/ fullysilentpcs  

This custom computer included the following components:

Streacom FC9 Alpha Case
Intel i710700 CPU
MSI MPG Z490M Motherboard
4 x 32 GB G.Skill Ripjaws V 3600 MHz DDR4 RAM
1 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD
Ableconn PU312C2 USB TypeC PCIe Card
Streacom HT4 Heatpipe Riser
Streacom ZF240 Power Supply

After a half hour stress test with a 65 watt CPU load, the maximum CPU temperature was 97 C, with a 21 C ambient temperature.

The music is by Brock Van Wey from his album "White Clouds Drift On and On."

Streacom was founded in 2010 and is one of the most wellknown brands for passively cooled and small form factor computer components. The original FC9 fanless chassis was introduced in 2012 and was revised in 2015 with as the FC9 Alpha. It is the one case in Streacom’s lineup that is designed specifically for MicroATX motherboards. It is fully made of aluminum and is available in 4 versions, silver or black, and with or without a slot for optical drives. The case measures about 13.7 inches wide, 11.4 inches deep, and 4.3 inches tall. It weighs about 10 pounds when empty. Like all of Streacom’s cases, it comes with an attractive sandblasted finish, and the passive cooling is accomplished with a heatpipe system that connects to the fins on the right side of the case. It is designed to cool 65watt TDP processors. A low profile fanless graphics card such as an Nvidia GT 710 or GT 1030 can be installed in this case for use with an AMD CPU, but a card like this is almost guaranteed to thermally throttle if stressed due to the lack of airflow. It’s theoretically possible to use heatpipes to cool a GPU with the fins on the left side of the case, but it would require some creativity since Streacom does not have any kind of GPU cooling kit for this case.

The system I will be building here was for a customer that does a lot of data processing and wanted a system with great CPU performance and a lot of highspeed memory. Also requested were multiple highspeed USB Type C ports. An Intel i9 or AMD CPU could offer more processing power, but if we limit the power of the i9 to be effectively cooled by the FC9 it would not perform much better than the i7, and a fanless GPU would not be effectively cooled in this case either as mentioned previously, so AMD CPUs without integrated graphics aren’t ideal. The i7 was a logical choice and avoided driving the cost up too much. The heatpipe riser is needed here to clear the motherboard’s VRM heatsink, and the ZeroFlex power supply was chosen as a highquality internal PSU designed for use with this case. Normally this power supply would only be compatible with a MiniITX motherboard in the FC9, but because we don’t need the internal drive tray in this build we can get away with it.

I wanted to test the CPU temperatures. Before this test I went into BIOS to make sure that the longterm power limit was set to the default of 65 watts. I then ran Prime95’s small FFTs torture test for half an hour and used HWINFO to track temperature and power use. After the halfhour was up, the CPU’s maximum average core temperature was 97 degrees Celsius. It was very close to starting to thermally throttle itself, but didn’t quite get there. I hoped for a bit better, but this was still a pass. In cases when I do reach the throttling point, I slowly decrease power limits and rerun the test until it passes. Luckily I did not have to do that here. To get a better look at how this case performs overall, I graphed some results that I’ve recorded from previous builds with this case and added a trendline.

The linear trendline has a formula that tells me that the expected maximum temperature in Celsius above ambient is equal to 1.08 multiplied by the power limit in watts plus 3.76. If we want to assume a room temperature of 25 Celsius and a maximum temperature right at the throttling limit of 100 Celsius, then we have to find the power limit for a temperature above ambient of 75. When we do that, we get a power limit of 66 watts. So, when Streacom designed this case for 65 watts, they hit it spot on. Keep in mind that different motherboards and processors will handle power differently, and not all will even allow you to modify power limits. When you can however it is a good way to keep temperatures down with minimal performance impact.

So who is the Streacom FC9 for? If you don’t need highend graphics and can stick to an integrated GPU, this case can likely work for you. The three lowprofile PCIe slots will give you some expansion capability with a Micro ATX motherboard. If you can avoid spinning hard drives, optical drives, motherboard fans, and coil whine, you can create a totally silent computer with no moving parts. With the ability to passively cool up to 65 watts, you can create a system with great CPU, memory, and storage performance. It can be used for business applications, as a hometheater PC, a highend audio server, or just as a home desktop PC.