How much cooling does a PC need when not processing?

that

googler wrote: »

Yes, I could have bought a fanless PC, and that might be a solution in the future, but the current one is a trial machine to see how the streamer behaves when accessing a 4Tb drive.

...It seems to read an occasional 'chunk' from this drive into the streamer, and then goes static for a while.

The cheap way is large, heatsinks, but slower turning fans. They remove the heat, but make less noise than small high revving fans.
A 120mm fan connects to this https://www.overclockers.co.uk/prolimatech-megahalems-rev-c-cpu-cooler-hs-005-pl.html
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/noctua-nh-d15-dual-radiator-quiet-cpu-cooler-with-two-nh-a15-fans-hs-026-nc.html

Then there is water cooling, but unsure how quiet this is. I've avoided this for both electrical, and laziness reasons.

Think the top cooling spot I think goes to a peltier cooler which consumes extra electrical energy. A 60 watt peltier will cool a 30w cpu (50% is the sweet spot), the hot part of the peltier should also be cooled (preferably water cooled), and the peltier may have it own thermometer/regulator as you do not want it to go below about 16C due to dew point and condensation
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/40x40x3-4mm-15A-15V-120W-TEC1-12715-Thermoelectric-Cooler-Peltier-Heatsink/282940657310
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Thermoelectric-Peltier-Refrigeration-Water-Chiller-Cooling-System-Cooler-Device/253018656380

For me the best step up after large fans would be sound insulation, and one up further is to buy a case that deals with sound dampening

The drive 'chunk'? mechanical drive self calibration, OS, Application, or badly designed hardware?

psychic_teabag

One thing to consider would be a raspberry pi. Very low power devices which run perfectly happily with no fan. I have a first-generation one running as a (video) media server using a USB hard disk (so it all runs off a single 5V supply).

They don't come with SATA interfaces, though they are availble as add-ons. But pi does have limited bandwidth since ethernet and usb share a bus. (but I have no trouble recording SD video from a USB tuner to disk at the same time as watching or streaming another.) I'd have thought that audio would be trivial compared to that. (As you say, your windows machine only has to touch the disk occassionally to read the data.)

Ah - from https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/pcs/raspberry-pi-4-brings-new-gpu-usb-3/1/ :

The Raspberry Pi 4 ... has been redesigned from the ground up, replacing the 480Mb/s USB 2.0 channel with around 5Gb/s of external bandwidth - enough to drive the gigabit Ethernet port at full speed while also having enough grunt spare to upgrade two of the four now-independent USB ports to USB 3.0.

so that should have oodles of bandwidth to spare.

googler

psychic_teabag wrote: »

One thing to consider would be a raspberry pi. Very low power devices which run perfectly happily with no fan ...

Yes, it's on the list of future possibles. Need to investigate if it has any limitations on HDD size. The reason I'm experimenting with the Win10 PC is to be able to use a 4Tb drive. Primary PC is an XP machine with a 2Tb HDD limit, so the library was spread out over two drives. Primary requirement is to have it all in one place, and be able to play it back from one drive

esuhl

googler wrote: »

Primary PC is an XP machine with a 2Tb HDD limit...

XP supports partitions of up to 16TB, or if you increase the cluster size, 256TB. It's just the boot partition that can't exceed 2TB (not 2Tb).

Cisco001

googler wrote: »

It's not the power consumption that's the issue, but the noise, since it's in the same room as I'm listening in.

Yes, I could have bought a fanless PC, and that might be a solution in the future, but the current one is a trial machine to see how the streamer behaves when accessing a 4Tb drive.

Task manager shows the CPU running at 4%, memory at 47%, the primary drive (OS on C) at 0%, and the 4Tb secondary drive (with all the music) at 0%. It seems to read an occasional 'chunk' from this drive into the streamer, and then goes static for a while.

Change a quieter CPU cooler, change to a 'silent' case