Maybe you should rethink the whole notion of a fanless workstation. But if you've got cash to blow and reliability as well as multi-threaded performance are not a priorities, why not?
If you care about reliability, spend your cash on premium workstation gear. If multi-threaded performance is a priority, spend it on more cores. In either case, don't spend it on such an expensive case.
If single-threaded performance is a priority, you want to overclock and you therefore want a K CPU. You can probably still get away with fanless cooling by disabling cores.
soleen wrote:i7-3770T or i7-3770s, first one is 45W, second one is 65W, both are compatible with HD-Plex case, and both are priced the same. Any suggestion?
The official TDP ratings are useless.
Past experience has been that the value of the S and T models is dubious. But maybe Intel will surprise us this time. If you can wait for reviews, you'll have a better basis for choosing but if you can't, I guess the T version would be the safest. But I think the S version would be safe as well and it's faster.
Note that you may not benefit much from the i7 models. The slowest i5 might get you a similar performance for a good bit less money depending on your workload.
If you would actually benefit from choosing one of the i7 models, they'd run hotter than the lesser models in your computer and you'd probably benefit even more by getting a faster CPU and using fans.
soleen wrote:someone please sanity check my configuration
The SSD looks dodgy, especially for the money you're paying. Do you really have a use for such an expensive SSD? If you do, consider getting more reputable models such as the ones sold by Intel or Crucial. Especially if you aren't going to use an UPS and if you don't need the best performance, consider an Intel 3xx.