Silent PC advice...

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Thinking of putting together (or buying pre-made) a PC to sit under the TV to act as our media centre.

So can anyone recommend a quiet PC or case (quiet PSU), motherboard, graphics card combination that'll do the job?


Graphics card to have the HDMI output. Case to have space for blu-ray DVD and front USB/firewire/card readers. Rear USB for wireless keyboard/mouse and possible wireless network link.

Audio output to surround sound amp or direct to speakers (haven't made up my mind yet!).

Would like it to act as PVR also but not sure on the mechanics of that with Freeview digital on the horizon.


Thanks in anticipation.
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...and the whirlwind is in the thorn trees, it's hard for thee to kick against the pricks...
Gibbs, what did Duckie look like when he was younger?

[Mr.Everready]

Have a wee look here https://forums.ebuyer.com/showthread.php?t=32324&highlight=htpc
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the undemocratically unelected mod of the Scottish section

[cagiva gezzer]

Take a look at Antec cases. I've got a sonata and it's neat / silent / spacey.

Think you might be wanting something smaller though.
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"because one stroke isnt enough and four strokes waste two"

[Tarmacsurfer]

There are very few *really* quiet dedicated HTPC cases, the Antec Fusion is supposedly one of the best.

If you've got space to put a midi tower case somewhere fairly hidden then the Sonata (another Antec offering, I'm not a fanboi, just not seen anything else that competes on quality V. price) can't be faulted. Built a system that sits in the corner of a friends living room, running a core 2 Duo on an OEM fan and it's still nigh on silent. I actually had to check after turning it on that it was booting, that sort of quiet. It was later changed to a thermaltake fan of some description, fairly cheap and although supposedly quieter than stock still not exactly high end and it's now even quieter.

Ebuyer have a special on the 8600GTS at the moment, CLICKY which I'm seriously considering for my living room box. Not great games performance but apparently a good allrounder for media systems.
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I'm immortal. Well, so far.

[trevoriv]

I've always used laptops for silent servers etc but im not sure if a laptop with blueray and hdmi is going to be cheap or quiet.
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Past: '96 Thundercat, '02 ZX636R (A1P), '58 KTM 690 SM LC4 Current: '06 ZX636R (C6F)
Mudskipper wrote: Someone just has to sig that...

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[divuk83]

https://www.kustompcs.co.uk/

Big section on HTPC's and a great shop for cases and quiet cooling/Noise reduction.

https://www.quietpc.com/

Fairly decent selection of stuff to give you an idea of whats out there however once you have found what you want buy it elsewhere as they are not the cheapest retailer.

Can't really comment on the HTPC case other than to say to try and get one with 120mm fans instead of 80mm ones as you that will help reduce noise. I can however I can offer a few suggestions on the other parts.

Motherboard: Make sure that its has a passively cooled northbridge (ie no noisly litte 45mm fan on the motherboard), having said that its not difficult to replace the fans with a bigger passive heatsink. Most moterboards come fitted with coaxial digital outs which you can send the digital signal straight into an AV amp for surround decoding. A proper AV amp/Speakers setup will do a much better jo than any PC and PC speakers.

Graphics card: Again, plenty of fairly good passively cooled graphics cards more than capable of HD/Blueray output with HDMI sockets.

CPU: All the new intel C2D chips run very cool so get the biggest heatsink you can, preferably with a 120mm fan (more airflow from less rpm means less noise)

PSU: Again its posible to get fanless PSU's however they are very expensive and you can't get very high wattage ones. There are plenty of quiet PSU's with fans. I'm quite impressed with my Corsair one (a rebranded Seasonic built PSU).

Its also worth mentioning Hard Drives as some of the high speed ones do make quite a bit of noise. I have a Western Digital raptor in a Smart Drive 2002C, its not cheap but it cuts the noise down loads. Some of the other less than 10k rpm drives are pretty quiet to start off with. Or alternatively you could go for a SSD with no noise as there are no moving parts.

https://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_3875.html

I also have the AcoustiPack foam on all the insides of my case which has slightly reduced the high pitch noise of some of the componets.
https://www.acoustiproducts.com/en/technical-information.asp

Case fans are another thing to look at replacing. I have swapped all my case fans over for Papst low noise ones, Yate Loon are also ment to be pretty good however I have not tried them.
https://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_2556.html

Let us know how you get on.

Dave

[Tarmacsurfer]

Yate Loon are what I replaced two 120mm Papst with, I was having frequent problems with dust with the Papst fans. Not entirely sure as to the reason why but there was a large dead air spot in the case, to do with the low rotational speed of the fans at a guess (despite which they were good at moving a decent volume of air quietly), kept getting small mounds of detritus building up on the network card. The YL are good, steadier airflow and same sort of noise level.

divuk83 gave some good links. Just one word of warning, make sure whatever card you get is HDCP compliant, it's pretty basic but I know of one or two people who've missed out on that one. Not all cards have an HDMI slot on board, you'll be expected to use a DVI to HDMI cable. No difference in quality, just means the card manufacturers can shave a few pence and some space when designing them.

You probably know all this already
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