I have been thoroughly enjoying Roon, ever since the assistance I received with assembling my NUC7i5BNH and installing ROCK. I am now ready to assemble an Akasa Plato X7; and I have read through the archives, and also watched the youtube video of the Newton S6T installation–Are there any other tips or things I should know before I begin? I see that my Plato kit includes the thermal paste as opposed to a pad–Is this sufficient, or should I purchase the MasterGel Maker Nano, as suggested in the video?
I found the distribution of this TIM on the chips to be quite troublesome. I stuck with the TIM that got delivered with my Newton S7. Getting excellent cooling results with this TIM.
That is going to prove quite useful, as I was concerned about how to remove the mother board without breaking it. However, upon doing some more research, I am wondering if he used too much thermal paste, and why he did not bother to spread it out…
I really don’t have a lot of experience or any expertise on building these things.
Akasa does have a lot of experience and I just trust their design and followed their instructions as perfectly as I could.
I can only guess he used a little bit of paste in that video because it will spread out when the motherboard is mated to the case?
It is a little bit daunting when you see all the case parts and look at the instructions but by the end you’ll realise the instruction pictures weren’t too bad after all.
Rather than trying to anticipate every little hurdle, I would just recommend giving it a crack (trying it) and if you get stuck on a certain part just take photos and circle in red the parts that you’re unsure about and I and others can try and help.
The other advice is to go slow and triple check every connection - to minimise the chances of having to open the thing up ever again later. I don’t want to ever see the inside again
I disassembled my NUC today, and have all the Akasa parts lined up in order. I am feeling pretty optimistic—My main concern was getting the mother board out without breaking anything! I may not be able to get back to it until this weekend, but I will take your advice and go slow, taking pictures along the way.
I’m going to miss out on the pain and probably buy one assembled from quietpc in the UK. When I eventually get round to it or its an SMG ST i5. Can’t make my mind up.
I just did it with Newton S7 last week. Everything was straightforward, but a tricky part was that the instructions were never clear about how much thermal paste I should apply. And it was not easy to spread it on the chip evenly. I just put a generous amount to build a mound (with the maximum height of ~2mm) fully covering the chip, and squeezed the thing onto the metal block, and got my fingers crossed. I realize that too much paste is no good, but too little isn’t either as it may leave some air gap which is an outstanding insulator.
The infrared temperature measurement of the outer surface shows about 41C at steady operation, so everything seems good for me. Good luck!
I’ve made a few PCs before, and the advice with thermal paste was always use the minimum amount of thermal paste you can (Arctic Silver always seemed to be the winner) and just put a small strip through the middle of the cpu and let it squeeze out to where it needs to go, rather than smearing it with a finger or anything. If you get poor cooling results, then the contact between CPU and heat sink is poor, so sort the cause of that - I sanded one problem CPU flat (“lapping”) using ultra fine sandpaper on glass and the tiniest amount of Thermal paste and got incredible cooling results, but cant do that with a NUC!
Moving my NUC over to a Akasa Plato is a job for this winter.
I’m definitely no expert, and the experts can jump in, but with the NUC and Akasa Plato case there’s is a fixed/finite amount of space (volume) between the CPU and the case internal surface when, once they are mated.
So when you mate them, even if you’ve used ‘too much’ then the excess will just get squeezed outwards. It has no other way to go…
So specifically with the NUC and Akasa Plato case (I’m not talking about any other fanless PC builds) I would just use all the paste that Akasa supply with the case and not stress about if you’ve used too much.
I too build my own pc with a minimum of thermal paste. But with the Akasa x7, when I did the same, the temperature rose to almost 100 C! I quickly turned it of, put a lot more thermal paste between, and then all was fine (temperatures between 32 Idle, 72 all cores working.
To control the temps I add a small program called CoreTemp, but that’s only for window-users of course.
Rather than trying to measure the external case temp, I installed Windows after the build and installed a CPU temp monitoring program. I tried up-sampling to DSD512 while the background analysis was running and then let that run for a couple hours.
A question regarding the build in the Akasa Plato X7D build. The NUC has a built in wireless card, yet I don’t see any directions on how to install this card in the case. If you do this installation, do you lose wireless capabilities?
I am taking pictures as I go, and when I am finished I will document the process. Here is where I am at right now—The HD Audio connector does not fully seat in the socket, and I do not want to force it. Is this correct?
