Fan replacement in NUC leads to emergence of fan noise?

Audio Gear Talk
1

I have an Intel NUC as my Roon ROCK server - NUC8i7BEH 8559U. A couple of weeks ago I began to hear strange repetitive mechanical noises coming from it. I opened it up, cleaned up the fan and tried again, but the noises returned. I went ahead and ordered a new fan and replaced the fan, which fixed the issue.

However, since replacing the fan, I have been hearing fan noise when using Roon. Prior to this I had never heard fan noise from the NUC. Sometimes the fan seems to spin quite fast, at other times less so, and sometimes I can’t hear it.

Any idea why this change? And how to address the issue? It’s not a huge deal as the NUC is outside the listening room, but now there is some fan noise in the living room that I’d like to reduce.

2

@extracampine
When replacing the fan, have you first clean away the old thermal paste of the CPU. Then, before putting the new fan on the NUC, you have to apply a small quantity of good new thermal paste. Only a small amount is necessary, just enough to fill the microscopic scratches on CPU and fan. Too much thermal paste will become a huge barrier for the heat to travel from CPU to the cooling fan.
Good luck, Frank.

3

Get yourself a fanless case. They work well and obviously dead silent.

4

Any suggestions?

5

When you fitted the new fan, did you clean up the old thermal paste and correctly apply new thermal paste? If so, did you fit the fan with new thermal paste, then lift the fan off to check correct coverage?

6

This would cure fan noise :wink:, but is only a benefit if the server is in the same room as the system :+1:

My server has a fan and sits about 8.5 meters away. Even with DSP taking processing to 10x, I don’t hear the fan over the music.

7

I’ve got an Akasa Turing but I’m not sure they’re still available for older NUCs. If you do decide to go fanless, do yourself a favor and don’t use the thermal material provided with the case. Get new stuff of better quality and cooling will be much better.

8

I use an Akasa Plato TN for my NUC11TNHi7. It works really well keeping the CPU temperature down to about 8-10 degrees above ambient.

For your 8th generation NUC8i7BEH I believe you need an Akasa Plato X8. As @David_Gibson comments with regards to the Turing case for the 8th generation NUCs, this is no longer supplied by Akasa. However, there is currently one advertised as ‘new’ available on ebay.co.uk (shipping from Poland). I can’t vouch for the seller.

Caution: ROCK does not provide a way of monitoring CPU temperatures and it is not the best installation to put into a fanless case - especially as its thermal management assumes the presence of a fan. When I moved my NUC to a fanless case, I also changed from ROCK to a dietpi (Debian) linux installation which allowed me to monitor temperatures (and do other things).

9

You can actually set “Fanless” in the NUC’s BIOS somewhere.

10

But that does not affect the way RoonOS behaves.

11

No, it won’t affect higher level apps, but it’ll affect resources at a system level to keep the fan quiet or the unit cool…