Silent M350 Chassis with an Intel i3 (or i5). Possible?
Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:06 pm
Hi,
I'm planning to upgrade my PC to a silent low power unit to sit behind my desk out of view. My PC use is normally barely above idle, nearly 100% web browsing and listening to music with occasional video watching, etc. I'll be running Linux. So I would like to get a quiet, power efficient system for this purpose. After reading the article on Fluffy2 viewtopic.php?f=14&t=64995&p=565036, I am tempted by the Intel Ivy Bridge cores and I'm considering either an i3 or an i5 (I'm debating whether my usage patterns really warrants an i5).
I also like the idea of the M350 chassis but I'm concerned about cooling. From what I've read in other forums about this case, it is a good idea to have a CPU fan to get some airflow. Ideally, I would like to have this as the only fan, or a small case fan over a passive heatsink, either way I would like to keep the number of fans down to an absolute minimum to avoid noise (my current fanless server annoys me because I can hear it's hard-drive! But I'm willing to tolerate a slight fan noise on my desktop).
Can anybody offer any suggestions as to what will/wont work with this CPU and Chassis selection?
Alternatively if you can suggest a different chip architecture that would be better suited I can then read up on that.
Other components are:
Intel DQ77KB
1x SSD
8Gb Ram (2x sticks)
I'm planning to upgrade my PC to a silent low power unit to sit behind my desk out of view. My PC use is normally barely above idle, nearly 100% web browsing and listening to music with occasional video watching, etc. I'll be running Linux. So I would like to get a quiet, power efficient system for this purpose. After reading the article on Fluffy2 viewtopic.php?f=14&t=64995&p=565036, I am tempted by the Intel Ivy Bridge cores and I'm considering either an i3 or an i5 (I'm debating whether my usage patterns really warrants an i5).
I also like the idea of the M350 chassis but I'm concerned about cooling. From what I've read in other forums about this case, it is a good idea to have a CPU fan to get some airflow. Ideally, I would like to have this as the only fan, or a small case fan over a passive heatsink, either way I would like to keep the number of fans down to an absolute minimum to avoid noise (my current fanless server annoys me because I can hear it's hard-drive! But I'm willing to tolerate a slight fan noise on my desktop).
Can anybody offer any suggestions as to what will/wont work with this CPU and Chassis selection?
Alternatively if you can suggest a different chip architecture that would be better suited I can then read up on that.
Other components are:
Intel DQ77KB
1x SSD
8Gb Ram (2x sticks)