Cooling System and Noise

Shuttle has always taken great care to design a good cooling system for its barebones, and the SB81P hasn’t become an exception. Two technologies contribute to efficient yet quiet cooling of this model: the currently widespread Smart Fan and Shuttle’s exclusive Silent X.

I will discuss them one by one, starting with Smart Fan. The point of this technology is simple: the mainboard controls the speed of the attached fans depending on the temperature of the components. So, the CPU cooler will rotate at a higher speed if the CPU temperature is high. It means that the noise from the cooling system is minimized when the computer is under low loads.

For controlling the speeds of the fans manually, you can enter the PC Health Status page of the BIOS Setup. This page also shows you the current status of the system. There are detailed tips describing the settings, so it’s hard to get anything wrong here.

The second technology – Silent X – is even more important. This name covers three things: a special Integrated Cooling Engine (ICE), a special power supply and a system case with efficient airflows.

The ICE is a processor cooler which is equipped with an additional fan and an air-duct. Cool air comes right to the processor though the air-duct, also cooling the elements of the power regulator located inside. This air stream then takes heat from the processor by going through the aluminum heatsink of the CPU cooler.

The cooler itself is composed of two parts: a heatsink and a fan. Six heat pipes come off the copper sole which the heatsink’s ribs are attached to. A fan is placed on the sole to drive cool air to the heatsink. To facilitate the heat transfer, an additional fan sucks the hot air off the heatsink and drives it outside the system case. For the hot air not to linger inside the computer there is a porous-rubber sealant between the fan and the vent grid in the side panel of the case.

I already mentioned the electrical qualities of the power supply. Now I want to say what role it plays in cooling the SB81P. There are vent holes in three of its four side panels, and there’s also an 80mm exhaust fan at the rear panel. The fan is very quiet, so its not having any speed control is of no consequence.