Advice on Fanless PC

[Carlos Moreno]

Hi,

I'm trying to assemble a PC with moderate-to-low computing
power, hoping that I will be able to get something with as close
to ZERO dB of noise as possible.

I thought the Atom processors were designed to use no fan,
but the available MB/CPU combos I've seen sport a big heat
sink with fan. I wonder if I could downclock to a point where
I can simply remove the fan with no risk to fry the CPU?
(actually, would that be the case with a regular intel or AMD
processor?)

Any other advice not involving those 3 kg fanless heat sinks?
(yeah, yeah, I'm going with the hyperbole )

Carlos
--

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Hi,

I'm trying to assemble a PC with moderate-to-low computing
power, hoping that I will be able to get something with as close
to ZERO dB of noise as possible.

I thought the Atom processors were designed to use no fan,
but the available MB/CPU combos I've seen sport a big heat
sink with fan. I wonder if I could downclock to a point where
I can simply remove the fan with no risk to fry the CPU?
(actually, would that be the case with a regular intel or AMD
processor?)

Any other advice not involving those 3 kg fanless heat sinks?
(yeah, yeah, I'm going with the hyperbole )

Carlos
--

VIA Nano can be fanless, I believe. And the Nano should be competitive
in performance against Atom.

New Shuttle PC has Via Nano, fanless cooling - The Tech Report
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16985

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

VIA Nano can be fanless, I believe. And the Nano should be competitive
in performance against Atom.

New Shuttle PC has Via Nano, fanless cooling - The Tech Report
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16985

Yousuf Khan

Here's a motherboard for Nano:

VIA EPIA NX12000EG Fanless Nano-Itx Motherboard - iDOTpc International, Inc
http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=481&IDCategory=115

 

[Oliver Nowak]

Yousuf Khan dachte sehr stark über folgendes nach :

VIA Nano can be fanless, I believe. And the Nano should be competitive in
performance against Atom.

New Shuttle PC has Via Nano, fanless cooling - The Tech Report
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16985

Yousuf Khan

The downside of Shuttle's offerings is that these things aren't
upgradeable. Several years back (in a time when the average
off-the-shelf PC made your ears bleed after a while) - I bought a
Pentium M based Shuttle barebone. Back then, I thought I would never
want to upgrade the 1,5 GHz CPU, but now I regret buying it instead of
a standard (micro)ATX case, especially when running Java IDEs like
Eclipse or Netbeans.

 

[mindwave]

these folks have what you need.

but as stated earlier, these are one shot pc's, dont try and update the processor later:

http://www.mini-itx.com/

but they have the goods and the info!

 

[Dan Lenski]

I thought the Atom processors were designed to use no fan, but the
available MB/CPU combos I've seen sport a big heat sink with fan. I
wonder if I could downclock to a point where I can simply remove the fan
with no risk to fry the CPU? (actually, would that be the case with a
regular intel or AMD processor?)

I have a regular AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual Core BE-2400, on a Gigabyte
MicroATX motherboard with the AMD 780G chipset. This is one of their low-
power 45W processors, runs at 2.2ghz max. It is really energy-sipping...
idles around 21°C with a poorly-attached stock heatsink (no thermal
paste) and stock fan in a small case with two hard drives sitting at
around 40°C. No case fan, either.

I've considered running it fanless, but didn't bother because most of the
time, the fan is running so slow as to be inaudible. But I wouldn't
hesitate to try it fanless, either.

AMD has made a whole series of these low-power dual-core processors
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_AMD_Athlon_X2_microprocessors#.22Brisbane.22_.28G1_.26_G2.2C_65_nm.29)
and you can get a single-core Sempron version for about $40 (http://
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698). Although I
only paid about $45 for mine on sale!

Tom's hardware found that these things use 7-10W when idling, and stay
under 45W when maxed out (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-power-
cpu,1925-7.html). So, I think it's quite possible to use a cheap low-
power AMD processor and go fanless.

Any other advice not involving those 3 kg fanless heat sinks? (yeah,
yeah, I'm going with the hyperbole )

If you really don't care about performance at all, Atom or VIA are good
choices, as previously suggested. But those are a lot more performance-
and upgrade-limited than a "real" socketed desktop processor.

Dan