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Best 65W CPU for passive system

Amp34

Amp34

Amp34

Caporegime
Joined
25 Jul 2005
Posts
28,851
Location
Canada
I'm planning on building a second passive mITX system and want a CPU to put in it, as powerful as possible for photoshop and video work. My current one has a 77W 3570K but I've had to underclock it slightly to stop it overheating (just by 5%) and would prefer to not have to do that for the second one.

Haswell appears to have done great work for laptops but it appears the desktop versions are higher TDP than the Ivybride predecessors? What is the best 65W (max) processor with a good integrated GFX system?
 
The S series is probably the best bet but are there any negatives to them, for example the 4670S and 4570S appear to be equivelent to the I5-3570K, any negatives? From what I can see they should be around the same processing power but better GFX power? Missing anything major?

Edit: the other option is always an AMD chip, however I have no knowledge of them, any that would compete with the the Intel S series CPUs?
 
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Not a chance, Intel has performance per watt nailed currently.

There are no negatives to S Chips, they are just clocked slightly lower and potentially binned better, but it costs the same so it begs the question why you'd not just buy the 4770K and do it yourself...
 
At least from experience,of mini-ITX systems unless you get one of those cases which act as a heatsink,you would need a very large conventional cooler which would negate the size advantage of going mini-ITX.CS6 is starting to use OpenCL now,and even though Intel is making great strides in this area,the AMD IGPs are still faster with Adobe software. Moreover,people have done desktop builds in such cases with AMD APUs,so it is possible.

However,unless you are in a hurry,Kaveri is meant to be launching for desktop later in the year. It will have cores with increased IPC,a GCN based IGP meaning massively increased compute performance and probably a power consumption decrease.

Edit!!

I would also ask this in the SFF section as a number of people there have done passively cooled AMD and Intel builds.
 
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As a small tip, any 120mm (or bigger) fan running at around 500 RPM is totally silent. So if you get one of the big OC coolers and tune the fan right down either with a cheap fan controller or speedfan you won't hear it. This amount of air flow is pretty significant and enough to cool a 95W CPU even.

Well, maybe AMD CPUs with the soldered heat spreader, I'm not so sure about Haswell or Ivy with their crappy TIM. You might want to go with an AMD APU as a result, the heat transfer from the soldered IHS lends itself much more to this kind of minimal CPU cooling. The best results I've seen were actually from an Athlon XP-M which due to the bare die was straightforward to cool totally passively with a standard socket A heatsink, even though it had a TDP of 45W.
 
Ok, bit of a back story to answer a few questions and comments. :)

I currently run a passive system with a 3570K in a Streacom FC8 EVO passive case (heatsink style case). The second computer I'm looking at building will be very similar, either in the same case or a more HTPC passive mITX case.

With the current system at full speed and running P95 the case just isn't enough and it ends up with runaway temps and throttling so I've underclocked and undervolted the CPU by about 10%. That means it maxes out at around 90 degrees, not great but I don't envision running 4 instances of P95 regularly. Standard idle temps are around 40 so not an issue and I don't really play games on the machine (only occasionally want to do video processing). Streacom say you can put a 95W processor in but obviously not (the case is HOT to the touch so it's not an issue with heat transfer)...

With the new machine I was wondering about sticking a 65W CPU in from scratch rather than having to underclock a more powerful processor, hence the original question.*

I shall have a look into the AMD/Adobe suggestion and also the Kaveri tip. I was hoping Haswell would sort this out, however it looks like the new Haswell desktop chips actually have a higher TDP than the equivalent Ivybridge ones.

*I've had problems with the board underclocking and currently have problems with sleep mode, notably it doesn't come out of sleep properly and after 3 tries restarts to load. Not sure if this is a problem with the board, setup or due to the underclocking.
 
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