I'm putting together a mini-ITX system and would like something with more processing power than a dual-core Atom or Brazos. What are the CPU candidates?

Depends on how much you want to spend and what you mean by low power. You're not going to find anything more powerful than atom/brazos that uses < 10w of electricity until Haswell comes out. The dual core Ivy Bridge chips use very little energy compared to chips of old, but most will still use about 30w of electricity under normal load. If this is good enough for you, then you could get something like an i3-3240T (35w TDP) or an i3-3220 (55w TDP). They both have the lower version of the Ivy Bridge graphics chip, HD 2500. It's more than enough for multimedia, but it won't game very well.

Thanks. From what I'm reading, the i3-3240T is OEM only. I see that there's an i3-3220T, though.

What exactly does Haswell promise in this arena? They're going to be able to lower TDP from 35W to under 10W for comparable performance???

Sort of...mobile CPUs go from 17W to 10W. If you want to roll your own build, you could try to find a QM77 based Mini ITX mobo...but then you get to pay mobile IVB CPU prices.

Don't worry about the OEM thing. That just means they come in tray packaging and don't have a heatsink/fan included. Most here don't care about the lack of heatsink/fan as SPCR builds tend to use custom cooling solutions anyway. Otherwise, its just packaging (and warranty is shorter - but when was the last time anybody had a CPU die that wasn't OC/abused?).

I'm actually doing a Mini-ITX build right now using an Intel DQ77KB and an i5-3470T. Trying to get it fanless/no-moving-parts into a mini-box M350 (using a "big chunk of copper" 1U Dynatron heatsink). Might not be cool enough, but I'm giving it a shot. Still waiting delivery on a couple of parts. Pictures and results in the forum in a week or two.

Did you ever finish this build? Would love to hear about it.

I'm still waiting for the processor. Delivery tracker has estimated delivery for next Tuesday. I've got all the parts - DQ77KB, 2x8GB SO-DIMMs, Mushkin 120GB mSATA, Dynatron 1U copper. Re-purposed M350 is all cleaned up and ready to go. Should be a fast build. I'll write something up in about a week or so.

Been thinking of alternatives if its not cool enough passive. Turns out there is enough room for the thin 120mm fan from a Scythe Big Shuriken between the case top and the heatsink. I want it to be dead silent, no-moving-parts, but if I have to I'll drill holes in the top of the case and use rubber push-through mounts to hold the fan from the Shuriken. Should still be near silent.

I've also confirmed that FrozenCPU will special order the Akasa Euler passive case for this motherboard. Its and expensive case but another option if I get serious about "dead silent, no moving parts".

On that motherboard, with an mSATA boot drive, are both SATA drive headers usable? I was trying to figure out how to fit an SSD and two 2.5" drives into the M350. Using an mSATA mini card would answer that.

Can't you use the Dynatron T459 cooler w/fan? It was mentioned recently in another thread.

Yes. According to Intel's block diagram for the motherboard the mSATA is on a completely separate SATA interface to the Q77 PCH (page 18 here: http://downloadmirror.intel.com/21339/e ... Spec04.pdf). The mSATA interface is SATA-II, so don't waste your money getting a really fast SATA-III mSATA card. This is the main reason I chose the Mushkin - it happens to be SATA-III, but it was also cheap.

BTW - there are four SATA headers on the DQ77KB, not just two. Two of them are SATA-III and two of them are SATA-II.



You could use that, but I'm going for a "no moving parts" build. The fan of the T459 kinda defeats that idea. I won't be using the built in graphics at all for an ESXi server and the CPU is only 35W, so I am hopeful the Dynatron K129 will be cool enough passive.

If I do have to have a fan the Scythe 120 from the Big Shuriken should be much quieter than the 80mm fan from the T459. I won't need to run it very fast even if its needed. It will make it near impossible to put any other 2.5" drives in the case but I don't need them as most storage will be remote on a big ZFS file server.

Just noticed the main-page review of the Noctua NH-L9i. http://www.silentpcreview.com/Noctua_NH-L9i.

It's probably low-profile enough to get under both 2.5" mounts in the M350. I measured my M350 and it would be close. Then if your MB supports mSATA (like the DQ77KB) you'd be able to get an SSD and 2x 2.5" drives into the M350.

Also - compared to the picture above - there is also another 1/2 height mini-PCIe slot on the DQ77KB that you can use for a laptop WiFi card that will work much better than that USB WiFi stick. Both the full height and half-height IO shields are pre-dimpled for antenna ports. Example: Intel Intel Ultimate N 633ANHMW.

See here: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=65465&p=568823#p568823

FYI, tomorrow I am building a dirt cheap box based around an entry level Sandybridge 1.9GHz Celeron G465 (35W) in an Antec ISK110 that will be running XP. Having built a few systems around the AMD Brazos E350, I will let you know how much faster the Celeron system is.


Andy

There is no-doubt that the 1.9GHz Single-core Celeron with HyperThreading is faster than the Dual-Core 1.6GHz AMD E-350, its still not lightning quick, but what do you expect from a £30 CPU. Which one would I use given the choice of those 2 options.... the Celeron, it only works out to be ~£20 more than a motherboard with its integrated E-350 and in the cost of a whole system its peanuts - personally I would also consider at a faster 35W CPU - but this was a budget system running Windows XP.

The included fan is actually pretty quiet in a normal working environment in an Antec ISK110, there should not be a need to upgrade the fan in the ISK110 in usual desktop or media centre usage - I didn't have a chance to run prime 95 or anything else demanding, and I did not note that the fan span up at all during its installation and setup.


Andy

I'm not very familiar with the lower end socket 1155 CPUs. Below the i3, are they all single core?

You can pick and choose different CPU's and see the differences.

http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/us/e ... ct=desktop

From the look of things there are not a lot of 35W CPU's to choose from and not all of them have obvious model numbers to identify that they are 35W parts, such as the G465 that I used.


Andy

There are currently 18 socket 1155 processors with TDP of 35W or lower & integrated graphics (and 3 more with no graphics).

See here: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s ... xTDPMax=35

Thanks to both of you for those links. I hadn't realized that only the i5 and i7 offer Turbo frequency boost, nor that there were i5 CPUs with just two cores and 35W TDP.

What does the 'T' in the i5-3470T product name indicate?

At the eTailer that I buy most of my stuff at, there is nothing between the G465 (~£30), and the i3 3220 (~£97), that's a pretty serious difference, I hope you have more luck.

I have noticed this in the past when the Ivybridge line of CPU's first came out, all of the 35W Sandybridge CPU's disappeared and only the expensive 35W Ivy CPU's replaced them, looks like this has not changed in the UK yet.


Andy

basically it means they throttled back a normal CPU so you dont have to be bothered to do it yourself.

...after bin-testing and selecting good samples to ensure that it would work perfectly. Its pretty much the same way they select higher clock samples off the line. The I5-3450 and I5-3470 are made from the same lith on the same die, but the ones that pass the bin testing for higher clocks get labeled 3470 and shipped set with higher clocks. And they aren't really doing that "just to save you the trouble of overclocking it".

They are not just throttled down - the voltage ratios are lower than you could achieve with a simple undervolt. To run undervolted at the same voltage as the I5-3470T you'd have to set a lower clock than the 2.8 they set it at (unless you got lucky with a "good" chip). And when you lowered the clocks you'd lower the max turbo too.

For reasons I don't completely understand they also set a lower Tj on the "T" chips - you can't let them get quite as hot before they start throttling. It may be to help total system thermal management since they are targeted for applications with less tolerance for high thermals. I certainly don't think its because the chip can't take it...they are pretty much the same as all the others so they should start tunnelling only above 107C just like the rest of the Ivy's.

Andy, you need to expand your etail horizons. Lots of socket 1155 cpus at Amazon.co.uk.

I missed a bit of important info, "35W", they don't list any 35W CPU's between £30 and £97.


Andy