14 Sep
2014
14 Sep
'14
11:13 a.m.
Ede Wolf <listac(a)nebelschwaden.de> wrote:
As HT generally has a bad reputation for audio,
currently, the AMD
FX-8350 is on top of my list, as the floating point preformance is
said to be rather good and lots of cores should be ideal for running
lots of effects in parallel - though unfortunately not every core
does have its on FPU. As it is not going to run 24/7, the insane
energy consumption is somewhat acceptable.
I have a similar AMD FX-8320 and it's a decent machine for the price for
doing software development and testing (mostly targeting servers). The
big selling point for AMD CPUs is ECC memory support[1] at a much lower
price than Intel Xeons.
sensors(1) reports power usage via fam15h_power kernel module and mine
idles around 35W. It'll max out to 125W when I run a parallel build
or SoX effects (mostly integer-based).
I went with the Zalman FX-70 heatsink and one of the high static
pressure (many blades) Noctua fans on the heatsink. There's only one
other 120mm case fan (also Noctua, but low static pressure with few
blades). Both fans run at the lowest possible speed, so temperatures
hover on the high side around 60C when I max it out.
My older AMD Phenom II 945 and my Intel Xeon E3-1230 machines run the
bigger Zalman FX-100 fanless (both 95W, AFAIK). Both can run parallel
build/test suites all day with only a single, slow, 120mm case fan
(which even cools multiple HDDs/SSDs).
Fanless PSUs all around :)
[1] that said, I'm curious why ECC hasn't taken off in the audio world...