[smuh]

I recommend the Arctic Cooling Silentium T2 Case + Artic Cooling SuperSilent 4 CPU Cooler + some sort of gpu cooler
+ Samsung Harddrive - Thats what I bought and the system is barly audible.

I left the case open and can barly hear that the system is turned on

WhooohooO!

 

[mosi]

Did you consider to put the PC out of the room? Some years ago I was thinking how to silence the damn thing when that idea came to my mind.

Sure its some effort to place the pc on the other side of your pc-rooms door. Maybe it even involves drilling a hole in the wall where the cables run through but the effect is dramatic. My box (Shuttle sn45g barebone) is just on the other side of some pretty thin wooden door and its almost unhearable.

Given proper cabling you shouldn't run into too much problems i guess.

 

[imported_Greg_R]

If this is an audio-only PC then I'd do the following:

- Netboot w. RAM drive
- Underclock the system and use all passive components

 

[uzziah]

not that it matters but i ended up deciding i was worrying about nothing and i can't even hear my cheap quiet pc now

i'm part of the
don't-spend-a-****-load-of-money-on-quieting-your-pc club

, keep your headphones and put the damn thing under the desk, and don't freak out about moderately high temps.

 

[Epicurean]

My computer has been very noisy and even more so after I recently upgraded my graphics card to an ati x800gto. So today I bought a low noise chassis fan(nexus, 80mm) and a zalman vf900-cu vga cooler for my graphics card and I can't believe my ears how much difference it made! Before I could hear my computer running two rooms away, but now I can hardly hear it when in the same room. It set me back a little over 40€ though, but it was definately worth it.

 

[Zenja]

My computer is so loud that it got unbearable, especially when I got my headphones. My computer room has a closet with a wooden sliding door. I moved the desk over to the closet and put the computer inside it, slipping the cables underneath the door (there's just enough of a gap in the corner). It was a huge improvement and the noise doesn't really bother me anymore. Best of all, it was free.

 

[dougmwpsu]

maybe this is kinda obvious, but why not just use a laptop + external dac? seems like it would be pretty darn quiet to me if you had a fanless laptop.

on a related question, i was thinking of trying to build a pc with no moving parts for soley music and web surfing. i have a usb dac and could use my ipod for music storage. can anyone think of what to do for an operating system?