan of all passive machines, especially ones without any big ventilation slots. Looks like premature heat death to me. While it may work for low powered systems (thinking Ryzen3 or i3s), it will end in thermal throtteling for more powerful components.
Looking at some benchmarks, specifically thermal and power consumption:
The i7-8700 draws arround 80W in floating point stress testing

Have you considered going minimal-fan instead of fanless? Having a few fans at low RPM may be better for longevity than having none at all. (like @Ellyrion suggested)

My suggestion for “low fan”:
As PcPartpicker: https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/RQx9TB
Ryzen7 1700
Noctua NH-U14S
ASRock X370 Taichi
Palit GTX 1050ti KalmX (passive)
BeQuiet Silent Base 600 (set the fan controller to low, it is quiet)

Suggestion for the HDPLEX 2nd Gen H5:
As PcPartpicker: https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/byRFfH
Ryzen5 1600 (has lower TDP than the intel CPUs you mentioned)
Asus ROG Strix B350-i mini itx
Palit GTX1050ti KalmX (because it was still in the list from the other build)
BeQuiet SFX L 500W PSU (was the first SFX PSU from a company I trust to not blow components)

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http://www.thermalright.de/en/cooler/57/hr-02?c=9

Themalright HR-02 with optional duct.

I am using the Thermalright Macho rev. B which is the same passive CPU cooler but with a fan. I also bought the duct for the HR-02. It works so well that I have the fan set to min. spin and it keeps cool and silent while overclocked.

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This might be interesting.

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Thanks for all the input. I am interested in going fanless because of noise. I have a small i3 7100U fanless pc (6 lan ports will be used for router/firewall - now having all sorts of bluescreens while running win10, but that’s another story) which I bought off Aliexpress and I can’t say anything but that I love not hearing anything. I will only have one SSD in the new pc, so I was considering a 160W powersupply and complete silence. With the Intel security business going on (as far as I understand they have also cancelled a new chip release/hopefully will work things out and maybe bring a more power efficient cpu out) and things I have read about Ryzen having some stability problems, I am cosnidering waiting a few months to start the build.

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Have you thought about getting a cheap-ish NUC and a used workstation (~400€ get’s you something sandy-bridge-ish with 32 gigs of ram) and putting the workstation somewhere other than your office / where you normally work?

Or maybe just rent a root-server for ~30-40€ a month for all your virtualization experiments.

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This would be ideal, no?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12441/passive-compulab-airtop2-sff-workstation-with-xeon-e3-and-quadro

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This would be perfect if I had the money.

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What solution are you thinking of for connecting to the pc if it is in another room ?

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Linus (LTT) built a silent gaming desktop several years ago. (well, fanless on the CPU).

He used a bequiet dark rock (?) cooler without the fans attached.

If it’s for VM work and not needing a high end GPU, you could quite easily go fanless, or at most have a couple of large fans rotating at slow speed for general case airflow.

Having an open top vent on the case (and another open vent perhaps in the bottom somewhere) is probably essential though in order to allow heat to escape via convection.

You’d be wanting to go for a lower TDP / lower clocked processor, but pretty confident you could do it with desktop parts just fine.

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Okay, this is probably not in the budget you are looking for.

But if you are really serious about silence you should check out Calyos :wink:

http://www.calyos-tm.com/calyos-fanless-pc-workstation/

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Sorry for the late answer: I had a busy week.

Short answer: Various ways.

Long answer:
Windows: RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol. Included in every Windows Version that is Pro or better (Education works too). Non-Pro Versions can only access, not be accessed.

VNC: A free protocol for using a desktop session over the network. There are a lot of working implementations (vnc servers and vnc clients) I think I usually use thightvnc under windows. Just get the GNU Version and you should be golden (other, non-free implementations might have some restrictions).

Commandline Access:
Windows - to - Windows: Powershell.
Just kidding unless you plan on being a Windows Admin there are more fun ways to spend your day.

Linux to Linux:
SSH. Plain and simple. Most mainstream distros ship with a ssh client installed by default. A ssh server is sometimes installed and enabled.

Windows to Linux:
Any SSH client will work. Commonly used is Putty but I end up using cygwin because it works like linux (i.e. I can use the same configuration file as in my linux machines). The Linux subsystem in Windows works too*.

*establishing a connection takes a couple of seconds sometimes in my setup, no clue why that is, your mileage might vary.

As for the wiring:
Some solutions in order of connection latency/bandwith
a) Ethernet cable: Something that supports 1 Gigabit now and maybe 10 in the future.
b) Wifi either 5 or 2,4 Ghz with little interference by neighbours
c) Powerline Ethernet (or if you are German D-LAN)
d) Crappy Wifi with tons of other wifis in the area

Bonus solution: If you have cheap LTE you could possibly connect over LTE to the computer in the other room if the computer has internet.

Bandwith needs of applications:
RDP / VNC: I have recently metered a connection to determine wether it is viable to use it via my phones hotspot. A Windows RDP session needed several gigabytes an hour even with some tricks (reducing color depth, not scrolling but using the page up and down buttons) but that did not help.
SSH: Next to nothing. Unless you transfer files (then it needs the size of the files in bandwith).

What is your situation in terms of home office or whereever you have space to put the pc?

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OK, thanks, will look more into your suggestions and get back when I decide something.