I'm looking to build a quiet/silent office PC mid-tower case. I'm thinking i7 CPU and a fan-less GPU card. Probably the most intensive activity would be HD video editing. The cases I've identified in no particular order are; Fractal R4 Gigabyte Cupio 6140 Corsair 550D Antec P280 Any opinion on these cases is welcome. Other options too. Personal experiences preferred.
Fractal R4 is quite good choice. It has plenty of 140 mm fan slots and sound dampening is quite good for that price. Also removable dust filters are nice bonus. Gigabyte and Corsair cases I have no opinion. Antec p280 overpriced and only 120 mm fan slots. It also does not give anything to justify high price. Forget it. i7 + fanless GPU sounds like waste for that usage. Also, Xeon 1231 is same as i7 without GPU.
I didn't know that. Is there any advantage to one or the other; Xeon & separate GPU or the i7 and on-board graphics? The on-board graphics HD4600/4800 I know they can run video streams, Bluray etc. Can they edit and render HD effectively with Adobe Premier or similar mid level video software? I do have an i3 with HD2200 in the house hooked up to a projector and it suffers from black level issues. I believe it is clipping BTB. My old Radeon 9800Pro was flawless in this regard.
Xeon is much cheaper and Intel graphics drivers sucks anyway, so I7+integrated graphics is not recommended. Amd because of discrete video, i7 loses it's only advantage against Xeon, that is integrated graphics. For video editing, discrete graphics OR high end integrated (AMD APU) is highly recommended. So for video editing, good possible choices are: - Xeon + discrete video card - 8-core AMD (on video editing 8 cores rock) + discrete video card - (Cheaper solution) AMD APU 4 cores with high end integrated graphics
