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Comment by egfx | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I was dreaming of a completely silent computer and bought the Antec 350 for my birthday. https://www.bjorn3d.com/2004/11/antec-phantom-350w-psu/

It cannot power a single mid-range video card today or pretty much any modern equipment. I would have loved to be able to use it.

Anybody making fanless PSU's today?

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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

The 2nd gen Seasonic 400 W is easily good enough to run a 1070 Ti and a 100 W CPU.

A higher wattage than 400W is utterly pointless for a fanless PSU; if you need to dissipate constant loads of >400W of heat, you will need a fan somewhere (exotic options like mineral oil cooling aside).

Well you can always add absurd amounts of surface area and mass to the heat sinks to take advantage of thermal inertia, or possibly change components to simply raise your safe operating temperatures to absurd levels. But that's pretty involved. Spacecraft take care of huge temperatures with no fans or even conductive or convective cooling. But that requires enormous, sail-sized surfaces to take advantage of extremely slow radiative cooling.

It would be an exotic option for sure. And not something you'll find pre-built.

http://fanlessfan.com/

Massive heat sink you say?

This is cpu and gpu fully passive. Amazing. But $1000.

Wow. That thing has more surface area than a motorcycle engine. I guess it really needs it with such a relatively low temperature gradient, not to mention the absence of airflow from movement. I'd love to see how that really performs.

I have a Seasonic Platinum X-400 fanless, but I'm quite disappointed because mine suffers from quite loud coil whine noise that is more annoying to me than a fan would have been.

> 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).

https://fanlesstech.com/

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.

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