Fainless main PC with 3 screens

[deca]

Hi all,

I need a little help putting a system together. I used to be up to date on CPUs and mainboards but have not been following it since I did my last upgrade 6-7 years ago. My current CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 with an Asus P5Q ATX mainboard. Initially I was going to get a whole new system with an i3-4330 but I'm not sure there would be any advantage to this in performance or power any more. The only other peripherals I use are a sound card, which I can take out if needed, and an Intel SSD.

Anyhow, I would want a system that is fanless and supports 3 screens simultaneously. Can I make this work with my current system or would I have to replace some parts?

I would mostly need advice about:

1) which cases would work
2) which power supplies
3) how to support three screens

I looked at HDPLEX cases, but I don't think those would work with my mainboard and I couldn't find any that would.

Thanks!

[CA_Steve]

Welcome to SPCR.

What are the monitors (resolution, video input connector(s))? Things get more complex when you are talking 4k vs 1080p, for example.

[washu]

An i3-4330 is quite a bit faster than a C2D E8400 in raw CPU performance. Passmark for example rates the i3 at ~2.3X the speed of the C2D. It's up to you to decide if that increase is worth it. If your system is running acceptably for your uses then there may be no point in upgrading.

In terms of power consumption, the i3 will use less power than the C2D if everything else is equivalent.

The built in HD graphics 4600 of the i3 supports three displays as long as one of them is display-port and your MB has enough video connectors. However, as CA_Steve said 4K requirements can complicate that.

[deca]

Thanks for your replies and the welcome! The monitors are at 1080p or less. I use two screens for university work and the third is a plasma TV.

I'm mostly okay with the current performance though chrome and firefox do get choked up sometimes. From what I've found with a quick search, the two processors seem to be close in terms of performance so I'm a little surprised by the 2.3 times difference. I wouldn't mind upgrading if it'll make a noticeable difference, but not for just a minor step up. Being fanless is more important to me than performance right now.

The screens are a Samsung P2450 (HDMI, VGA, DVI) an old Hyundai L705 (VGA) and a Panasonic Viera TV (HDMI, DVI). Ideally I'd like all three of them to be connected and active, and I think the Intel integrated graphics only support two active at a time.

[CA_Steve]

Here's another very brief comparisonof the e8400 vs the i3-4330. Call the i3 ~2x as fast for single and multithreaded work. That said, if all you are doing is web browsing and watching videos, you don't need a faster CPU. Chances are your browsers are bogging down due to something else - lack of RAM being the usual culprit.

Could we start at the beginning? If you would detail out the rest of your current system (RAM, storage, etc) and your applications, we could fine tune the best/cheapest path solution.

As is, your current system would need to add an inexpensive video card to support the third monitor.

[quest_for_silence]

Being fanless is more important to me than performance right now.

Please mind that fanless parts usually cannot go into a fanless enclosure (at least, if you want to be "sure" that your rig won't overheat).

[deca]

That's interesting that the i3 is so much faster. I'll keep that in mind as I might still end up upgrading, but it's not a priority right now. Thanks for the link. I have 3 GB of RAM (had 4 but one stick broke and I never replaced it), one Intel 80 GB SSD (the rest of the storage is networked and in a different room, so I don't have to hear it) and a soundcard (which I plan to remove anyway). The mainboard is an Asus P5Q (ATX), but I can replace that if it would make it easier to work with a mini/micro board.

I mostly use my PC for research and writing (which is what I want two screens for), and I also use it for watching movies via XBMC (on the Panasonic TV). Other than that it's just some standard applications with no special requirements. I'm a really light user so I hope I can get away with it being completely fanless.

[washu]

The Intel FAQ on triple display actually claims that the only thing that does not work on Haswell is 3 TMDS (DVI or HDMI). So in theory your three monitors will work in a DVI/DVI/VGA, HDMI/HDMI/VGA or DVI/HDMI/VGA configuration as that would only be 2 TMDS. However, I have never tried or seen this working. I've always had one display on displayport.

[deca]

Thanks washu. You're right, as I just went to the FAQ as well and it seems the chipset itself does indeed support three active displays, so upgrading might be the best option for me still. The only thing needed then would be to find a small mainboard with three video outputs. I do dread re-installing and setting up everything, but that's unavoidable.

[CA_Steve]

Cheapest path is to still try to salvage your current system - I don't think the e8400 is the bottleneck. It might be the 3GB of RAM and lots of Chrome tabs open. It might be a build up of s/w cruft on your OS partition. What video card do you have that doesn't support the three outputs you need, anyway? HDMI/DVI/VGA is a common mix.

fanless for the sake of fanless is a hobby. Aim for silence, instead. Figure out what's making noise in your current system and replace it (case fans, stock cooler?, psu fan, vga cooler/replace with cheap 3 output passive card, etc..). That'll run under $100. Maybe run task manager when things are boggy, and see if it's the cpu or RAM that's the limiter.

[lm]

I have a passive NVidia GPU at work that can run 2x Dual Link DVI and 1xhdmi simultaneously.

Asus-GT640-DCSL-2GD3-GeForce-GT640-2048-MB-DDR3-PCI-Express

This seems to do exactly what you need?

[ggumdol]

I don't think the e8400 is the bottleneck.

I beg to differ from CA_Steve. I do think E8400 can be the bottleneck because there were major architectural changes from Core 2 Duo to i3/i5/i7 CPUs. At the same time, if your current memory size is smaller than 4GB, it is quite likely that you can enhance the overall speed simply by increasing memeory size to some extent. However, I tend to think i3 CPUs are much faster than Core 2 Duo (BTW, does it support DDR3?). It really depends on which applications you use in which setttings but i3 will be 2+ times faster on the average. For instance, due to inefficient implementation of "Hardware Acceleration" in Firefox, I can clearly feel the distingushed difference between Intel's built-in graphics and Nvidia GTX graphics card when I'm skimming through webpages by hyper-fast scrolling plus smooth scrolling functions of my Logitech mouse at 60+ frames per second on my 1440p monitor. That's one of reasons why I use a discrete graphics card.

fanless for the sake of fanless is a hobby.

I fully agree. I would go so far as to say it's merely an ephemeral obsession. You can build a completely silent and considerably more stable (in various senses) system in various form-factors because you don't need the very culprit of the system noise, i.e., graphics cards. As far as I know, almost Haswell motherboards support triple monitors. There are so many options you can choose from if you don't have any constraint on motherboard form-factor and chassis footprint. It occurs to me that i3-4130 with an inexpensive (Asrock?) motherboard will deliver. For your informtaion, the cheapest Haswell ITX motherboard is likely to be Asrock H81M-ITX almost everywhere in the world. If you prefer a future-proof system, Asus Z97 or H97 motherboards seem to be decent options because they are supposed to support next-generation CPUs and 1440p or higher-resolution monitors whereas Asrock support 1440p only on their top-tier models. Asus also completely revamped their BIOS fan control according to articles by AnandTech and Tech Report.

[CA_Steve]

I beg to differ from CA_Steve. I do think E8400 can be the bottleneck

I guess we'll agree to disagree. My last system was an e8400 with 4GB and a SSD for OS/Apps. Never had any slowdowns while web browsing with many tabs/watching video on two monitors. It took adding game play to the mix to stress the CPU.

[xan_user]

I moved from e8400 to i3, didn't see much change in normal usage.

Who was it anyway that said it first on spcr? "Fanless is pointless."

[quest_for_silence]

I moved from e8400 to i3, didn't see much change in normal usage.

+1 (gone from q9650 to i5-2500K and from e8600 to i5-2320, a while ago).

Who was it anyway that said it first on spcr? "Fanless is pointless."

It mostly depends of user expectations (as fanless is actually more silent than anything else, even if it's often unpractical and sometimes without considerable advantages): anyway, I found this.