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Thoughts on a silent desktop?

IronWing

IronWing

No Lifer
My Dell XPS desktop is over five years old now and beginning to get cranky. I'm in the market for a new desktop and would like one that is really quiet. I've been looking at pugetsystems.com's Serenity line (under 20 dB) as well as endpcnoise.com's Elite and Powerhouse series (under 30 dB) machines. The prices are considerably higher than a similarly speced Dell but they do claim to be quiet. Has anyone here had experience with either of these builders? Other recommendations?

The layout of our house is such that moving the box away from the user isn't really an option nor is moving the box to the floor viable as we have lots of cats and therefore cat hair and dust, particularly at floor level. Also, I live in Tucson so ambient temperatures in the house are fairly high throughout the summer.

We are considering a laptop as they are often quieter than desktops but the new Dell laptop I received at work a couple months ago is almost as loud as the old XPS I have at home, lots of fan noise.

Also, I get no thrill from the thought of building my own PC. I just want to use it and have it work.
 
What type of work do you do? Depending on the work load, a CULV like the ASUS UL series might fit the bill. Mine is literally silent (no fans running) 90% of the time, and the other 10% it's whisper quiet. I usually have to physically feel the air coming out of the vents to see if the fan is running.

That, plus a monitor / keyboard / mouse / USB hub may be just what you need. However, while the machine is significantly faster than a netbook, it still isn't as fast as a full-blown laptop or especially desktop. If you're doing coding or other non-intensive tasks, it'll be perfect. If you're doing photo editing with lots of layers / effects, video encoding, lots of compiling, etc. you may want to find something faster.
 
Puget's systems are quiet, SPCR has reviewed a couple of them, most recently the Serenity.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/Puget_Serenity

There's really nothing fancy about their builds, though, they mostly just use off-the-shelf parts and then sell the systems at a significant price premium. And it's not like it's hard to find out what they use, they even list the individual components on their website. You could literally just buy the same parts for a fraction of the cost and get a system that's just as quiet. But if you don't mind paying a more for the convenience of not having to put it all together, Puget Serenity would probably be a great choice.
 
I had my dad order a system from Puget when he needed a new PC a couple years ago. It's in the older Antec P180 case and I had them do the "silent" fan upgrade. It doesn't even have any of the foam sound deadening stuff that one that frosted linked and I still can't hear the thing. It's really impressive (and really heavy).
 
Consider a water cooled machine. In Tucson, checkout what they have at SWS Electronics on Speedway.
 
Good case, passive cooling on CPU and video card (or integrated video...), SSD, and a quiet PSU with 120mm fan or larger.
 
Thanks for the input. Most of the time I'm not doing anything particularly CPU intensive but I do like to play games occasionally and I'd like to get a video card that will at least run DirectX 11 games. It wouldn't have to run them in highest mode but at least not crap out. I understand that there is a trade off here between graphics quality/speed and noise so I'll have to decide which is more important.
 
Powercolor and Gigabyte both offer passive HD5750s (and I'd assume Puget and others have these available for their systems). Great cards, and they don't use a lot of power, so even passive they should run pretty cool. You probably won't be able to crank the AA and AF, but it should be able to handle even the latest games no problem at reasonable settings.
 
In the PC I talked about above I didn't want a weak vid card (for the time) and I didn't want it to melt

It has a 4850 with a fan and it can't be heard at idle. When you game I think noise is acceptable so don't worry too much.
 
Update: My Dell XPS is dying fast. It won't boot w/ any USB devices attached except the mouse, it gives memory errors and assorted other hardware errors during bootup. Searching the Dell website it seems that this death pattern is a motherboard failure and was fairly common on Gen 4 XPS machines and that the only reason mine is still alive after five years is that I had the original motherboard replaced due to a different failure a couple years ago (extended warranty paid off).

This sped up my time table a bit to get a new machine so...

I bought a Puget Serenity with passive 5750 which arrived yesterday. It is incredibly quiet. During normal use (web surfing, office apps, image manipulation) I have to press my ear to the case to hear anything at all. Playing Crysis at 1280x1024 (my monitor don't go no higher), high everything, 4xAA, the fans are audible from the back of the case but not from the user position with the box on desk two feet to one side of monitor. The fan noise of my external RAID is now far louder than the PC. The DVD player spinning up upon loading a new disk is the only noisy thing so far.
 
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