You Could Fry An Egg On That Processor!
After playing with the HiFi functions for a few minutes, I powered the system on fully and was pleasantly surprised to find that noise was minimal. There was a total of four fans in the MEGA 180. One in the power supply two on the CPU cooler and one on the Northbridge. Together they weren't much louder than the expensive water-cooled setup on my previous HTPC(I actually got a little nervous and opened the case to make sure that the CPU fan was running). I happily popped in a Windows disk and sat back to wait for the installation to complete.
About 10 minutes into the Windows installation the CPU fan suddenly kicked into high gear and became very loud. Concerned, I opened the case and, sure enough, there was some really hot air being pumped out of the CPU cooler. I rebooted the computer and went into the BIOS to check the temperature and found it hovering at 61 degrees Celsius. I left it idling in the BIOS for an hour and it stayed right around 60 degrees Celsius. As I mentioned in part I of this series, I am a little obsessed with CPU temperatures. Before building this HTPC I was never content with CPU temps that rose over 40 degrees Celsius under a load, so it was a little disconcerting to find my new HTPC idling in the BIOS at 61 degrees.
After a quick search on the Internet, I found that the Athlon XP 2800+ can handle temperatures up to 85 degrees Celsius, so I decided to leave the case cover off and risk finishing the windows installation so that I could gather some more data.
After a slightly tense installation, I installed MSI's temperature monitoring tool and was relieved to find that the CPU was idling at about 40 degrees Celsius in Windows. Still too hot at idle for my taste, but much more acceptable than 61 degrees. However, depending on what I was doing during the rest of the setup, the temperature fluctuated between 40 and 70 degrees. Watching a DVD would put me at about 58 degrees, but watching live TV would bump me up to 67. The worst came when I tried to compress video. After about 20 minutes of encoding it got up to 83 degrees before I got nervous and shut it down. After that I avoided activities that would prolong a heavy load on my processor.
Over the next few months I took the HTPC apart a number of times trying to figure out a way to increase airflow and cool it down. Unfortunately, there was just not enough space to work with. I even tried several times to figure out a way to modify the case to accommodate the Innovatek water cooling kit that I had used for my last HTPC. However, with my mediocre skill at case modification, I would have been back to hiding the case behind the TV in no time.
My final solution for the heat problem was to remove the DVD drive completely and raise the hard drive up to the top mounting bracket in the case. Then I installed a case fan where the hard drive had been and directed it to blow towards the air intake of the CPU cooler. With this new setup was able to achieve steady temperatures in the 60s. I still couldn't encode video without reaching dangerous heat levels, but I could do most HTPC tasks like video and music playback, TV recording and time shifting. I sacrificed CD and DVD playback by removing the optical drive, though, and I was very disappointed that I had once again failed to make the perfect HTPC. I dug my old DVD player out of my closet, put it back into my home theatre and grudging began using the MEGA 180 as my main HTPC. However, all things considered, it was still a huge improvement over the old one.
