Any feedback welcome

Cheers

What sort of power do you need?

http://global.shuttle.com/products/productsDetail?productId=1847
got an older one of these, runs laptop chip/board in a bigger case, there are 2 tiny fans which come on occasionally I think, though I can’t hear anything from it.

I want to run the internet/windows/media player – dvd’s etc & music

Plus basic photo editing (not photoshop)

Cheers

Not fanless but 18 months ago I built an i7 pc with “bequiet” (http://www.bequiet.com/en) fans and they have been incredibly quiet. Pretty close to silent unless you put your ear right up to the case.

I used a graphics card with 2 very large fans on it, better as they spin more slowly, so less noise.

The worst fans for noise IMO are the really small ones as they spin at very high rpm. I disabled the two on my motherboard as there was plenty of cooling across it anyway (and temperature sensors everywhere to check)

It’s amazing how much nicer a silent pc is – definitely worth doing.

No but seriously contemplating water cooling for my next major update on the big rig.

For small to medium powered machines passive is easy enough provided you get the circulation right, you obviously can’t stick it in a cupboard and expect it to run well but it shouldn’t be too difficult.

It sounds like you could comfortably do it with an all-in-one board like the Intel NUC boxes are a good bet, i3 or 5 processor and space for a 2.5″ drive, the DVD/Bluray could be run externally.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc5i3ryh.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc5i5ryh.html

Looks like a lot of money but you would probably spend that building a PC from parts (unless you already have most of the bits), the i3 would be plenty IMO and you would get an upgradable mac-mini type machine for a fraction of the price (minus OS).

My bud south of me did. “No spinning rust” and one of

these:)

Here’s another similar heatsink worth considering.

It’s an i5, and also had a passive GPU.

http://www.quietpc.com/ is the trad. place to start.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/ may also be of use.

TL;DR Intel CPU, SSDs and Fanless GPU – yep. Reasonable performance possible.

Personally, I prefer massive fans and heatsinks, all at low RPM. Unless I’m gaming or rendering, I can’t hear more than a whisper from mine*, just because it’s a large case, 120-140mm fans all turning slowly.

I built an even quieter one with a Fractal Define R3 [rubber-lined] and a i5 2500. Again, big case, slow fans.

*5650@4GHz on Zalman CNPS-10X Extreme, + 7970 Vapour-X, big Seasonic PSU and a Coolermaster Storm Scout Mk1 case.

The worst fans for noise IMO are the really small ones as they spin at very high rpm

Help!

Personally, I prefer massive fans and heatsinks, all at low RPM. Unless I’m gaming or rendering, I can’t hear more than a whisper from mine*, just because it’s a large case, 120-140mm fans all turning slowly.

Coolermaster Hyper EVO FTW.

Thanks for the good info guys. I’m going to go through them and try and come back with something sensible – slightly out of my depth, and wondering how much I will have to manage myself. Seems like these are for a more advanced user?

Here’s a question – how do the chips I see in these machines linked compare with what I have now? The likes of i3 i5 etc

AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz

I built one from bits bought from Quiet PC. I ordered all the bits from a shopping list based on one of their systems (I has in a hurry so I didn’t have time for them to build it). I use it for music recording, and it makes no noise at all. It’s brilliant. After spending 15 years buying ‘quiet’ fans etc (which are never as quiet as hoped) having a totally silent one is ace. It’s based around a low wattage i7 w/passive cooler, SSD’s and passive PSU in a slightly weird looking tower.

Lot’s of ideas on here….

http://www.quietpc.com

I use a raspberry pi does all that you need and no moving parts. Mine is running as a Plex server for DVD playing to a Chromecast.

I went to PC shop for my present PC and said I wanted silent. He built all the bits and bobs for that end, but it’s still ‘loud’

When I switch it off, it’s obvious just how much noise everything is making

So, only way to get silent is fanless?

We have a couple of Intel NUCs knocking about, nice little boxes. Wife’s Mac mini is near as silent too with an SSD fitted.

Water cooling generally won’t mean quiet. You replace fan noise with pump noise, and usually the radiator needs a fan anyway. High cooling performance for the noise level but most people are well served by lower wattage processors, with a big heatsink and a big, slower turning fan.

IMHO, yes, I have bought loads of quiet fans in the past, and they are still noisy enough to be heard. Fanless is the only way to make sure it’s really quiet.

So are fanless systems TOTALLY silent?

Or is there still some noise from power supply chip crunching etc

Mine is totally silent…no whining, no buzzing, no sound at all. As much sound as a pencil.

it’s like this one…
http://www.quietpc.com/sys-a470

So for doing what I want the machine to do, is it a ‘media pc’ I should be looking for?

Or a ‘Ultra NUC’?

I’d have thought one of the compact ones would do it, they just won’t be good for gaming as you can’t fit a graphics card (not that I know much about that), but for basic photo editing, a NUC should be fine

Great, thanks for your help
It won’t be used for games

I wouldn’t get too hung up on “fanless” as that usually means low performance or sky-high price.

Modern systems monitor temperatures and run their fans according to how much cooling is needed – often little or nothing when they’re not being stressed. So it’s down to whether you need a system that’s silent absolutely all the time, or if you’ll tolerate a little fan noise if you’re using the full performance for longer durations – like if you’re editing 1080p footage from your gopro.

The small brick systems like the Intel NUC use laptop-style power supplies (no fan, no extra heat in the case), solid state drives (no spinning discs or seeking heads to make noise) which just leaves a quiet, efficient fan in the box just in case it gets too hot.

NUC’s etc. are all right for moderate use – but take a look into the CPU spec’s. NUC’s use low watt, low cache or dual core ‘mobile’ i3 or i5. And a laptop style brick.

SSD is a given – But check the benchmarks and specs on a desktop i5 like a 4960k vs a NUC i5 4200. It may not matter for your purpose – but worth understanding if you want to keep it for 3+ years. Of course the extra heat (TDP) has to go somewhere though!

The TDP measure (wattage) of the gen4 Core i5, i3 etc. is a reasonably effective proxy for performance it seems.

The TDP measure (wattage) of the gen4 Core i5, i3 etc. is a reasonably effective proxy for performance it seems.

You might have hit the nail on the head with that one.

So for doing what I want the machine to do

Sorry to be so direct, but how much do you have to spend?

Also –

how much storage space do you need [based on your existing and planned use]?

is a small system more important to you than powerful one?

simon_g – Member

I wouldn’t get too hung up on “fanless” as that usually means low performance or sky-high price.

Totally agree with this tbh… I went with good airflow and quite a lot of fans, going slowly (not actually on CPU control, I’d rather have a constant ignorable noise) Even on facemelting overclocks it’s not noisy, but on standard clocks and with 2 ram boards (for airflow, 4 is a bit tight) and running all the fans at stall speed, it’s barely audible- the hard drive makes more noise than the cooling.

TDP is nothing to do with performance, my QX6850 has the same TDP as an i7 4960X, when you actually compare die sizes, cache and all the other parameters affecting this you might as well just say ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’. It’s simply a measure of the heat generated which, for very basic editing will be the sum total of naff all.

Of course – but, crucially, he was talking only about the current same gen chips.

Otherwise, it just wouldn’t work 🙂

Here’s a question – how do the chips I see in these machines linked compare with what I have now? The likes of i3 i5 etc

AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz

Have a look at the chart, I’m still using the X4 955 for lots of stuff including video editing and complex simulations. I’ll not make the box silent without water but it doesn’t need to be.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

I’d go with a couple of big silent fans personally..

even a fan spinning really really slowly on the CPU heatsink makes a huge difference to getting rid of the heat..

the new grey noctua fan’s are my current faves..

one on a big tower heatsink
one in the PSU
and one as a case exhaust

mount with good quality soft rubber fan mounts

and then stick a manual fan controller on them to really tweak the noise / performance.. then you can turn the fans up if it gets warm in the room or you want to do something CPU intensive..

stick an SSD hard drive in it too as a boot drive and you should have a near as damnit silent PC..

ive also got a big normal mechanical hard drive in mine for storage.. but i use a program called revosleep to turn it off…

coil whine can be a problem (much less so nowadays..) but thats mostly luck of the draw with components..

My main PC is built into a nzxt s340 case with 3x120mm case fans and the nzxt kraken watercooler. It’s running a haswell i5 clocked to 4.5ghz. The only time I can hear it is when I push the graphics card hard or reboot it. If you put a passively coooled card in there it would be near silent all the time.

Not all watercooling being equal mind. I had a corsaire one in my old PC (now vm server) and the pump and radiator fans were noisy as hell. I swapped them out for a BeQuiet pure rock cooler and it’s quieter and still keeps temps in check. Not quiet like the nzxt pc though.

http://anandtech.com/show/9166/intel-nuc5i7ryh-broadwellu-iris-nuc-review

A review of a bang-up-to-date, fast, NUC machine.

Another interesting thing to look at is the Corsair 1200W PSUs as the fans only kick in the event of it being heavily loaded, which if you aren’t running lots of GPUs isn’t going to happen, for example an overclocked i7 with every core at 100% compiling code doesn’t start the PSU fan.