Modern Fanless CPU??

[Guest]

Hello all.

I have built a few PC's over the years that have been able to run the CPU's fanless. ie I buit a pentium 3 1ghz a while ago, and put a 80mmx80mm copper heatsink on it minus the fan and it doesnt get hot at all, even when tested at 100% for 3 hours.

I am after building something a bit more modern that will run fanless, without spending a fortune on, say, a pentium 4 modile cpu.

I have a good socket A mobo. If i bought, say, an athlon xp-m 3000 cpu for it, will it be able to run fanless? Any suggestions for other cpus that can be run fanless?

Thanks in advance. Adam

[Chiefish]

You can run almost any new cpu fanless, if you get the right size cooler for it, i have an E6400 dual core running fanless as my server with a Skyth Ninja heatsink on it, It runs 24/7 without any trouble, Now if you intend to o/c at all with it i would not suggest running fanless tho. There are many cooling solutions out there to run silent now a days , just do some googling on fanless cooling.

[JAC]

Also consider throwing in some underclocking. For me on my work machine the slight performance reduction is stomped on by the deafening sound of SILENCE.

[FDIV]

The turion 64 in my htpc only produces 25 watts of heat and will run fanless fine.

[Wizzard1]

Fanless is overrated- Add a VERY slow (7v) 120MM fan for the entire case (in the front/hdds and our the top/power supply), and you have more airflow that you'll ever need, with NO noise!

[Guest]

Thanks all.

The PC wont be completely fanless, one controlled 120mm or 140mm fan will be the setup.

The last quiet pc i built, I cut a 120mm hole in the botton of the psu, and fitted a 120mm fan, drawing air in through the psu from the outsde of the case and over the cpu heatsink below, with great results. Anyone else used this setup?

I am looking into the Turion 64 route. Apparently these CPU's work in a socket 754 mobo, is this correct?

I am not after buildng an ultra modern system, just an all in one system thats faster (and much quieter!) than what ive got now. (athlon xp 2400, 1.25gb ddr 333)

If i built a system with a good all-in-one socket 754 mobo and with, say, a Turion MT-40 or ML-44 + 2gb DDR 400, will this be significantly faster than my current system?

[Wizzard1]

Most s754 DESKTOP motherboards, are just for DESKTOP socket 754 processors- Even a mobile proc with the same rating as a desktop 754 proc will not work in most motherboards.

[Guest]

[EzPcMars]

How about liquid cool? Too expensive?
If they would use the case as a massive heatsink that could be fanless.

[FDIV]

Mine is running on an Asus K8V-MX board. When I was building it I frequented http://www.silentpcreview.com. Here is an article on the turion http://www.silentpcreview.com/article300-page1.html. Mine works fine, it identifies the chip as a turion and runs it without issue. My board does not differentiate between different grades of turion however and this leads it to provide the chip with the slightly higher voltage that the lower grade model requires. Not a problem though, it is not dangerous to the chip or anything.

Before I installed the processor I added a heat spreader off of a Pentium 3 tualtan processor so that the die would not be damaged by a heavy heat sink unit. Here are some pics of my home theater build. It is quite quiet.

I kicked around the idea of removing the last fan altogether but I think the video card, north bridge, or ram might fail. The processor fan is the only fan in the system and it is reversed to exhaust the case. Even drawing hot air over the processor it stays around 33 C. This is quite cool considering this mobile chip is rated to around 90 C. Passive cooling would definitely work for the cpu.