I had a Gigabyte ITX motherboard with an 8700G in a Goodisory A01 case which made a pretty great APU build. However I couldn't help feeling that the ~30W idle was a little disappointing. I tried swapping my CPU and SSD into the MinisForum MS-A1 which runs on average 20W lower. (At idle, that's about 65% less power). This thing is drawing nearly the same power as an 8th gen i3 NUC now. However the cooler on the MS-A1 leaves a lot to be desired. It's kind of loud, audible even at the lowest settings, there's no custom fan curve in the UEFI, and it isn't even that effective. I wanted to throw my Noctua NH-L9i on it, but the cooler mounting holes aren't AM5 spec and the case doesn't fit anymore. So I designed and 3D printed my own cooler mounts and case to match. I also designed a custom fan controller with a thermistor to monitor the heatsink temperature and control the fan speed. It plugs into the existing 4 pin micro-jst connector on the board and can be programmed with simple low / high temperature and associated PWM duty cycles.
This thing now idles at 12W, 28c, and in complete silence. At maximum synthetic 16 core CPU load, it drinks 70W and hits around 60C, and under a typical gaming load it only hits 50C, and the cooler is much quieter than stock. I am running the CPU in the AMD 35W UEFI power profile as I find it barely impacts performance but keeps things considerably cooler.
I uploaded the cooler mount and the case to Printables in case any one is interested to make their own:
- Mount: https://www.printables.com/model/1309017-minisforum-ms-a1-noctua-nh-l9i-am5-mount
- Case: https://www.printables.com/model/1309100-minisforum-ms-a1-noctua-nh-l9i-case
