Except for quietness I'm aiming for something that isn't bigger and doesn't draw more power than necessary. I only use Linux and will mainly do development, use VMs, emulators (Android), compilation, simulations, and have lots of browser tabs. I play some not too heavyweight games and would like to have access to CUDA, so I'm thinking a GeForce GTX 750 Ti would be a good fit. As for storage a single 2.5" drive will do fine, and no optical drive is necessary.
I've tried to come up with as concrete questions as possible, although it's hard...
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
1. I'm not sure what to settle for in terms of chassis size. I think the Corsair Carbide Air 240 looks very nice - is this a good size to aim for, or can I aim for smaller? A tiny size is nice, but practical and sufficient cooling and being able to reuse the chassis in the future are more important.
2. I'm having a hard time choosing between CPUs. I've mainly been looking at low-power options such as Xeon E3-1240L v3, i5-4690T, and i7-4785T or -4790T. Being able to leave simulations running the whole night without exceeding 25/35/45 watts sounds nice, and it might be easier to quietly keep these cool. I'm wondering if this way of thinking is reasonable, or if a decent Noctua cooler makes the TDP irrelevant even under constant full load? I'm not too picky about performance since I'll be upgrading from an i5-2410m which mostly serves me very well. Any of these options should feel fast in comparison and even without Hyper-threading I'll have twice as many cores.
3. After much reading it seems like a motherboard from Gigabyte would be a safe bet. I'll hardly need anything in terms of ports, slots and overclocking, but is there anything to consider when it comes to power draw? For instance, how do I know which motherboards will let me set the new low memory voltage - since DDR3 seems to support 1.35 V nowadays - and still be stable?
4. With this setup, especially if I went for the Xeon with only 25 W TDP, would it be a good idea to go for an external PSU (150 W?), and what tiny chassis could benefit from this? Otherwise, should I go for the Seasonic G360W gold recommended here on SPCR?
Very grateful for some perspective on this!