[JepZ]

Well, if you think water cooling is cool, try passive cooling.

A few years back I build my current PC:

- Core i7-4770S (Haswell, so you see its not that new anymore)

- 32GB RAM

- SSD 840 EVO 1TB (not that new either)

- some passive PSU

Last year I added an

- AMD Radeon 460

So the whole thing is completely passively cooled.

So no noise at all and I am pretty happy with the performance. I don't know what 'instant' performance in Lightroom means, but so far my experience with Darktable was just fine (actually, I was wondering why some options have a 'slow' or 'fast' suffix). That said, I am just a casual Darktable user, so I take all my photos in RAW and JPG and view them most of the time in the JPG version, but when I would like to create a photo calendar of some sort I use Darktable to get the most out of the pictures.

The only downside is that hardware doesn't age that good :-/

  $ grep -m1 bugs /proc/cpuinfo 
  bugs            : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2

[tracker1]

Even the newest CPUs have those bugs (well, AMD doesn't have meltdown iirc). That said, I think the old 47xx cpus have aged extremely well. Running a 4790K myself, and will probably hold out for 2nd or 3rd gen Ryzen (unless Intel has something competitive in price/performance). The latest CPUs only do much better for many-core chores, and I just don't do enough of it to spend $2k+ on a new setup (migrating some bits) over keeping what I have for a 10-20% boost in performance.

[digi_owl]

Passively cooling 65W TDP?

[JepZ]

Apparently ;-)

Actually, I bought the CPU, mainboard and cooler assembled together from mifcom, so they did the testing that everything runs stable and smooth.

Just looked up some other details:

- Mainboard: ASUS Z87-Deluxe

- Case: Xigmatek - Asgard Pro

- PSU: 500W - FSP Aurum Xilenser

- CPU Cooler: Thermalright Macho HR-02 passive [1]

As you can see that cooler is pretty big. The case isn't too fancy but it does the job and venting slots on the upper side. Interestingly dust doesn't seem to be a problem, in fact I never had so little dust in any previous pc.

[1]: http://media.bestofmicro.com/N/G/460924/gallery/Thermalright...

[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Xigmatek+-+Asgard+Pro&t=ffab&iax=i...

[digi_owl]

Now that is a brick of a cooler.