Building a Pentium-M Based Quiet PC?
Dec 29, 2004 at 3:25 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 17
Zoide

Zoide

Headphoneus Supremus
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According to this article , it might not just be feasible but also desireable...
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 7:37 AM Post #2 of 17
afaik, theres only one or two desktop motherboards that can be used with those chips right now and theyre not exactly cheap. They do have low heat output though and great performance per mhz.
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 8:10 AM Post #3 of 17
It's still got a way to go before it becomes "desirable" in anything but the noise and bragging rights department. Sure, it performs very, very well, but it's being held back by the fact that there's nothing in the way of a real desktop chipset for them yet. The board there is basically just a laptop motherboard with a few extras grafted on. Give that thing a real dual channel memory controller, something more than AGP 4x, and onboard networking that isn't tied to the PCI bus, and then we'll see what it can really do.

I'm not saying it's not impressive, because it is. But right now, you can do just as fast and just as quiet (and get more onboard goodies) with an Athlon 64 and a good quiet fan for a whole lot cheaper.
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 10:25 AM Post #4 of 17
Once shuttle has a Pentium M XPC machine (with the fan-less external power brick featured on some of the units) I will bite, as this could mean a completely silent system (save for the only noise of the Samsung hard drive, which is currently the quietest hard drive greater than 120GB). A couple 160GB drives and a DVDRW would complete this system, and it would be powerful enough for gaming/serving/workstation duties and other more intensive tasks that the Via systems cannot touch. Finally we have power and silence…The only lingering issue is cost; the prices of the M chips and the boards themselves are way too steep to consider, but I'm hoping prices will drop as availability and awareness increases. Here’s hoping…
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 11:28 AM Post #6 of 17
A review of AOpen's i855GME board. (Another mfr also has one on its way, DFI if I'm not mistaken.) They also have a Pentium-M barebone to go along with it, the XC Cube EY855. A quick 'n' clueless review at THG revealed that it's indeed very quiet. With a fanless graphics card (e.g. 9600 or somesuch) and PCI sound card taking up the expansion slots, this could make a nice HTPC... though it would have the horsepower of an allrounder.
Sure these first boards aren't exactly overwhelming in features, but they're better than nothing. If something 915 based is in the works (which I hope), all the better.
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 12:00 PM Post #7 of 17
Quote:

Originally Posted by Edwood
If cost is not an issue, then Pentium M is the way to go.

-Ed


If cost is no issue, I'm building a dual or quad Opteron monster with 8 gigs of RAM and 16 400 gig hard drives in 4 RAID 5 arrays. Then I'm wiring it for gigabit ethernet and sticking it in a closet somewhere to sit and be a handy-dandy all-purpose server and multimedia encoding box, with a side job of running Folding@Home when it's not doing anything else.
icon10.gif
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 2:51 PM Post #8 of 17
The added cost just isn't worth it IMO. You can spent that extra money on better audio related equipment.
 
Dec 29, 2004 at 3:18 PM Post #9 of 17
Hmm, these DFI boards sure look more attractive than the AOpen. That 64-bit PCI slot is nice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lan
The added cost just isn't worth it IMO. You can spent that extra money on better audio related equipment.


Sure something with a 90 nm Athlon64 on an NForce3 250Gb would be more cost efficient, but if you want an "Intel on Intel" solution without a frying pan, or simply one of the literally coolest CPUs on the planet...
 
Mar 18, 2005 at 10:23 AM Post #11 of 17
Quote:

Originally Posted by sgrossklass
Hmm, these DFI boards sure look more attractive than the AOpen. That 64-bit PCI slot is nice.


Sure something with a 90 nm Athlon64 on an NForce3 250Gb would be more cost efficient, but if you want an "Intel on Intel" solution without a frying pan, or simply one of the literally coolest CPUs on the planet...


The 64 bit PCI slot is pretty worthless, IMO with the advent of PCI-E now. Unless you want to use a hardware RAID controller cars like a nice 3Ware, and even then you'l need at least 4 drives to really oversaturate a 32 bit PCI bus.

-Ed
 
Mar 18, 2005 at 10:38 AM Post #12 of 17
I have that Pentium M AOpen board on "loan" right now. I haven't had the time to play around with it yet, but it's build quality looks pretty good. Not as bullet proof as the over engineered Lippert Mini ITX Pentium M board I have, but still quite nice.

There is a very annoying issue of lack of off the shelf heatsink support for the Pentium M. Because it's not a desktop chip, there is little to no 3rd party cooling solutions out there. And because the Pentium M lacks a heatspreader, Pentium 4 heatsinks wont' work without modifications. Namely you need to add a shim, which will detract from cooling capabilities.

The AOpen board does have a standard P4 type retention bracket, but the CPU socket is rotated almost 45 degrees, and......oh what the hell. I'll take some pics and show you....
biggrin.gif


-Ed
 
Mar 18, 2005 at 11:14 AM Post #14 of 17
I'm using P4 2.6C on full ATX M/B
The coolermaster JET4 HSF at the 2K RPM is extremely silent yet totally capable of cooling the CPU (I live less than than 1 degree away from equator)

Antec TRUpower PSU runs at a RPM that's so slow that my M/B can't even detect the speed most of the time, so it's also near silent.

Seagate Barracuda 7 or 8 are just unaudioble even when reading/writing, and performance is satisfactory at the least. I doubt 2.5" HDD can be any more quieter than them.

for VGA I'm using Matrox G450 which use passive cooling.

So as long as the CD-rom/DVD-writer is not spinning, I can hardly hear any noise even at a silent night. I put my tower at ground level, that might have help a little too.

So If you build your desktop with acoustic property in mind, it's not that difficult to build a near silent PC while remaining mainstream. (I don't see Pentium M for desktop as mainstream)
 
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