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Current cpus

Rat

Not bored. Never bored.,
Rat
Joined
May 19, 2003
Messages
10,629
Location
Leicester, UK
Is anyone up on the current range of cpus available? I work in specifying parts for pcs, and even I am fairly lost these days. Last time I had to buy one for myself, it was fairly straightforward, as AMD were by far the best in the midrange price bracket. These days, I'm not so sure, and it's not just Athlon vs Pentium 4 or whatever, as they all have all kinds of names.

I'm obviously familiar with the concept of dual-core cpus, and that's what they all are these days, but what's the best at the moment if I'm looking to spend between £100 and £200? Intel are currently leading, as far as I can tell, if you're looking for the very best and have the money to pay for it. AMD seem to be doing a good range of budget processors. But there seems to be no consensus over the midrange.

If it makes any difference, I'm trying to build a silent system (to replace the roaring beast I have at the moment), so it needs either to be quiet as standard, or to be tolerant enough to take a new cooler from quietpc.
 
CPUs don't make noise. To have a really quiet system, after you pick your CPU start researching quiet fans and cooling devices.
 
Starthinker said:
CPUs don't make noise. To have a really quiet system, after you pick your CPU start researching quiet fans and cooling devices.
Click to expand...
Well, yes, I realize that. What I mean is that Athlons, at least, come with a cooling fan, and I assume Intels do too. As they like to claim that you'll invalidate your warranty if you use something different, I'd be happy with one whose stock cooler was fairly quiet. I'm willing to put on a Zalman or similar if necessary, but it's added cost and fuss, so I'd rather avoid it if possible.
 
I don't think you will notice any significant difference between stock CPU fans. Besides, all fans are noisy. If you're after silence don't look for quieter fans because I think that eventually you'll be disappointed. I've bought several "quiet" fans, only to find out that they are not quiet at all. There are no quiet fans, period. Go for water cooling which will possibly reduce the total number of fans to one (that of the PSU). This is what I've done with my main system and even though the PSU is a "quiet" Zalman it's still audible and makes me wish for a water-cooled PSU. But of course there's no comparison with what I had before, ie a system with 3 "quiet" Zalman fans; that one sounded like a Boeing.
 
El Greco said:
There are no quiet fans, period. Go for water cooling which will possibly reduce the total number of fans to one (that of the PSU).
Click to expand...

What water cooling solution are you using? Nearly all water coolers have a fan at the radiator and all water coolers have a water pump. Water cooling requires either a large cooling surface for heat removal via passive convection (and a maybe a little radiation) or a much smaller cooling surface and a forced air system.

Anyway, I have 3 ultra-quiet fans (variable speed 80 and 120mm) and 3 ultra-quiet drives. While not silent, it stays below my annoyance threshold. I'd recommend Rat find what his noise tolerance is and let that define the system. I remember my old system with no low-noise components used to set my nerves on edge after sitting at the machine for an hour.

My server runs one of those fanless mini-itx systems. It needs ~50W at startup, ~25W at full load and ~7W typical. The only moving parts in the whole system is a pair of very quiet hard drives. Nearly inaudible at 3 feet. The downside to this is the system is not particularly impressive: 533MHz CPU, PC-133 memory and ATA-100 PATA drive interface.
 
Wavicle said:
What water cooling solution are you using? Nearly all water coolers have a fan at the radiator and all water coolers have a water pump. Water cooling requires either a large cooling surface for heat removal via passive convection (and a maybe a little radiation) or a much smaller cooling surface and a forced air system.
Click to expand...

Reserator 1+. There's no fan and the pump is inaudible.
 
I'm using a special silent case from Antec (the P180), along with a quiet PSU (corsair 520) and a passive CPU heat-sink (Scyth Ninja).

Top this with a silent graphic card (a silent NVIDIA 7600GT from ASUS, no fan).

Make sure to get silent disk drives, western digital seem to be ok in the 320gb range (7200rpm, SATA).

As for the CPU, Intel Core2 are faster and cooler running than current AMD offering.
 
Aha, I had already ordered the Antec P180 when I started this thread. I went for the silver one, for no particular reason. I started installing bits in it today, and it's not bad at all. The only gripe I've had with it is that I have a modular PSU (a quiet one), and the plugs on the back of it make it very close to touching the middle fan.

Now I'm waiting for the day that a fanless 8800 graphics card becomes available. I feel I may be waiting for some time. In the meantime, I'll be running a 7900 with the fan replaced with a quieter one.

I think disk drives may be a problem, but at least they aren't constantly noisy. The reason they may be a problem is that my new machine will soon be replacing this one, and as this one has 1.8TiB storage, I'm going to need at least 2 750GB drives. The Seagate and Fujitsu 750s are reputedly quite quiet, but that's a good job, because there's not a lot of choice in models at that size.
 
the noisiest fan in most systems will be the graphics card, and if you want 8800 perfomance your going to be stuck with a relatively small fan running around. personally I opted to go for a 7300 last time purely because it had a pasive heat sink. The performance has been more thean adequate for me (although Vanguard has me looking longingly at the upgrade pages again)

As far as processors go the stock coolers are never much good so its worth replacing. Zalman is always a good place to start and they are fairly cheap now, the main problem with them is the size of the heat sink and they will not fit all cases/motherboard layouts. another option is to change the fan thats on the stock cooler with a quieter one. I did this for an older system by using a 80mm fan with a reduction collar screwed into the original heat sink which worked very well. In general a larger fan, as long as its decent quality, will be less noisy then a small one. obviously if the cooler that you get has the option to vary the fan speed that can also make a big difference.

Rubber washers on the mounting screws make a surprising amout of difference to the noise generated by the hard drives, so its worth using those too.
 
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