NUC 7i7BNH fan speed

It’s a case for a mini-ITX board, not for a NUC board… So no guarantee that ROCK will continue to work.

You are all making things more difficult and expensive for yourself by insisting on having the core in the listening room.
It would probably end up cheaper to pay a professional install a cabled connection from another room than having to buy expensive silent cases. :wink:

I did get an email back from Akasa in UK saying that while it’s not perfect it will work for the Plato X7

"You are correct that the Plato X7 is compatible with the 7th Generation i3 and i5 NUC’s.

Regarding the i7, from our own internal testing of the Plato X7 case with the i7 - found they can work. BUT subject to BIOS setting and system loading. If you intend to use it at maximum 100% on CPU and GPU for sustained periods of time then it does get very hot and may shutdown, hence why we have not included the i7 in our compatibility
list. If interested, we can offer further instructions on the BIOS settings if needed."

So for throttled use and some bios tweaks this might just still fly…ymmv.

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Even paying someone to pull Cat 5 to the room may be overkill. Wired is better, but wireless can be far more than adequate. In many installations, a wireless 802.11ac connection between routers in different rooms should provide a level of service similar to that of wired 1000BASE-T.

AJ

Wired or wireless is not my main point!

The main point is that placing the core in another room will make all the need for expensive silent solutions unnecessary.

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It depends if the people in the other room accept the fan noise.:wink:

The difference in performance between the 7th Gen i5 and i7 is 10%, so I’ve chosen the i5 with a fanless Akasa Newton case.

Well, it was €80 more expensive (plus my time for the transplant operation), which in the great scheme of things is great value. And the reason for moving the Core out of the meter closet (where it now lives) is to improve the WAF (or the HAF, in my case), which it has. So a win-win all round, I think for my particular situation. :smile:

Edit: and just remembered the original reason for moving the Core - I want to use the HDMI connector to supply multi-channel audio to my AVR. That means putting the Core next to the home cinema AVR…

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@Geoff_Coupe and @Rune your suggestion in placing RoonServer in another room, this assumes RoonBridge near the audio gear correct?

Correct. An inexpensive solution like a RPI as RoonBridge can be used instead and should in theory be less noisy than a PC/MAC.

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Okay, so why confusion regarding 7i7 Vs 7i5 ? Simply pick up 7i7.

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If someone wants to build a fanless ROCK, then at the moment, their are no DIY solutions available to house a 7i7 - that’s why we’re going for an i5 model. It has less thermal output than the i7, but is almost as fast (and a good deal faster than the i3).

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Agreed on Fanless needs which leads to using 7i5.

The point was moving NUC to other room, run cheaper solution like CAT cable + RoonBridge (RPI3?), if this the case then NUC can be 7i7 sitting in some other room where fan noise is not a concern.

I know for my situation fan noise is a consideration in every room, I don’t have a basement or storage closet I can hide it in. I will be using mine with CAT and several types of end points. With that said, part of the issue is that the default fan settings in the BIOS for the NUC are loud, the little fan in there can really crank. I have set them lower and it is not so bad, unless the Core is about to melt down on me :slight_smile:

I will however get an i5 instead of an i7 as it should be more than i need, and uses less power, and I can probably more safely keep the fan low if I don’t go to a fanless case.

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I finally have the Plato X7 sourced from factory in China and will be sent to me later next week when I get back from my traveling. They do say that as long as its not like 100 duty cycle all the time or for long periods it will probably be ok. Now if the ROCK software only had some temp performance indications in the web page rebooting to get to the BIOS temp reading would not be needed.

The transplant operation went well, I think. The NUC7i5BNH motherboard is now in the Akasa Newton S7 case. It all seemed straightforward.

I used the thermal transfer pads supplied in the Akasa kit - in the video that Marius posted, the guy said that he eventually used thermal paste for better heat transfer properties. That may well be more efficient. The CPU in my Akasa is running warm @ 50 degrees C, but it’s well within operational limits I believe, so I will probably keep it this way.

I used the recommended Crucial memory, but substituted an Intel 600P 128GB m.2 SSD in place of Roon’s Transcend recommendation.

The only downside of the new system is the laser-like brightness of the blue power indicator. It’s so disturbing, I’ve now built a touchscreen control panel to put in front of the Akasa. The panel uses the touchscreen software being developed by @spockfish

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Thanks for the info.
At 50 degrees C, do you apply any DSP?
How many Roon endpoints do you entertain?

Thanks a lot.

My main system has DSP applied; I have up to 9 endpoints - usually three at most are grouped in a zone (including the one with DSP). Not sure whether the CPU temp is still 50 deg.C in that case - I have no way of knowing in ROCK, unfortunately. The temperature was taken from the BIOS after the device had been soak tested for a short while.

All you report sounds pretty solid.
I am very tempted going the same path.
Thanks again.

@Geoff_Coupe
I ordered the same stuff.
Maybe the temperature can be improved by use of that cooling paste you mention.