Found this post on Gearspace:
So, I have looked at every single mini PC in existence and they are all noisy. There are silent ones as in fan-less that have chips like the N100, which would probably be absolutely fine for my use case with 4 12th gen cores I believe, but DPC latency info is impossible to find, and the ones where I CAN find good dpc latency info are stupidly noisy, like up to 40db. The Mac Studio is 6db… so… I don’t think it will work.
Then it hit me.
“What are you doing, Theo you fool? Save and spend the extra money to get…”an Apple iMac Pro!
They are 13db and the 8 core never spins the fans up, but I also get a 27" panel include and the best windows performance of any Mac. You see, I have tested this myself when I had one. The maximum DPC latency was 20us (lol, it’s ludicrous) in Windows 10, and of course I’ll use Win 10 Pro since they are older processors and there’s no need for Win 11.
Furthermore, I pushed them to the absolute limit in Windows at 32 buffer and could get 100% asio meter load in any DAW without clicks and pops.
I always said it was the best Windows PC I ever used, and the entire thing has been escaping me the last few weeks.
Near silent, perfect thunderbolt compatibility in Win (not that I will need it), 8 USB ports, they just work, and the funny thing is, I can buy a little $200 freesync portable 14" monitor I can put next to it anywhere in TATE (portrait) mode so I can play all my retro arcade games at the proper aspect ratio and with adaptive sync (the only way to see animations of arcade games properly that originally ran below 60hz, and there’s a lot of them). 2 birds, one stone - and I can get one for about a third what I sold mine for in 2020. So…
I can’t think of anything else that makes more sense… buy from a seller like OWC or a refurb seller in OZ that gives a 1 year warranty standard, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s the only way to get
- Guaranteed quiet that won’t disrupt the rest of the studio
- Guaranteed ultra low DPC latency
- Guaranteed excellent ultra low buffer performance in Win 10.
That is my new goal now, I am starting to save, and I am not buying another thing until I can afford it. Or sell a kidney.
I mean sure there are little PC boxes for a few hundred bucks, and AMD integrated graphics are great, but as said, the noise. The best one I found, with tested low DPC latency of around 300 (that’s fine), idles at just under 30db. Idles. I think it would drive me insane.
Cheers all, decision made.
Thoughts?
https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=16977230&postcount=52