If you are primarily interested in creating a low-noise, low-power computer, you should also definitely consider AMD's latest 90 nm Athlon64, based on the Winchester core. We measured the power requirements of most of the current desktop processors for our Pentium 4 570 review, and the results of the 90 nm AMD Athlon64 processors 3000+, 3200+ and 3500+ were amazing: they only consume 3.2 Watts in idle mode (running Cool & Quiet). An Athlon64 3500+ never required more than 31 Watts even under full load. This is all the more amazing if you consider the performance level that this particular processor delivers.

We used a K8N Neo2 from MSI (nForce3) as our Athlon64 reference system for this project. An Athlon64 3200+ with Winchester core was our CPU of choice here.