After receiving my ultra board, with one Wifi antenna and some assembly components missing, it did not take long to have it assembled and tested and I am really pleased with this little thing, however... It turned out the cpu and board do get rather hot and the manual told me it is the responsibility of the user to prevent overheating so I ordered the CPU fan from UDOO which arrived last week. After mounting the fan, setting up the bios and testing the thermal behaviour I was not impressed. The fan is very noisy with a high pitch and the board stil gets rather hot. It was time for a different approach. In my scrap box I had a couple of intel pentium cooling fans and selected one with a frame that would nicely fit the UDOO X86 board. I wanted the fan to be easy removable so it stands on top of the board, fixed by two pins. I did not have a connector that would fit the original fan connector on the board but I preferred a continuously running fan anyway so selected the sata power connector as my 12VDC power source for the intel fan soldering two tap-off fan wires to the ultra-kit supplied sata power cable. That did not work I found as the sata power plug 12VDC is not wired on the UDOO X86 board. A new yellow wire straight from the power plug to the sata power connector pin 1 solved this. My 'new' fan works great and can easily be taken off.
I realised there is an easier way to power the fan, just use a short male/female 12VDC board power extension cable with fan-power tap-off. That way no modifications to UDOO X86 board or sata power cable are required. Why do we always start with difficult solutions first?
Markus Laire´s solution: https://www.udoo.org/forum/threads/cpu-fan-noise-level.4841/#post-26473 (asked one post before, for a mount for a bigger fan). My solution: https://www.udoo.org/forum/threads/how-to-fan-adapter-cable.7081/page-2 Markus is kinda like yours. Always on full power. Mine is connected to the original fan-power cable. So I have management, but a bad one, because the BIOS settings are not the best ones.. Some other guys just used a USB-Fan. Also provides enough cooling for it..
I've also tried 80mm ARCTIC F8 TC fan which has built-in speed control and temperature probe so BIOS control is not needed, just connect 12 V and place included probe to heatsink - works quite nicely. (image)
I was a bit fed-up with buying new parts to make it nice and most of the time pay twice the sales price for shipping as there are no electronic parts stores in town anymore, so I am now focussing to re-use parts I already have but do not use. It is cheaper and more fun. In the meantime I have installed a (used) 15 ohm resistor in the fan yellow wire to trim the already low fan noise down even lower. Need to do run a CPU full load performance test to see the fan-noise/CPU temperature balance.
very nice, I prefer your DC jack breakout connector, I was planning a similar solution for my diy nas, to power usb hub/sbc. Then a 2 second mis plug of 9V broke my heart. I would assume most of the noise is coming from vibrations, do you have anything to isolate the fan, felt pads/rubber bands
This approach to cooling the entire board is interesting but I wonder whether it is really necessary. On my Ultra the CPU certainly gets too hot with anything other than minimum load. I fitted a quiet 25mm fan to the CPU heat sink and that keeps the CPU cool. It only runs about 20% of the time. The only other components that get noticeably warm are, for some odd reason, the various grey inductors. So is there really any reason to cool the whole board?
I think you're taking the initial post too litterally. Example, if I said my board was getting hot, what I really mean is the processor with the heatsink, not the whole the pcb + components. The smaller fans have a very noticeable whine, as per OP, this is the case with udoo store fan. Personally I would rather increase footprint a little and have silence, or a low hum.
