Upgrading my Lian Li 351 HTPC. Haswell too hot?

[Skunkwourk]

On a whim I bought the Powercolor 7850 for $99 after rebate in hot deals and have been tempted by the upgrade bug.

My current aging setup is

Lian Li v351,
Phenom II 905e,
Scythe Ninja Mini, (passive with no attached fan)
Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H,
8gb G. Skill Ram,
Gigabyte 5750 Silent Cell,
Corsair 650HX PSU

Let me be clear, I really love this setup. It's cool and quiet it allows me to watch movies just fine and also allows me to game at mid settings although at a lower res of 1600x900 or 1280x720 (which I'm ok with). I also don't plan to overclock. I've thought about upgrading to

Lian Li v351,
i5 4570S,
Scythe Ninja Mini,
ASRock H87M Pro4 LGA 1150 Intel H87,
8gb G. Skill Ram, (DDR 3 1600)
Powercolor AX7850 1GB,
Corsair 650HX PSU

I'm just really looking for a good balance between heat and noise. If the Powercolor 7850 SCS3 passive would have fit, I would have bought that but it's just too tight of a case. My Silent Cell barely fit. Pics at the end

That being said, I have a few concerns.

1) My main concern is whether or not the 4570S Haswell would be too hot to keep in this case? I'd like to keep the CPU cooler completely passive in the interests of noise but I'm also not sure if the Mini Ninja is even adequate anymore (fan or not).

2) Alternatively should I go for an Ivy Bridge 3470S instead since it runs cooler? I'd need to switch motherboards as well.

3) I probably won't do it, but what if I bought the 4570S and attempted to delid it, would things stay cool enough then?

I'd appreciate any advice, sorry for writing so much.

Current setup below.

 

[crashtech]

I think there should be some Haswell i3s coming out next month. I'm waiting to see what those are like before building my wife a mini-ITX system. Really even an Ivy i3 is plenty overkill for an HTPC. Do you think you need the extra cores for the games you play?

If you want a killer low power CPU, there is always the E3-1265L V2 45W, but it's expensive. I'm surprised there aren't any low-power desktop Haswells available, even though there are part numbers and they say they are released, where are they? What you need is a 4670T.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

The "S" isn't really worth it. It has a lower TDP because it is downclocked. You could always downclock yourself.

 

[Termie]

I haven't tried it nor have I read about it, but my guess is that running a Haswell passively is not going to work. I agree with the above that the low power chips generally aren't worth it, but actually in this case it might help.

 

[crashtech]

The ones that will run passively aren't in our hands yet. I'm hoping more will become available when the i3s are released in a couple weeks.

 

[Skunkwourk]

I suppose I'm more concerned about heat and noise than low power which is why I chose low TDP cpus. I understood that heat would be an issue when I bought the case so I'm willing to make some sacrifices to make a balanced gaming HTPC. I was hoping under load the "S" series would still be cooler than non S variants.

As for the games I play, while they may be playable at 720, I'd really like to make full use of the 7850 and hopefully be able to play on High Settings at 1080 with Vsync, AA and AF (none of which I currently enable). My system barely makes the recommended requirements for a few of the games I own.

Yeah that E3-1265L V2 is way out of my price range. I was hoping to spend less than half that amount after selling off my current MB, CPU, RAM and some other "junk" lying around.

Is there a more reasonable CPU I could keep passive and pair with the 7850?

 

[crashtech]

I think you might be surprised at how well a higher clocked i3 like the 3245 will feed your 7850 in most games. Their single threaded performance is through the roof, and with HT you get heavy thread perf about on par with an older quad core. They're among the best within the TDP constraints you are looking at. The new ones are gonna be that much better.

 

[Skunkwourk]

Hmm well it seems like Haswell is out. The i3 3245 isn't bad, it actually seems pretty perfect but I'll just have to convince myself I won't miss the 2 missing cores. Maybe I should just wait till Sept to see what i3s get released. In the meantime I'll probably research passively cooling a 3470S Ivy a bit more since it seems like there are a few people who have been able to get away with it.

Really appreciate the help guys.

 

[crashtech]

I know exactly what you mean about cores, I'm formerly from the moar core school. Leave Task Manager open sometime during a gaming session and check core utilization for yourself. Many games rely heavily on one or two main threads that want to run as fast as possible, this is the reason new i3s can defeat older quads in many game benchmarks even though the old quad still looks really good in synthetic CPU benchmarks.

 

[mfenn]

The S and T model CPUs are build especially for temperature limited situations just like this. I think that you'd be fine with a 4570S if you made a duct that directed air from one of your front fans over the HSF.

 

[Torn Mind]

Ignorance of how electronics work is rampant along with older hardware being "oppressively slow", and hence manufacturers have mostly free reign on manipulating humans into fearing they won't have enough.

My brief explanation of understanding CPU speed.

Since I too don't know the finer details of CPU usage, I had to figure it out using information from someone in the know, primarily at scali's blog.

Speed= "what is done per clock"*clockspeed*(core utilization). Core utilization is a natural number inbetween numbers 1 and 4, inclusive, and is entirely coding dependent. Hence, in your case, it is your game collection that will determine whether moar cores is necessary.

Now, the most contingency-proof choice is getting a "K" chip because you can DOWNCLOCK until you can reach that point your cooler can cool the CPU passively.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I used to have a PC-V351. It was my first build after getting back into PCs a few years ago. Since then I've tried many cases and I've never met one that was as hard to keep cool. Every build I've worked on since has been a cakewalk compared to that Lian Li... Your post brings back some special memories, like mounting a Noctua U9B-SE2 *inside* the cube, because it was too tall to slide the tray back in after the HS was attached to the CPU.

Have you considered a case change? The CPU temps on the machine I'd had assembled in my 351 dropped by more than 10 degrees after I switched to a normal case. I'd imagine any modern quadcore would be hard to cool passively in that cube.

Of course you could always slap a quality 80mm fan on the mini ninja and run it as quiet as your 120mm fans up front. I currently have some 80mm Noctuas ziptied to a GPU and they're inaudible at 5v. Just a little bit of airflow makes a huge difference, and a Haswell would likely be doable with a fan on the heatsink. I believe I had a PhII 940 OCed to like 3.5GHz in mine for a while and just barely kept it around 60 degrees at load. That CPU was a volcano.

 

[Skunkwourk]

Yeah the case is a real pain to work with at times but when you finally get it all together and working it's extremely satisfying. I just have a thing for making small HTPC's that are quiet and moderately powerful.

If I can't get this build to work out, I think I'll get rid of everything and try out ITX. My next case will probably be a BifFenix Prodigy or maybe a Lian Li PC-Q28.

 

[crashtech]

Underclocking a "K" CPU is a really great suggestion, and one that I had no experience with until recently, when on whim I set my 2700K for 20X and .99V. Booted up on the first try with low temps. Unplugged the CPU fan on my Hyper 212 and maxxed out the cores for a while to see if it got hot. It never exceeded 60°C with ambient over 30°C. I'm sure there was more to be done as far as tweaking final multi and voltage for maximum perf, but as proof of concept it was pretty cool and too easy. For an i5 in an HTPC this might be ideal, since you could fine tune it after it was all together and in place to give a good balance between perf and temp.

 

[Skunkwourk]

Update.

Well I pulled the trigger and got the 3470S. I'm pretty happy with it and only a small part of me thinks maybe I should have gotten the i3 instead and saved roughly $60. The CPU idles at around 39C and after a few hours of gaming it went up to about 59C so I think I'm good.

That's it for this case though. The 351 has the firewire port up front but it seems harder and harder to find a motherboard that can utilize it. I also had to mount the heatsink from within the case due to the lower placement of the CPU on the LGA 1155 boards compared to AM3 so installation was a bit tricky.

Thanks for all the help.

 

[mfenn]

Glad it worked out in the end!