I want to repurpose an old laptop I have. I plan to ditch the monitor and keyboard, and replace the fan with a heatsink for quiet. I'd put the whole ugly mess in a wood box, cutting plenty of holes for air.
The chip is a Intel Pentium M 740, 1.73GHz (single core mobile chip). I will use this as a networked headless music server with a USB sound card. Basically, all it'll be doing is playing music, which is a very light load on the chip.
My question is: can I get by without a fan? There are just a handful of passive socket 479 heatsinks available.
I've only ever built a conventional desktop rig, so I know very little about cooling. Here are the specs on the best heatsink I found:
- Model number: Nexus PSM-5000
- Socket 479 (Pentium® M, Celeron® M, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo)
- 2U, size: 50x50x47mm
- Fin pitch: 1.6mm
- Fin thickness: ~0.44mm
- Passive SkiveTek® heat sink
- Full copper, 99.5% pure, C1000 copper material
- Thermal resistance: 1.060°C/W
- Weight: 265 gram
This one has a little brother, which is the same except that it's 1U and has a slightly higher Thermal resistance (1.077°C/W).
These look like what I need, but the manufacturer says these... "are designed to operate in an environment with a good thermal/cooling structure. Although the cooler is passive it does require an amount of airflow to go through the fins to be able to provide the neccessary cooling. So the fins of the passive cooler should be inline with the airflow direction in the case for optimal performance"
Can I ignore that, as long as I put a lot of holes in my case?
If it turns out that I do need a fan, can I plug in a large, quiet desktop fan into laptop fan's power source on the motherboard? Are there power jack adapters for that, or would I have to jerryrig something? Would the power specs be compatible?
(unrelated bonus question: is there any advantage to ditching the hard drive and running this thing from a usb flash drive? I just like the idea of no moving parts, but there might not be much of an advantage to doing this.)
thanks!
The chip is a Intel Pentium M 740, 1.73GHz (single core mobile chip). I will use this as a networked headless music server with a USB sound card. Basically, all it'll be doing is playing music, which is a very light load on the chip.
My question is: can I get by without a fan? There are just a handful of passive socket 479 heatsinks available.
I've only ever built a conventional desktop rig, so I know very little about cooling. Here are the specs on the best heatsink I found:
- Model number: Nexus PSM-5000
- Socket 479 (Pentium® M, Celeron® M, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo)
- 2U, size: 50x50x47mm
- Fin pitch: 1.6mm
- Fin thickness: ~0.44mm
- Passive SkiveTek® heat sink
- Full copper, 99.5% pure, C1000 copper material
- Thermal resistance: 1.060°C/W
- Weight: 265 gram
This one has a little brother, which is the same except that it's 1U and has a slightly higher Thermal resistance (1.077°C/W).
These look like what I need, but the manufacturer says these... "are designed to operate in an environment with a good thermal/cooling structure. Although the cooler is passive it does require an amount of airflow to go through the fins to be able to provide the neccessary cooling. So the fins of the passive cooler should be inline with the airflow direction in the case for optimal performance"
Can I ignore that, as long as I put a lot of holes in my case?
If it turns out that I do need a fan, can I plug in a large, quiet desktop fan into laptop fan's power source on the motherboard? Are there power jack adapters for that, or would I have to jerryrig something? Would the power specs be compatible?
(unrelated bonus question: is there any advantage to ditching the hard drive and running this thing from a usb flash drive? I just like the idea of no moving parts, but there might not be much of an advantage to doing this.)
thanks!