ashley9803 opened this issue on Feb 21, 2007 · 56 posts
pjz99 posted Wed, 21 February 2007 at 8:19 PM
Your biggest improvement for fan noise is to get rid of all the 90mm fans in the box and replace them with 120mm fans, including the CPU cooler. The Zalman stuff has 120mm fans on a lot of models and takes away a LOT of noise, while losing nothing in the cooling department.
The Intel E6600 is the most powerful of the lot there in terms of pure render benchmark power, but the E6400 is 90 bucks cheaper. How much is that ~15% or so worth to you, and how much are you looking at spending for the whole PC? Personally I'd suggest the biggest processor you can afford, just to reduce render time.
Note that rendering at much higher quality becomes more practical with bigger processors! :)