Mini PC build (ITX)

[sjomae]

Does someone has experience with a Mini ITX (or at least small) project, suited for audio usage (silent)?

I'm thinking of a mini pc as a laptop replacement. Ideally there should be a smart or better simple way to copy my Desktop system to another drive and stick that in the mini pc, avoiding having to maintain two systems.

I think the main question is about the case. What is a good small silent case.

Hardware will become some amd ryzen with integrated gpu, I can figure out that part myself I think.

[wjl]

Hello sjomae,

I've built a PC like that some time ago. The pictures from my Flickr page are long gone, but maybe the article on my blog about it still helps? It's at

https://wolfgang.lonien.de/2022/10/a-ne ... t-in-time/

I'm still very happy with that machine, typing this on the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" on it. And when using Ardour, the 8 cores / 16 threads on the Ryzen 7 5700G have almost nothing to do, so it's completely silent - at the moment my CPU fan is at 642RPM, and the one case fan I have in is at 908RPM. I can record my double bass with a condenser mike next to it without any problem.

Hope that helps?

Cheers,
Wolfgang

[sjomae]

That's helpful, thanks.

The Fractal design Terra and the Lian Li A4-H20 are small cases.

The latter is meant for watercooler, which I don't know nothing about.

What are the benefits and downsides of watercoolers?

[wjl]

Can't say anything about AIOs (water cooling), because I've never tried one. And about cases, the basic rule is: the smaller you go, and the hotter your CPU runs (look at the wattage), the more difficult it will be to cool them at full load. That's why I opted for a 65W CPU and a relatively big ITX case.

There's a YouTuber who might be helpful, as he provides sound samples of fans running at different RPMs, his channel is called Machines & More. I chose the CoolerMaster NR200 mostly because of him (and also a bit after a review at kitguru.net - see his channel at

https://www.youtube.com/@MachinesMore/videos

and the kitguru test at

https://www.kitguru.net/components/leo- ... one-right/

[sjomae]

Still quite large such a mini-itx. Maybe I should be looking at a mini-pc like the Gigabyte GIGA BRIX GB-BRR5H-4500.

Ideally something that can be repaired and maybe even upgraded over time.

Not sure how silent these things are.

Somehow I lean towards AMD.

Edit: maybe I can do something with the Akasa Turing compact fanless case as starting point, but are these for specific NUCs?

[solivia]

If you really want “no noise” then only fanless case is for sure. But if you accept super quiet fan then Node 304 or Terra is a good balance.

[Babarosa]

I am using a fanless Minisforum GK50 and a fanless Cyminilmd pc i7-1365u both with Debian 12. They work perfectly fine using jackd2.

[Driving]

Mini-ITX works well for silent audio builds. Focus on a quality small case with good airflow, an AMD Ryzen APU, NVMe storage, and quiet cooling. For system transfer, cloning is possible but a clean install is usually more stable. Fan curves and PSU choice matter most for silence.