On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:12:28 -0700, Carlos Moreno wrote:

I thought the Atom processors were designed to use no fan, but the
available MB/CPU combos I've seen sport a big heat sink with fan. I
wonder if I could downclock to a point where I can simply remove the fan
with no risk to fry the CPU? (actually, would that be the case with a
regular intel or AMD processor?)

I have a regular AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual Core BE-2400, on a Gigabyte
MicroATX motherboard with the AMD 780G chipset. This is one of their low-
power 45W processors, runs at 2.2ghz max. It is really energy-sipping...
idles around 21°C with a poorly-attached stock heatsink (no thermal
paste) and stock fan in a small case with two hard drives sitting at
around 40°C. No case fan, either.

I've considered running it fanless, but didn't bother because most of the
time, the fan is running so slow as to be inaudible. But I wouldn't
hesitate to try it fanless, either.

AMD has made a whole series of these low-power dual-core processors
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_AMD_Athlon_X2_microprocessors#.22Brisbane. 22_.28G1_.26_G2.2C_65_nm.29)
and you can get a single-core Sempron version for about $40 (http://
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16819103698). Although I
only paid about $45 for mine on sale!

Tom's hardware found that these things use 7-10W when idling, and stay
under 45W when maxed out (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-power-
cpu,1925-7.html). So, I think it's quite possible to use a cheap low-
power AMD processor and go fanless.

Any other advice not involving those 3 kg fanless heat sinks? (yeah,
yeah, I'm going with the hyperbole :-) )

If you really don't care about performance at all, Atom or VIA are good
choices, as previously suggested. But those are a lot more performance-
and upgrade-limited than a "real" socketed desktop processor.

Dan