March 6, 2020

The beautiful machine

It is an almost magical experience to return to a field after two decades away. More often than not people have kept themselves busy. Countless problems have been solved and things are significantly better.



The last time I built a PC, the CPU was an Intel Celeron 433Mhz Slot1. All cases available were beige and ugly. Information was scarce. Learning that a part existed was an achievement in itself. Actually producing the parts was an adventure requiring to drive around town. In the worst case, orders took months.



Being crazy into CG at the time, the graphic card I picked was a Riva TNT from a relatively new yet impressive company called Nvidia. The NV4 was one of their earlier chip and I had a hard time keeping it cool. The machine froze often during that hot French summer of 1998.



Fast forward 20 years, the world of PC enthusiasts is a marvel. Whatever you are into, there is a manufacturer with parts that will do what you want. Orders can be delivered on the next day. Sometimes even on a Sunday. In last resort, a 3D printer will solve your problem. The hardest task is to make up your mind and decide what you actually need.



I am not a hardcore CG programmer/gamer anymore. Time has allowed my tastes to evolve. Pixels pushing sessions have made way to glyphs carving and type-setting. When I set myself to build one more PC, my goals were different. I did not want to sacrifice everything to horsepower. I wanted a totally silent machine. I wanted something esthetically pleasant. I wanted something that would remind me of the NeXT hardware.

Passive Cooling Streacom DB4 Chassis

It turned out that people at Streacom had read my mind. Their chassis, an elegant and effective piece of hardware, was released in 2016 under the name "DB4".



The cube is designed to run without a single moving part. It uses a passive cooling system based on four panels of extruded aluminum. There is no need for fans as long as you pick the components wisely.

Top view of a side panel. Notice the extrusions which nearly triple the surface area. Each panel is able to dissipate 65W. In its most sophisticated configuration, one panel takes care of the GPU heat, one is dedicated to the PSU, and the two last are combined for 105W taking care of the CPU.

Left, a LH6 kit using two panels via six copper rodes. Right, stock CPU heatsink with GPU kit. Is it an homage to the NeXT computer or simply good taste? The DB4 also comes in black!



Build

With the chassis selected and dictating constraints, elements had to fit three criteria.

Physically fit in the chassis (e.g: ITX motherboard and mini GPU). Allow enough clearance for the heat-pipes to travel to the side panels Operate within thermal budget (65W PSU, 65W GPU, 105W CPU).

Additionally all components combined had to drain no more than what the PSU could supply. I ended up settling on the following list.

CPU : Ryzen 5 2600 (6 cores, 12 threads at 3.5Ghz)

RAM : Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GiB DDR4 2666Mhz

Motherboard : Fatal1ty AB350 gaming-ITX

Storage : Samsung 960 EVA 500GiB M.2 NVMe

GPU : MSI GTX1050 Ti Aero ITX 4G OC

Chassis : Streacom DB4 (65W)

Coolers : Streacom LH6 kit (105W)

Coolers : Streacom GPU kit (65W)

PSU : ZF240

USB : 3.0 Cables Extenders

Power : Right angle adapter

The Ryzen 5 and discrete GPU may have been overkill. I did not need that much power and an Intel i3-8100 with Integrated Graphics would have been a safer bet but the old ex-GPU enthusiast in me could not come to terms with this idea.



Thermal Benchmarks

I used Geeks3D Furmark 1.21.0.0 to generate load and monitored thermal metrics via HWiNFO.exe. The ambient temperature was around 20oC. Overall, I found the chassis did a good job of cooling the system and no thermal throttling occurred.



The CPU six cores were pinned to 100% for 30 minutes via 12 threads. From 43oC while idle, temperature of the die stabilized around 84oC. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast temperature dropped once minimal load was applied (-27oC within 30 seconds).



For the GPU, I used a resolution of 2560x1440 with 2xMSAA. Temperature went from 49oC while idle up to 82oC within 20 minutes and stabilized at this level. It is reasonably below the max 97oC stated on NVidia 1050 Ti specs page[1].

Note that these are the internal temperatures of the CPU and GPU. These are not how hot the aluminum panels were. Even with CPU at 85oC, the case only felt hot. Surprisingly, the only component to get **really** hot was the M.2 drive (87oC) but some research revealed those have a tendency to run hot anyway.

Verdict

After using this PC for a week, I am very happy with how it performs. The machine makes no noise whatsoever and I like how it looks. As I am finishing typing this article with it, I think that even with the acquired insight I would not change a thing.



One last thing. Beside its obvious aesthetic, the DB4 has another perk. The I/O connectors are all located on its bottom. With holes drilled in the desktop, cables can sneak below the surface. The black cube will sit on the table seemingly connected to nothing which I find insanely cool.

Brushed aluminum is a forgiving material. Even covered in fingerprints, it still looks gorgeous. Hopefully, this machine will do for an other 20 years. Come back and check in 2040.



References

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