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Comment by altano | Hacker News Reader

Mobile CPUs limit you to motherboards that support them, which severely limits the other parts you can buy and will drastically increase the overall cost. Instead, buy a low power desktop/server processor. Intel usually suffixes their model number with an "L" for these and they have wonderful power-to-performance characteristics.

I currently have a server CPU, the Xeon E3-1260L. It has 4-cores, is hyper-threaded, EXTREMELY fast, and can be run 24/7 at 100% with extremely minimal cooling.

Power-to-performance is actually not a well tracked metric. You can find some information on spec.org, such as: http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/power_ssj2008.html

Like my CPU, the Xeon E3-1260L: http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2011q2/power_ss...

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Low-power Intel desktop parts are marked with a "T" instead of "L". Eg Intel® Core™ i5-2390T is 35W part, and there is couple of 45W Ivy Bridges available if you need more performance. Sadly AMD doesn't really provide much competition in this segment, almost all their desktop parts are 65W or (much) more, and trinity/llano parts are usually 100W.

The Core i5-2390T has 2000 HD integrated graphics though whereas the mobile Core i5 part in the 2011 Mac mini (and I suspect the Core i5s in most new laptops) has 3000 HD graphics. Since the goal is for the system to be easy to cool, not having a dedicated graphics chip is essential, and maybe the OP has reason to believe that the 2000 HD graphics engine might not have quite enough oomph. His article says, "Intel chose not to include very good integrated graphics with most desktop versions of their Sandy Bridge chips".

Agreed (I'm the OP). I consider HD3000 to be minimum acceptable graphics. Ivy Bridge has HD2500 in the desktop CPUs which is also (probably) acceptable and I could have stated that exception - but I was trying to keep the post simple for the mainstream audience for whom it was intended.

I have to disagree on the notion that discrete GPU would cause significant increase in noise. A passively cooled, 50W GPU (eg GT430 or HD6670) could provide easily 3-4 times more processing power compared to HD3000, which in gaming can often mean the difference between slideshow and playable:

http://www.techspot.com/review/392-budget-gpu-comparison/pag...

Modern (discrete) GPUs have also very low idle power consumption (couple of watts max afaik), so in desktop ("2D") usage the added thermal load is negliable.

OK, OK. Too late for me to edit my comment, though. And someone on the internet reported that their Core-i5 Mac mini with discrete graphics gets hot whereas my Core-i5 Mac mini without it never gets more than slightly warm. (The Core i5 in the mini with discrete graphics is .2 GHz faster than the one in the mini without discrete graphics, but that is unlikely to make much of a difference.)

Your correction does not invalidate FilterJoe's article since he is addressing people who want to spend less than $700 for a quiet computer, and surely you will agree that adding a GT430 or HD6670 will invalidate his basic strategy to achieve that goal and the quietness goal, namely, to buy a laptop. We know that integrated graphics engines tend to be unusable for playing modern games.

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