Cool, quiet, but not low-performance?

[theprobbka]

Hey y'all. I'm building a box for my folks, and they want something that is fast, while keeping cool & quiet. They say my Athlon XP 1700+ generates too much heat and noise. I was thinking along the lines of maybe a Duron 1200 to an Athlon XP 1500+. Mainly I want to keep from having to buy a second case fan--I think this would cut back significantly on the noise, and it would mean that the system would be generating less heat. What would you recommend?

The Probbka

 

[MoFunk]

Check my reply to your other post in cases and cooling.

 

[Migroo]

Definately Celeron or Duron.

I doubt they'd need the performance of the higher end chips (correct me if I'm wrong), as I bet the machine would be used for web surfing, sending email and using MS Office...

For these tasks, a Celeron or a Duron is fine. My sister runs a Duron 900 with no case fans - its fine...

 

[KenAF]

theprob,

At 2200MHz, the new P4 outputs about as much heat as a 1GHz Duron...so some form of that processor (like the 1.6A or 1.8A, overclocked) might be the best choice. The default P4 heatsink is more quiet than the Athlon and Duron Coolermaster/Taisol heatsinks...and with the P4, you don't need any case fans or case cooling.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

I don't know about the P4 heatsink, but the retail HSF that comes with the Athlon 1500+ is damn near silent. I know because I have on sitting in my living room with two 80mm case fans and the case fans together are louder than the CPU fan. I'm sure I could get by with only one of the case fans too. Even with 512k of cache, at 1.6Ghz the Northwood won't be noticeably faster than the XP 1500+, especially for the price you pay. At 1.8Ghz the picture changes. The Northie will outperform the equivalent AMD chip without a big jump in heat.

 

[scoobydooby]

Like Migroo said there's no way your parents need a higher end processor. Look at the celerons and durons because it'll cut costs and heat. By the way my old gateway had a 1 ghz athlon w/ no case fans and only what looked to be a retail HSF and it was quite stable. Good luck.
Scoob