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Intel i5-3570T or AMD A10-5800K / 5700

Valis

Valis

Member
Building a non-gaming PC for a family member, where power consumption and silence is the key. (Both go hand-in-hand?).

I've narrowed it down to i5-3570T or an AMD A10-series on a mATX mobo with USB 3.0 / SATA 6 GB/s with SSD.

Going to use maybe a passive PSU and no gfx-card, but the possibility to put one into the box. Maybe a CPU cooler like this one. http://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?e=882803

What do you think guys? Maybe I can under clock the 5800K to be in the same TDP as the 5700? Since the cost about the same, the 5800K is even cheaper here. 😛
 
unless they're doing CPU intensive work all the time, a 3570T isn't going to run any cooler or use any less power than a 3570K (particularly with the second one undervolted). all sandy/ivy processors idle at the same wattage. and most stuff doesn't stress the processor at all, so you're rarely out of the idle state. playing a movie is going to lead to the same power consumption because the processor is loafing around doing that.
 
Sounds about right. 🙂 The AMD A10 is cheaper though, so I'm just having it as an alternative.

I guess the heavy work this computer is going to do is youtube, mkv/avi/mp4 and streaming from online TV channels, that's about it. The 2500 GFX might be enough for all this.

Thing is, that the i5-3570T costs 1699:- and the 3570K costs 1695:- 😛 Which is about about 50 cent in USD.
 
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If you can use a A10-5800K then you can just as easily use an i3-3220 or even a pentium G2120. The G2120 is what I would recommend to anyone who does not need 4 threads or transcoding of any sort. Even the G2120 is overkill for a typical non-gaming non-transcoding PC.
 
Well, I want it to be sorta able to do that in the future, the difference in cost is 50 - 150 USD total? Besides, silent is the importance here. Would like it to be at least a good dual core or quad.
 
you should be comparing the a10 with a Core i3 (i3 3220 or something), it have a 55w TDP, compared to the AMD CPUs at 100 and 65, CPU performance is pretty close, GPU performance is much higher with AMD.
 
I would recommend reading this:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6335/amds-trinity-an-htpc-perspective

AMD's APUs have a pretty strong showing for HTPCs and I'd guess it probably has more to do with superior software than anything. Applying shaders and filters will be better in general on an AMD GPU than Intel's.

Just considering the CPU, stock vs stock I'd take an i3 and I don't imagine you're planning to do any overclocking in a PC whose goal is silence.

It's a tossup really but I think an Intel quad is overkill for your needs.
 
For me I think I would fall back to the Intel® Pentium® G2120 it should be able to handle what you are going to throw at it and still give you solid performance. Matched up with an H61 or a H77 chipset based board you should have a solid system at a reasonable price point.
 
If power consumption and silence is key, then probably your best bet is neither of what you posted, but a dual-core hyperthreaded Intel processor. Something like the i3-3220 or the i3-2120T. If you underclock and undervolt the 3220 it will probably hit lower consumption and noise levels than the 3470t because it simply doesn't have the two extra cores to keep cool. 5800K, meanwhile, has comparable performance to one of the i3s yet has far greater power consumption & noise levels; to even get them down to stock i3 levels you would have to underclock and undervolt it.
 
Also, silentPCreview has found that there's not a lot of point in using an expensive passive powersupply. They have ones available that will suit your needs and are extremely quiet. The seasonic G360 will suit your needs just fine.

Also, go with a normal i3 processor. This will be more than adequate for your workloads and they hardly use any power and can be cooled easily. AMD is a good option if the computer is for a general workload that could include games. It's a good computer if you have kids in the house even if they may not play games on the PC now. But it sounds like the i3 graphics are all you need.
 
Hubb1e said:
Also, silentPCreview has found that there's not a lot of point in using an expensive passive powersupply. They have ones available that will suit your needs and are extremely quiet. The seasonic G360 will suit your needs just fine.

Also, go with a normal i3 processor. This will be more than adequate for your workloads and they hardly use any power and can be cooled easily. AMD is a good option if the computer is for a general workload that could include games. It's a good computer if you have kids in the house even if they may not play games on the PC now. But it sounds like the i3 graphics are all you need.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right. I've been building PCs since the early 90s, but don't always keep up with all the thing as they seem to come out much more frequent now. 😛

Here is sorta what I'm looking into. http://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=1124745
Very inexpensive passive PSU. :>
 
ShintaiDK said:
You need an external brick to power it as well tho.
Click to expand...

I might have a few spare bricks @ 3, 5, 9 or 12Volts to plug into it.

Ok, I'm adding the i3-3225 to the list, as well, since it has the better HD 4000 graphics. Should do that with the i5 as well. 🙂
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
For me I think I would fall back to the Intel® Pentium® G2120 it should be able to handle what you are going to throw at it and still give you solid performance. Matched up with an H61 or a H77 chipset based board you should have a solid system at a reasonable price point.
Click to expand...

I have recently become a fan of the B75. It costs a little more then an H61, but you get one SATA3 port and an Intel USB3 controller. Its perfect for users who only run with one HDD/SSD and perhaps an optical drive...😛
 
Red Hawk said:
If power consumption and silence is key, then probably your best bet is neither of what you posted, but a dual-core hyperthreaded Intel processor. Something like the i3-3220 or the i3-2120T. If you underclock and undervolt the 3220 it will probably hit lower consumption and noise levels than the 3470t because it simply doesn't have the two extra cores to keep cool. 5800K, meanwhile, has comparable performance to one of the i3s yet has far greater power consumption & noise levels; to even get them down to stock i3 levels you would have to underclock and undervolt it.
Click to expand...

quad core/dual core doesn't matter unless you're loading the processor up. at stock voltage the dual core 2100 and quad core 2400 draw the same power doing the same non-heavy tasks:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1202-page3.html
 
If you're loading the processor up, an i3 is better for power consumption and noise. If you're not loading the processor up, well, why are you paying extra for the 2 extra cores?
 
Red Hawk said:
If you're loading the processor up, an i3 is better for power consumption and noise. If you're not loading the processor up, well, why are you paying extra for the 2 extra cores?
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cost is the only factor in the i3's favor.

and if the processor does get loaded up, the quad core will consume less energy because it does the same task so much faster (that's covered later in the SPCR article)

frankly, a big fan on a big heat sink is more important than the particular model of ivy processor when it comes to noise.
 
The A10-5800k is an easy pick.

1) It has the lowest power consumption of them at idle Web browsing, word processing don't tax the CPU. It will be at the lowest power usage for most of the time. It will consume more when taxed, but the activities that will take place in that machine won't tax it. Video playback is offloaded to the GPU.

2) Noise being a factor, the newer Cooler Master heatsinks that come with the stock AMD CPUs are very nice and quiet. Copper bottom with copper heatpipes. These ones are recent, like in the last month or so, but are very quiet. The older coolers were heavier, bulkier and noisier. Even if any of the other CPUs would take less power, is the heatsink as quiet? No 😉

3) Hardware acceleration in the GPU for video playback works perfect in an AMD GPU. Ask the intel users if hardware acceleration works properly on theirs. If hardware acceleration doesn't work, the cPU will consume more power as the CPU has to do the decoding instead of the GPU.

4) The A10 is cheaper.
 
Wow, this is certainly a mixed bag, with the i3, i5 and the A10. HW accel don't work well on the HD 4000? Is that due to drivers or?
 
Valis said:
Wow, this is certainly a mixed bag, with the i3, i5 and the A10. HW accel don't work well on the HD 4000? Is that due to drivers or?
Click to expand...

For the tasks they will need, i'd go with the A10 as well. But honestly, they wouldn't notice the difference in any of the processors recommended here.

Save the money, get a A10 and a decent SSD drive and they'll be thrilled.

And yes, AMD's video drivers are better than Intel's.
 
Valis said:
Wow, this is certainly a mixed bag, with the i3, i5 and the A10. HW accel don't work well on the HD 4000? Is that due to drivers or?
Click to expand...

I'm not highly knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, but I think the HD4k suffers from a mix of lack of raw compute power, and Intel not having as much experience in that kind of software. It's still a fine choice but AMD's GPU will open more options as far as hardware accelerated shaders and effects (like types of deinterlacing and noise cleanup). I hope someone with some more knowledge chips in on this topic.

It's true AMD's APUs do have lower idle power consumption but if we leave GPUs out of this entirely, I'd go with an Intel CPU because they get more work done per watt.
 
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