NUC 7i7BNH fan speed

If you don’t know which one you prefer - Newton, provided that your NUC is indeed one of its listed compatible model. The two have rather different thermal dissipation designs.

Thanks. I’ve the NUC7i3BNH.

I’ve used the Plato X7 with a nuc 7i7BNH m.2 and room for a 2.5mm but no Wifi or at least if you need there holes for external antenna but not provided. I bought direct from the factory in china. I3 should be fine. i7 is a bit over spec for that case but as long as not stressing the cpu it’s ok so far for roon. Runs warm and I use a fan if I’m doing clean import

Coming late to the party, I was wondering if you did a comparison of fan speed/noise with Windows 10 running on the NUC with the same configuration running ROCK?
I just ordered a 7i7BNH and am planning to do the ROCK install tonight as I received the missing parts (RAM and SSD)… You’re making me worried!
BR
Arnaud

Where will your NUC be located in relation to where you listen to your music?

I just got my NUC7i7BNH yesterday and put in a 120GB Corsair MP500 and 8GB of RAM and it’s working just fine. I was concerned about all the talk about the fan speed but it was a non-issue for me.
Event when setting it all up in my home office room I could barely hear it.
Then I moved it to my dedicated music room which is very quiet and the NUC is about 7 feet behind me and to the right and I cannot hear it at all. Quite happy and I like that I can play my multichannel rips of my own SACDs (only about a hundred) with the HDMI output.

Something is amiss, then. Check your BIOS – you may have the fan turned off or set too low. You cannot be in the same room and not hear a NUC7i5 fan at a standard setting, let alone a NUC7i7 fan.

AJ

Hello @Ratbert,
Fortunately the NUC is located in a dedicated (ventilated) cabinet with the home router, fiber box and NAS. The installation went smoothly and I am now importing (again) my library, starting from scratch. So far so good as I can listen to Al di Meola on my Devialet thru Air without problem (I’m still at the letter A :wink: ).
Best regards,
Arnaud

Yeah, I did check the fan settings when I was in the BIOS setting it up.
I didn’t change anything for the fan settings and it did report the fan spinning at 3200 some rpm. I will verify it again when I get home.
Maybe my ears just can’t hear that frequency :slight_smile:
Though I can certainly hear my laptop fan when it’s going!

The fan will be no issue noise wise in that case.

A post was split to a new topic: Has anyone tried the akasa Pascal MD case with the NUC7i7BNH?

I hear my NuC 7i5 only when it’s on heavy duty. When Roon is running (whitout dsp) it’s noiceless. You can adjust the bios so the fan only run’s when it’s on heavy duty. It run’s now for almost a year this way. Can’t fan noice!

Will this setup increase the heat of the components so that they may last less long?

Not with the i5. With the i7 it could be harmfull. My temps are never getting higher then 65 Celcius. But then I said: When the NuC have some heavy duty, the fan does its job. When Roon runs, the fan is quiet.

I used to build Shuttle mini PC’s and I noted a lot of them suffered when radical mods were made to make them quieter. The issue I think was with linear power regulators which needed air moving over them to dissipate unwanted heat, so even if you could keep the CPU and GPU cool it still shortened their life. I think now that power regulation is largely switch mode then heat is no longer a massive issue. That and the design of NUC cooling which is all about the CPU and GPU gives me some confidence these are better suited to warm running. However only time will tell.

How do you measure the temps, do you go to the bios to check them?

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I spent a fair amount of time with my NUC running Windows 10 so I was able to reassure myself there was nothing untoward going on. This was on an i5 passively cooled. It is coming up to its second anniversary in the summer, now running ROCK and it hasn’t missed a beat. It boots reliably (unreliable booting is a symptom of heat related failure) and does everything it should.

All the NUC boards are very different so make sure the fanless case you get supports the NUC board you are getting.

We sell the sonicTransporter i5 in a totally fanless case.

We also sell the sonicTransporter i7 with a full quad core i7. Much faster then an NUC. The sonicTransporter i7 is also noiseless/fanless.

Another option that works really well is a player such as our microRendu. With a player/server solution you can put the server near your router away from your listing room. You will also get much higher sound quality then you would from an NUC USB port.

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With program Speedfan

Yes, on the NUC 7 i5 BNH the fan runs continuously. The Amazon reviewers said you had to have your ear within a few feet of it to hear it. Poppycock! I have tinnitus from decades of listening to loud music, and I hear it 6, even 10 feet away. At least when kept running the way it arrives.

But, I say revisit the bios. There is a Fanless option there. There is also Quiet (that is what is use). Those are standard options provided, no fiddling from the standard ones provided necessary. Do NOT select Cool, as the fan higher all the time to, you guessed it, keep it Cool. -hehe-

The most CPU resources are used after adding music. Once its quickly processed and meta data persisted in the db, even with dsp the CPU is not stressed and cpu temp stays 30 degree centigrade under the level that kicks the fan to high. An i7 can get hotter as it can process faster than the i5. But when processing is nowhere near peak, they should both produce the same heat. My i5 NUC 7 is 2 - 3 feet from my head. And it’s now suitably quiet.

Oh, and like the bios tab for cooling, there are setting on at least two other tabs to select the processor profile. It defaults to, arrives at, Performance. Change that to balanced or low power and that will help too. The processing power will still be far more than Roon needs.

( I didnt read the whole thread. All this is assuming you still have it… tho then for anyone else who comes along with the same question :wink: )

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