I have a rather loud water-cooled i9 gaming computer pressed into service as a music production rig. I thought about installing a fan controller or building some kind of sound deadening box for it. Then I just put it in another room. Problem solved.

that’s what I am doing for years:no fans in my ‘control’room....just a hdmi and three usb lanes ......very silent......on full load

https://m.fr.aliexpress.com/item/328926...9173627163

This fanless pc with i3 7100u does a decent job with pianoteq. Along with 4Gb RAM and 64Gb SSD it reached my home for less than 200€. Install of linux mint 19 was super easy. Boots up & ready to play in 15s.

Performance is good for my playing. With no optimization it will start going red & cracking when polyphony goes beyond 48, way beyond my playing style (requires a lot of notes with continuous sustain pedal though, not in my reach despite my love for Satie - I tested by pushing the sustain while the demo jazz was playing). Much better than a fanless fit-pc I purchased 18 months ago with AMD G4 for twice as much.

It seems a Pentium J5005 would be maybe also ok, as it has somewhat lower single-core but higher multicore benchmarks. Those exist as inexpensive NUCs and for 60EUR more one can buy an Akasa Newton JC fanless case for it. Total maye 280EUR.

But to be on the safe side probably a Pentium 4560T or 4600T 35W processor would be better. For those one can build a system with an Akasa Euler MX case and GA-B250N Phoenix-WIFI motherboard. In a low-memory and small-disk configuration that's around 400EUR.

Hmm.

My subjective experience is that it really makes a difference if you only boot into runlevel 3, i.e. without GUI, and run PTQ headlessly. This saves a lot of processors cycles. You can configure PTQ through starting it with X forwarding from another computer with X windows installed:

ssh -XC -c aes128-ctr tinkerboard.local bin/start-pianoteq611-gui

I'm using a Hifiberry AMP2 on the Tinkerboard, but I guess the built-in DAC is also not too bad (as in the Raspi) so you might just try the setup for about 60 € ordering a Tinkerboard.

But I'm also interessed in a more powerful **fanless** computer, the Intel NIC have fans AFAIK.

lorez wrote:

Would something like a Surface Go be enough for PTQ?

Spit-ball guesstimate of around 40 PTQ PI (+/-5) for the Pentium Gold 4415y (assuming no throttling or heat issues). It is a 7-8th generation CPU so you might get better performance but it is a budget mobile CPU. A step up would be the m series ( m3, m5 etc.), then the u series.

And as EvilDragon noted, the higher the base Ghz speed the better.

It’s a 7th gen and it’s very close to a low m series cpu but yeah, you’re right a u series would have been great. I’m looking for a fanless, (in my case also tablet like) solution too and I waited for the Go since it was announced but it seems like a no-Go

Would something like a Surface Go be enough for PTQ?

Spit-ball guesstimate of around 40 PTQ PI (+/-5) for the Pentium Gold 4415y (assuming no throttling or heat issues). It is a 7-8th generation CPU so you might get better performance but it is a budget mobile CPU. A step up would be the m series ( m3, m5 etc.), then the u series.

And as EvilDragon noted, the higher the base Ghz speed the better.

But then I realized that the headless side of this option wasn't going to work because I am often switching VSTs. And I wondered why 'fanless' was on my list also. "Quiet" really was the goal, after all.

And so I concentrated on Intel offerings until I realized that there is another solution: just buy a once high-end 4 year old I7-equipped laptop and upgrade its HD to an appropriately sized SSD. You can get such laptops for little money, and I am now considering switching all my VST stuff from my desktop pc to such an older i7 laptop.

In general, any 7th or 8th generation Intel CPU will run Pianoteq decently (top Celerons on up). I believe the Celeron N4100 is 7th gen and very similar to the Pentium N4200, so probably a PTQ PI of around 40+.

The i3/i5-7###U and i3/i5-8###U mobile CPUs might work fanless or with a low speed/quiet fan. Assuming no throttling, they will run Pianoteq nicely. For reference, my two MacBook Airs have older versions of the same mobile CPUs: 4th generation i5-4250U @ 1.3 GHz = PI of 40-72 and 5th generation i5-5250U @ 1.6 GHz = PI of 72-112.

There are also the Intel Compute Cards which are ridiculously tiny, but require a dock with a fan. The low end is a N4200 and it goes up from there.

In terms of bang-for-the-buck the Pentium G4560 is a cheap workhorse - more powerful than the CPUs above, but it’s a desktop CPU and requires a fan. It works in many of the mini-ITX motherboards so you could build a relatively small desktop system a few inches larger than a NUC. I’ve seen mini-ITX cases around 9x9 inches.

After that you’re looking at the i3-8100 desktop CPU and higher.

:-)