Cogito wrote:
Roscoe,
I dont plan on doing any heavy video encoding work on my audio servers.
Me either. Point is, that for the low loads we see on our renderers, there's no reason to buy expensive fans (although, you may want to avoid the very cheapest ones) since any decent fan is quiet enough when it runs slowly. NUCs have fans, I've never heard mine from more than 6" away. My NUC has four cores, and no hyperthreading....
DaveM, as far as noise from PWM fan speed control, the loads on renderers are low enough that you could use a non-PWM fan with an LM317 or similar variable voltage supply and keep the CPU happy w/o having a noise issue. In most cases if the voltage is just high enough to guarantee that the fan actually starts, you'll do fine keeping the CPU cool enough under the loads we deal with.
Roscoe