Completely Silent Computer

There are plenty of silent/fanless Coffee Lake based industrial NUCs, too.

https://ark.intel.com/products/series/129705/Intel-NUC-Kit-w...

My iPhone 7 Plus has some crazy coil whine. In a quiet room you can hear it. I can hear incoming notifications being processed before the alert goes off!

The MacBook is (at least in theory) noiseless as well. It has an SSD and no fans.

Am I the only one that wonders how anyone can thinks of comparing a phone with to a high-end desktop system and claim they can fore fill the same need?

I'm sometimes nostalgic for clacking disks. It's sometimes useful to know when the machine is swapping because some process has gone awry and used up all the memory...

Sure, but most mobile OSes don't support a full desktop experience well, and you're limited to bluetooth peripherals only. Unless you have a rare phone that comes with a docking station.

A better title for the article would be "Completely Silent Gaming PC"

> my smartphone is completely silent as long as I don't accidentally press the Golem Invoker, er, Siri button

You can get rid of that sound as well: just flip the switch on the left side of the phone.

I use a Dell Latitude 7370 which is completely silent. It's not the fastest machine, but works fine for running several VMs, Visual Studio, etc.

The noisiest computer is the person constantly telling you how silent their machine is.

I can hear a high pitched whine emitted from most electronics. Granted for smartphones the display or transceiver has to be powered up and it has to be a quiet room with no white noise. It's a lot better than it used to be, I knew I was getting a call or text from my old Nokia 5160 before it did just from the whine.

MacBook 12" have no fans and are completely silent.

Yes you are right. Cellphones and tablets are totally silent. It is the desktops and laptops that make noise, ummm waste too much energy ( heat ).

The 12" MacBook is a silent computer as well.

silent yes, computers, no.

No, but a smartphone is not a computer.

Smartphones are capable of computing and are sometimes very powerful, but the analogy is totally out of wack in my opinion.

If you can live without using an actual computer, it means you don't really need computers. You can check your email and browser the web on a Kindle, on your TV, or even your car.

Everything is a computer, then.

I think a computer is a productivity tool. Smartphones (and I'd definitely say tablets, too) are to consume content, not produce it. Some companies (most notably Apple I think) believe otherwise, but I think they'll have to come to realize that smartphones and tablets are horrible to produce most kinds of content.

This type of noise is arguably worse than that produced by a well-managed fan setup. If you have fans that spin at a constant RPM, you can fairly easily tune out the noise. Coil whine will vary depending on the load of the system (e.g., when you start/stop scrolling a web page), making it much more difficult to tune out.

Some noise, depending on the texture can be even pleasuring.

coil whine is highly unnerving while low fan sound is relaxing.

we like stimulus, the clicky keys of my old hp48 is neat, the insertion sequence of pioneer 32x slot-in cd drive was amazingly subtle; not long ago I revived an old HP tape drive, the tape rolling and the head gear was also beautiful.

Also, it was as cute as informative, it's a clear state change side channel. Often software notification about hardware are decoupled so much that you don't trust it; plus they're invasive, unlike a tiny led, a click, a tiny motor ramping up.

I've switched to Fractal Design cases with their heavy sound-proofing and been thoroughly impressed. I use Corsair RM750 which never powers its fan on, and I used to have a all-in-one water cooler for the CPU, but I moved to a Noctua design with a large 140mm fan. The water cooler had a 120mm fan that I replaced with a 120mm Noctua--but it was too close to the rear vent of the case, and thus noisy.

However my graphics card (RX 480) is quite loud, and one bearing is making noises.

But the Fractal Design case has really dampened the sound. For my home server, it's using a RM500 (which also never turns the fan on), and a low-profile Noctua CPU cooler. No other fans, but I do hear the 6 HDDs spinning and seeking when it's real quiet in the room.

I don't hear any coil whine, except when using headphones plugged into my desktop's speakers--probably the result of the speaker system's power supply. Klipsch ProMedia, if you're curious.

The only time I achieved silence was when I moved the computer case outside the room and used a 2m VGA cable and USB chord extenders. That silence was weird though. No audio feedback at all from the computer, just the clicking of keyboard and the mouse.

A long time ago, about the time someone tried to coin the term invisible computing, I figured out how to hook a monitor arm to my couch, and I put the tower behind it. 3 inches of padding can absorb a lot of sound.

Still kinda miss that couch.

The case matters a lot. I've got a Fractal Design Define C, which dampens a lot of noise. Supposedly the R5 is even better.

This was my second silent PC. The first one still had moving disks, but I went for as few fans as possible, and had passive coolers on the internals. This time I did the opposite: lots of fans, but have them spin as slow as possible. This works very well.

But coil whine and electronic hums are easy to overlook when you're choosing parts. It's worth looking at not just the fans and the power use (more power needs more cooling), but also the quality of the electronics.

That's called coil whine, often a result of shoddy power components or construction (and often in either PSU or GPU).

I've a completely silent PC too [1] and I was lucky, as mine doesn't have any relevant electronic buzzes.

But when I walk to the backside of my desk I can hear some electronic buzz from one of my monitors. Whats funny about it: I have that monitor since a few years now and before I built that silent PC and turned my desk to another direction, I never noticed the buzz from the monitor :D

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224202

It is possible to get rid of the coil whine. You can use a long paper roll like from a kitchen roll to locate it. I once saw in a forum a guy flooding a whole PSU in epoxy, to get rid of it.

I used to do all this in the past but now as I get older I have hearing loss/tinnitus and suddenly no longer have to worry about fan noise anymore...

Oh gosh, coil whine.

I had a Geforce 280 that would scream like hell whenever it was at full power and its framerate went below about 10 or above about 100 FPS. I was glad when it broke some other way and got replaced under warranty.

But doesn't locking up your PC in a cabinet hurt its cooling performance? I doubt there is adequate airflow in there.

My computer is in the closet and I have a two cables a USB type c and a mini display port that comes out under my desk through the wall. Absolutely quiet.

Coil whine can relatively easily be absorbed as it is easy to absorb high-frequency noise. Just seal the entire thing and let only the copper pipes with the heat sink stick out.

After having purchased an AMD GPU, they would have to pay me for me to buy anything from AMD ever again.

>Prime95 with AVX throttles really, really fast, under a minute, perhaps, but is a very unrealistic load

I suppose blender would thermal throttle the cpu as well. If you run any non-Xeon/non-Laptop Intel chip (greater than 2k series) and care about temperatures - delid the bugger. (Xeons are soldered, laptop chips don't have IHS). Intel uses something that's worse than toothpaste, plus tons of glue between the die and the IHS. If you see temperature deltas under full load more than 9-10C between the cores, the thermal paste between the die and the IHS might have missing spots or have dried out. In your case removal of the IHS altogether would provide decent results.

You might wish to check the VRMs, they are rated at 125C but if the case is hellishly hot inside, they might not be able to dissipate the heat.

I'm glad you enjoyed the post. My first silencing attempt (in the early 1990s) was to seal a hard disk in what amounted to little more than a couple of oven bags, custom-make a long IDE cable, and then — literally — dangle the drive in a bucket of water that was under the desk the computer sat on. That ended poorly, with thermal cycling inducing microfractures in the bags, which resulted in leaks, a dead drive and a blown controller on the motherboard. Ah well, we live and learn. Take it easy.

It used to be fun trying to silence a computer. Figuring out which HDDs were single-platter, undervolting processors, finding low-rpm fans, etc. used to be a challenge, and have great rewards for those of us who care. Now, check out silentpcreview.com, hasn’t been updated this calendar year. In some ways I miss the old days, but most modern laptops and even desktops are reasonably quiet, and full silence is easy to achieve.

I've had the same experience with my MBP 2017. So many people don't realise that the aluminium chassis isn't just attractive, it's actually a massive heatsink, and it's the reason the machine needs barely any internal airflow.

man, my mbp is on fire and fans spinning all the time just from xcode / ios dev.. backend dev on a remote server was the life! :D

Silent means that it has no sound, but "sound" either means the sensation of perceiving vibrations, or the actual vibrations that cause the sensation. 0 dB SPL is the threshold of hearing, so it is "silent" in the first sense.

Strictly speaking.

He’s using the term incorrectly to begin with so corrections aren’t really possible.

Of course it can’t be completely silent. Heat generates air movement which is “sound”.

By 0dB he means 0dB SPL which is give or take correct.

Yep. 0dB is the limit of human hearing, not absolute silence. There are anechoic chambers with noise levels below 0dB.

Pretty sure there's going to be some coil whine. Probably above 0dB.

I'm pretty sure that there's some measurable amount of coil whine or other noise coming from capacitors and other small components, making it more than -infinity dB, and probably more than 0dB. The sound might not even be within human detectable frequencies.

To be more pedantic, it's probably safe to assume this is not even 0dB. Most people would probably consider a computer under 25dB-30dB as "silent" since most rooms background noise are around there.

Linus did a silent PC build which even in a sound proofed case and at idle was about 14dB and broke 20dB under load: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXZrWqCT7R0

Even the high end microphone used to record the sound level in this video produced it's own 7dB of noise.

It may register below 0dB SPL (in an anechoic chamber, anyway) depending on the manner in which it's measured, which is a complex discipline in itself. Sound pressure dissipates over distance, for example, so the distance at which the measurement is made has bearing, as does the angle at which it's measured.

(This is unabashed pedantry. But I'm on my lunch break, so...)

20 to 30dBA is probably the base noise level of most environments.

No point in making your PC less noisy than the noise floor.

Also, coil whine and convection wind have potential to be more obvious once you take away fans and introduce more efficient passive components.

I was just going to post this with a nitpicking warning. Anyway, it may be a joke.

Yep, it took weeks to finalise the parts. I had to contact multiple vendors and get them to check component heights, track down motherboard layouts, compare review photos from different angles, plan heatpipe runs, resolve conflicts with VRM heatsinks and power connectors, watch assembly/review videos over and over again, scrutinise manuals, determine hardware/OS incompatibilities... probably well over 80 hours of work before I could even order the parts.

But, like you say, even though I had done all that, there was still the possibility that I might have missed something and would need to return/replace some parts and rework the plan. My mouse hovered over the "Order" button for quite a while before I finally committed. An anxious moment.

Virtually none of that methodical and boring research/prep work made it into the post — it's just not that interesting. Necessary, yes, but not something that the vast majority of readers would want to read.

The setup should be able to handle a 105W CPU and 75W GPU. At this point 65 + 75W is confirmed. When I OC the 1600 I should be able to verify up to ~95 + 75W.

The strategy was to start with a really well engineered passive case, then select components that could be pushed right up to the thermal limits. It's worked well so far. I'll keep publishing all of my test results for those that may be interested.

Personally, I just don't like computing at a distance. I actually like hearing things like fan noise or hard drive sounds, as long as they're not incessant, because it can serve as a subtle notification that the computer might be doing something in the background that I might not have realized otherwise.

I did the same but the tower is in my basement. I ran an HDMI and USB cable up thru the wall and into a keystone panel behind my TV. Other than occasionally having to manually flip the tower back on after a power outage it worked pretty flawlessly. Totally silent and no tower to hide in my living room.

At the risk of me too! I have a Dell T420 with eight spindles in the loft above our bedroom, plus assorted UPS, APU2 based router, switches and a mini ATX based thing for MythTV.

I screwed four lengths of 4" x 2" between two roofing joists to make two trapeziums. I then screwed a 3/4" thick sheet of chipboard to the bottom and then wrapped the top and sides in roofing felt (some protection in case of roof failure).

The loft is lagged 200mm deep with 3/4" chipboard on top which deadens the noise nicely. The Dell was running the fans quite a lot today when I went up to check on something - 25C outside in Somerset, UK today.

What sort of ambient temperature do you normally have in your garage?

Maybe, but it is tricky.

Because there is no pump the water will flow much slower, therefore you need much bigger pipes. Think at least 3x the diameter you would think you need.

Also because you are depending on thermo siphon you have to ensure you have to ensure the water flow works with gravity. The heat source must be at bottom, and the radiator must be at the top. You don't get any flexibility go around something that might be in the way, the pipes must always be sloped in the correct direction.

If you are using anything other than water you need to pay attention to specific gravity (and how it changes with temperature), and viscosity. Probably something else that I'm not thinking of.

It probably can work. I have an antique tractor that uses such a system. A 2.2L, 16hp engine, has 24L of coolant, and the pipes between the engine and radiator are noticeably bigger than my truck with a 7.3L 250HP engine. Remember that this was designed to run at just under the boiling point of water (antifreeze is too modern). You probably want your computer considerably cooler, which implies even larger systems than a similar active one.

Yes, just use a flat (i.e., no high fins) passive cooler on the CPU (this won't fit with stock parts), lay the motherboard flat and submerge about 1cm deep in a refrigerant boiling in the range (max room temp 5K) and (max healthy cpu temp -20K). Flourinert and Pentane are suitable, the former is really expensive and the latter as flammable as gasoline. If you replace the cooler with a 1mm copper plate and use a pump to archive a flowspeed across the cooler between 5 and 20m/s, you can get crazy overclocking. You might get subzero clocks without any active refrigeration. The benefit is that all your ancillary components are cooled too, and you have superior performance with a pumnp, and even performance without one. Ensure some radiator with gravity-backflow gets the vapor, e.g. just use a central heating one above and ensure liquid can't pool in the piping, and that that is not too narrow.

Sure, here's a quad-Opteron build (55W each) from 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20170308162629/http://www.linuxj...

It's possible using a low temperature phase-change system, but you need some absolutely immense radiators. The Calyos NSG-S0 chassis will passively cool a high-end gaming PC, but it weighs 22kg and costs €1000.

http://fanlessfan.com/

Probably not - you need to push water over the radiator blocks at a decent clip and I'm pretty sure you need pump. You could try a heatpipe into a big radiator that sits in a big tank of water, though.

There are always peltier units, but horribly inefficient...

Activity has ceased unfortunately. The last articles are from 2016.

These guys sell silent PCs and components too:

https://silentpc.com/

At my college, we had a bar with a custom account management system (it managed the credit of each students).

The thing was all text/ncurses.

The terminal was an under-clocked PII, with all the fans removed and connected to the server using a serial cable and it was kind of necessary since the environment was quite hostile and sticky (spilled beer, some fat deposit, etc).

If I recall correctly before the PII, it was a VT-100 console, so even more basic than the PII.

Seasonic does. They make excellent power supplies. I've used a 400w fanless in a media center PC, but they also make higher wattage units like this for example: https://seasonic.com/prime-titanium-fanless

> Anybody making fanless PSU's today?

There's a lot of PSUs nowadays that will work with the fans completely off up to ~75% of their rated power. Which is adequate for most situations.

I'm not sure if you didn't read the article, or if I'm misunderstanding your question, but the author used and linked one from streacom: http://www.streacom.com/products/zf240-fanless-240w-zeroflex...

I considered a fanless PSU when I bought my current set-up, but at least back then I didn't find them cost-effective: for a cheaper price I could buy a higher-rated, at least as efficient model from the same manufacturer, and even though it has a fan, it is equally not making any noise in most use cases because it's not running. (I've never bothered to find out when it turns on; later on I added an external GPU to my case, and when its fans start -- not in desktop use -- you can't hear the PSU fan anyway, although I certainly wouldn't mind it running when the case temperature goes up, which it certainly does in certain use.)

Speaking of silent computing; unfortunately my monitor is "louder" than my PC in desktop use for most brightness levels. Anyway, personally I've given up the goal of doing a solid-state PC; a single fan chosen correctly in a case is virtually silent and makes the cooling design much easier; in my experience most PSUs and GPUs produce similar amounts of noise even without fans (and with bad luck, they can be worse).

There are a few on NewEgg right now:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAGGN79S1...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAD6F7450...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3N68...

They have more, that are non-standard ATX.

Lots, actually: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=gehps&xf=363_passiv+(l%FCfterlos)%7...

I think a good route would be to get as efficient a fan-cooled psu you could find and modify it yourself. You can always take the PCBs out of the case and add bigger heat sinks, change the TIM under those heat sinks, add water blocks if needed, desolder components and swap with higher wattage components, etc.

Or you could just submerge the whole machine in mineral oil. That technique really sucks, though. As cool as it is to have a fully submerged computer, it's hell to clean literal liquid laxative out of a PCIe slot when it's time to upgrade the graphics card.

Other than standard ATX/SFX PSU, in the small form factor (sff) scene I've seen using DC/DC PSU like the HD-Plex or PicoPSU and a beefed up external power brick.

The most bizarre thing I've seen, when the power requirement for a single brick wasn't enough, they used two power bricks, for example the Zotac Zbox EN1080 mini PC.

For what it's worth, I've been using a Corsair AX760 (80+ Platinum) with a i5-6600 and a GTX 1070 in a Thermltake V31 case (stock fans) for a couple of years now and I don't think I've ever heard/seen the fan spin up, even under load while gaming in the Southern California summer heat.

"How long HDMI cable do I need to call this a cloud?" :))

Also, there have been many flaws found for AMD systems as well:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-ryzenfall-patch-...

And I believe there's Spectre v2 and/or Meltdown v2 now as well.

You just can't win.

A computer with no input mechanism or output mechanism would be secure. Just not very useful.

I imagine any computer that approaches maximum security also approaches minimum utility.

Presumably the author just thinks that Intel is a little too low on security compared to the other offerings, and not that the other offerings are actually "secure".

Anything that can be used can be misused, if you wanna get into the philosophy of it. And any information that is intelligible to one party can be made intelligible to another party, pending whether quantum weirdness™ pans out or not. Even if entanglement becomes a consumer-level thing, I bet eavesdropping techniques will eventually be developed, even if they only operate on the conventional side of the quantum computer.

But this is more about security engineering philosophy. The Intel management engine relies on a lot of security-by-obscurity, which is not the best way. But I think that Intel chips are passably secure as long as you watch what you're doing.

If I were to try to setup a system with as much security as possible, I'd go with OpenBSD, in a Tempest Room[1], without a direct connection to the Internet. I don't recall the exact procedure, but there is a way to securely get information into and out of such a system, but it involves CDROMs, not USB memory sticks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_%28codename%29

Well no material is unbreakable, either, but some are a whole lot more breakable than others.

You can fanless video cards of the same spec as in the article (1050ti) e.g at https://www.quietpc.com/palit-ne5105t018g1-1070h

(I can personally recommend both the vendor and the card!)

The design of the DB4 is such that the graphics card is mounted vertically. Fresh, cool air flows in through the grille at the bottom, over the VRM area, then up and out the top of the case.

I have more small heat sinks I could put on the mosfets, but they are relatively low profile so I'm not sure they would improve things much.

A single, large heat sink, with long fins (that would protrude above and beyond the nearby capacitors) would seem to make more sense — but given there are no mounting points I could use to clamp it down I'd be a bit concerned about the long-term effect of torque.

Opinions and suggestions are welcome.

Correct. I did the same thing with RX 560 and it died within 2 weeks even though "GPU temp" was never above 60C (normal desktop use, I never gamed on it).

Last time I've looked there was a passive cooled 1050 GeForce model and an equivalent (more or less) from Amd that I don't recall the name.

I have a similar system. What OS do you run on it?

No. A vacuum doesn't transmit heat at all. The chips will get very hot. Liquids (generally) transfer heat better that air. You can completely immerse your computer in 3M Fluorinert. That will transfer the heat. Then, cooling fins to transfer the heat into the environment.

The challenge is removing heat. Putting things in a vacuum chamber doesn't make them colder - vacuum is actually a pretty good insulator, so you'd need some mechanism to get the heat out of there with9out using air. If you go the other direction, some people have built computers they submerge in mineral oil or other similar media. That works pretty well for removing heat from components more effectively than air convection.

Yeah, but without air, the heat won't dissapate.

That approach would not be very different from surrounding it with sound insulation, and would involve the same challenges. Things that conduct heat out tend to conduct sound out too.

You'd still need to get heat out. You could water cool the machine, but you'd still have fans/radiator on the outside.

You could, but it would be thermally quite bad: The only way for parts to cool would be through radiation, which is way less effective than convection (be it forced by fans or passive, as in OP's design.)

You'd have problems with getting rid of the heat if your components were surrounded by vacuum - you'd only have radiation, no convection to carry away heat.

Yes, the feeling you get from pure silence is hard to put into words.

I got mine last week, pleasantly surprised at how good it was considering the price. The display is gorgeous and linux support is excellent. Far from usual experience with linux on laptops.

They weren't vulnerable to Meltdown, only Spectre. The author expands on what happened to his particular PC in the comments.

Yep, you can't always wait for the perfect product to come along — sometimes circumstances force your hand.

Not only did that processor not exist at the time, but even if it did there were going to be a bunch of compatibility issues with it on Ubuntu (like there always are when new hardware is released). I simply didn't want to have to deal with those sorts of issues for — potentially — months.

Maybe the Ryzen 5 3400G(E) will be a compelling upgrade? We shall see.

But not to meltdown and AMD did not try to spin it as "everbody is just as vulnerable as us, move along" like Intel did.

Irrespective of how serious you consider these vulnerabilities, the way Intel handled them can very well be a "final straw".

I just put the machine to a closet and buy long cords for all peripherals.

You wont be disappointed. I've been running a router/kodi-box machine with a low power i5 in their h1 case for almost 4 years now, it works like a charm.

Which model VIA mb? And what do you mean by "hardware Soundblaster/ADLIB support" - do you have to run a TSR to make it work?

It's not limited to the power supply, ceramic capacitors are on basically all complex circuit boards now, and most of them will readily sing and whine. It can be eliminated through careful design (reducing ripple) or paying nanocents more for the caps, but as far as I can tell Lenovo doesn't give a fuck.

It can be a problem, also with PC psus. Not all of them have coil whine, and it depends on the connected components, but it definitely happens.

In my case it is the monitor that of all my components has the worst coil whine (actually the PWM brightness regulation).

I have a 5V-2A phone charger which whines. So it can happen even on low-powered devices.

It's a problem, most desktop PSU, even from recognized brands produce coil whine, especially after 3+ years.

There's also using ARM, Calyos stuff[0]

Some old Macs were also 'potentially' silent if you were to today remove the HDD and the optical drive, which were the only mechanical parts[1].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LauL5JxYis

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

It's a cool idea but that particular build has 4 fans.

It's my new daily driver. I do everything on it except play games. My previous rig is now dedicated to that task.

So we have the usual suspects: Watching videos and movies, staying abreast of current affairs, listening to music.

Then some not so-usual suspects: Research and self-education, software development, and a simulation that I've been running and tweaking for several years.

This computer is on for an average of about 15 hours every day of the week, and is pretty-much always doing something. It spends virtually no uptime idling.

The sheer challenge of the undertaking, I expect.

try turning the brightness up or down. I had the same issue with many of my monitors and this would sometimes fix it.

Ratiofarmings is on the right track. The noise coming from the computer drowns out the subtle sounds of life all around me.

Someone suggested in the comments that I should just wear earplugs instead. This was my response to him: "But the rest of the world doesn’t make annoying noises that I want to block out — only the computer does. I still want to hear the birds tweeting in the trees and the wind blowing past the awnings and the rain hitting the roof and the ice-cream truck driving by and my wife chuckling at something she’s watching and the cats running along the floor and the microwave oven heating a meal and the kettle finishing its boil. I’m not trying to disconnect from the rest of the world — I’m trying to reconnect to it."

A lot of the most interesting and enjoyable sounds in life are very, very faint. It doesn't take much noise to drown them out. Even a single fan will do it. Now I can hear those noises and get 'work' done at the same time. It's really hard to describe, but 'magical' comes close.

Thanks for asking.

Because it feels nice if things just happen like magic. Even "big" things like compiling, rendering or gaming. It just happens and you hear nothing but the birds outside and the cat breathing next to you.

If something starts making a noise I'll update my posts and let people know.

Thanks, and you're right — I am. :)

I have exactly the same, and I'm very pleased with it. I use it as my main home computer, which includes occasional use when I'm working from home.

It overheated once (Linux/Ubuntu suspended automatically), my room was also 28°C or something and I'd been encoding videos non-stop for hours.

Thanks, and yes — Streacom did really well on the design. It has a brutalist aesthetic to it that folks will probably love or hate.

For those that like the looks but want moar powerrr, Streacom have an actively-cooled version on the drawing board. Do an image search for "Streacom DA4" if you're interested.

Anybody else think the extruded aluminum cube is a good look?

The CPU's heatspreader is not connected to any leads on the CPU. The case should be grounded through the power supply, therefore, it should be like touching ground with static charge.

It's been done with water cooling and a car radiator on the wall ;)

Since he described how his cpu cooling is capable of dissipating up to 105W and he uses a 65W cpu, he can overclock a little. He is also using fast memory and a 1050ti is quite capable of running pubg well. Based on that pubg should run well.

Yeah, I love my mac mini for that. For a computer this silent I even find it remarkably good value. However, there isn't much else positive I can say about mac/their eco system...

The DB4 already has a black version: http://www.streacom.com/products/db4-fanless-chassis/ then click the Gallery tab.

The entire outside of the case is a heat sink. If there's any convection flow whatsoever it shouldn't be too far above ambient.

Nope, rubber dome.

I'm actually on the lookout for a wired, backlit, white/aluminium, chiclet, TKL keyboard. Basically something like the Apple Keyboard but sans NumKeypad, backlit and keyed for Linux/PC. Bonus points if it has a column of macro keys on the left.

If anyone knows of one please drop me a line.

That would be me. I don't have a fully passive set up (I don't really trust those, since I tend to use both the CPU and GPU a lot) but it's silentpcreview silent.

To make up for it, I'm using a mechanical Razer Blackwidow. It's so loud you can get distracted by the sound of your own typing :)

3M make a non conductive solution for exactly this application. I remember reading about an overclocking rig using something like it pumped through a radiator submerged in liquid nitrogen. Was pretty cool but the solution ended up turning into a gel at low temps https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/novec-us/applications/immersion-...

There are several. But the liquid will heat up and eventually require cooling again. Pumping it somewhere generates noise. Evaporating it creates costs and need to frequent maintenance. And a large enough tank for that not to be an issue is impractical.

Yes! Mineral oil cooled PCs in aquariums have long been a thing-to-do (but it's very messy).

The Australian state I live in has the highest electricity prices in the country, and amongst the highest in the world — so there's a simple financial reason to defect from the grid. Then there are the self-sufficiency angles (produce/control your own power) and the preparedness angles (grid power always fails in bushfires) to consider as well. They are all the reasons I need.

No, it does not. :)

All NUCs have fans. The Skull Canyon is infamously loud.

Regular iMacs are jet engine loud once you throw any CPU or GPU load at them.

I think the iMac Pro is much better in this regard but it's not sustainable as a workstation machine.

I'd love to know more about this : what "system" did you use on a silent laptop, how do you get rid of the fan ?

It also has no power ;)

It is caused by the increase/decrease in power consuption, as in general the audio chip isn't properly isolated from the power source of your computer. So, as more power is used (by slightly increasing the CPU speed, for example, to render the page as you scrooled it), the audio chip amplifies it.

It is a problem of some motherboards, and one way to get ride of it is to use another audio chip (for example, a small USB device that acts like a sound card).

I can also "hear" something when I scroll on some computers, but I hear them with my ears, no headphones required.

On one particular susceptible computer I did a bit of testing, and scrolling white background pages made the noise, but black background ones didn't! Scrolling a completely white page also made the noise. And it depended on app, some apps were immune, it seemed to only happen on GPU-accelerated apps, like browsers.

I used to be able to hear data going over the serial port back in the modem days. Some systems used to make a buzz when scrolling too. These days I have not heard that, but I'm not sure if it's because the frequencies have gone up (outside of my hearing range) or the parts have better isolation or I'm just going deaf as I get old.

I don't think I've heard scrolling noise since I stopped using analog video signals.

There are motherboards with higher quality components or isolation that eliminates this problem. The Pyra (open source mini gaming computer) recently solved their problem with the noise:

https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/stop-the-sirring-no...

Likely it's your GPU or LCD panel leaking RF. Try turning your monitor off and see if scrolling is still audible.

That's generally caused by poor shielding between components, to save on cost.

Back when I was making electronic music, I noticed that I could hear pixels. When I did things that changed a region of the screen — pulling down a menu, switching windows, etc. — an audible whine would change on my audio monitors.

This was back in the CRT days, so I'm not sure if it's still an issue today, but it took me forever to figure out what was going on and drove me crazy when I noticed it.

I do find that generally USB headphones do better and minimizing interference/noise. Which makes sense, having a sound card on your motherboard is pretty much a worst case scenario. With USB it's not till outside the case that you are susceptible to RF.

What I remember finding most annoying was when you can hear the same (IIRC, actually the inverse) through your monitor.. as in it would whine ever so slightly unless you were scrolling. (NB no speakers involved)

I have noticed this on the front audio connectors, as the leads supplied with the case are not properly shielded but not on the rear, so that might be worth a shot before buying another sound card.

I built a fanless (technically had fans, but only turned on if needed), semi-high-performance open bench-style system several years ago.

It's really pretty nice in theory. The reality is that some components still emit a good bit of noise, and unlike fans, the noise they tend to emit isn't very pleasant. Power-hungry graphics cards are by far some of the worst offenders; without being masked by fan noise, they can be incredibly loud and irritating. An open bench PC is definitely cool, but was kind of a mistake in my case.

Fan tech has improved to the point that I think, more often than not, you really want to have them. Otherwise it's time spent trying to eliminate other noise sources that would otherwise be conveniently and usually pleasantly masked by a little wooshing.