[alkit]

Hi,

I've priced the following 2 builds to be almost the same price in my country:

A-
CFI-A6719 mini-itx chassis with 150W PSU and 4cm cooling fan
Sapphire E350M1 White Pure Fusion Integrated AMD E350 motherboard
2gb Generic DDR3 ram

B-
Generic "slim" ATX chassis with 2x 80cm fans
Gigabyte Odin 370W PSU
MSI Intel G41M-P28 motherboard
Celeron E3400 CPU
Powercolor HD5450 GPU (need the HD bitstream capability)
2gb Generic DDR3 Ram

So these are what concern me regarding the 2nd build:
1) The 2nd build will be a lot louder than the 1st build (chassis fan, CPU fan and PSU fan?)
2) The 2nd build will not have as much of WAF appeal, but that's not a very major concern...

So the question is - how much of a benefit will the 2nd build give me?
Will it outweigh those cons I have mentioned?
And lastly, how loud will the 2nd build actually be? I do have a projector at the back, so will it sound the same or will it be very audible above the projector fan?

Thanks in advance for the help!

[eskro]

definitely go with build A for quietness...

builb B more noisy but more powerfull too,,,

but build A still does it all, NEtflix-HD, 1080P movies & Bitstream HD-Audio....

i say go for A then,,,

[Choque]

I have an E3400 aswell and a GeForce GT 430 and...it's dead silent. I placed a Scythe BIG Shuriken on the CPU replacing the stock fan and unplugged the stock GPU fan and replaced it with a be quiet! one (any Noctua would work too) and you hear nothing. You only notice the 2 LEDs on the front of my Lian-Li case, otherwise you wouldn't know if it's turned on or not.
So if you don't mind buying 2 extra fans and replacing the stock fans with them, I don't see a problem noisy-wise.

Edit: And I even have the two 80mm stock fans which are in the Lian-Li case plugged in!

[wicky]

I did a comparison with my E3200 build and my E350 build, which you can find here, you may find the results useful.

Basically, if low power and quiet operation is the goal, the E350 system will be the better route - provided that 40mm fan on the E350 is kept in check. I have not used that board, but the typical 40mm fan is audible, especially when there are no other moving parts, and can create rather annoying whines. I would advice replacing the fan with something like a Silenx 40mm fan. They are about $10 and very quiet, the draw back is they push less air which may effect cooling performance with a heatsink that small. The MSI E350 I used in my comparison has a better heatsink, and as I and others have found, it is actually good enough that you can run it passive - without any fans.

In terms of performance, the E350 is just as capable as the E3400 build for SD and HD content, the difference will come in the menu system, especially if you are using fancy interactive skins. I have found that while scrolling through a large collection of movies (600 or so), the E350 can bog down trying to load all the fan art, thumbnails, and info. Moving slowly is not an issue. Also note that if you are running a lot of background apps that do various other things will also eat into your CPU resources and can cause performance issues. So in that case, the E3200 is a better route.

The more performance you really need, the more you will benefit from the E3200. And as Choque notes, even these E3200 celeron (and higher end chips) can be passively cooled, or cooled with silent fans. My E3200 build for example used only the fan in the PSU to circulate air. The power supply was mounted in front of the cpu socket, so I relied on a large tower cooler that was just tall enough to sit right against the PSU fan, so the PSU fan was drawing air through the heatsink, cooling it and the PSU components. Since the CPU never got very hit with that big tower, it didn't impact the stability of the PSU or the CPU. Another way I tried was using a 150w PicoPSU to power the system, and where the PSU was mounted in the case, I simply left open to channel air, or I could mount a fan in that spot, lots of options.

Choosing the right heatsink and case are critical for making low noise systems, the better designed the case, the more effective the cooling can be. Choosing the right fans are also important, not all fans are created equal.