I don’t know about silent….but I guess it is….since it doesn’t stand out noise wise. Though I probably have high ambient noise in my room. HEPA air cleaner in the corner running all the time.

Have several around the place….can’t sleep without the one in the bedroom running (and I’ll probably keep it running even after I replace it with a silent aircleaner…..just for the noise. )

Anyways….my current computer is in a FIC Sabre 1815 case. <http://www.fica.com/site/html/products/pc/detail.asp?cat_id=240000183&C_ID=240000088>

And, I’m thinking of building my next system around the FIC Samba SM-1845GV – http://www.fic.com.tw/product/sff/sm_1845gv.aspx

The Dreamer

We got a few of these at work and they’re great little boxes. Very powerful and scalable. See if you can get one off ebay or something.

The one I’m lusting after, to mount in my Land Rover, is the M-100 from Mini-Box — <http://www.mini-box.com/>. I don’t know much about it except what it says on the web site, but it sure looks ideal for my purposes (Nav, journalling, Music, etc. while on the trail.)

Of course, you pay for it. For general purpose use, I would recommend an ordinary system, placed strategically will give you more zen time for the money.

I run a water-cooled 100% silent desktop PC at home. I looked at the Shuttle MiniPC, but found it not so quiet and quite limiting in terms of expansion (I need more than just one AGP and one PCI slot since I use hardware RAID-5 and a PCI WiFi card). Here’s how I achieved a totally quiet PC:

- Use Zalman quiet PSU
- Use Koolance EXOS external water cooling system (so easy to set up) to cool the CPU, GPU and the Northbridge chip on the motherboard
- Only one silent Zalman exhaust fan in the case
- Use quiet hard drives like Seagate or Maxtor and make sure their acoustic management feature is enabled and set to minimum noise mode
- I’ve also soundproofed the insides of my case, so that it is totally silent. This step is optional, but I need a 100% silent computing environment

Works like a charm.

For most of my work, I use Apple’s Powerbook G4 (12, 15 and 17 inch screens) and iMac flat panel desktops. They are genuinely silent machines. I don’t mean low noise, I mean absolutely silent. I’ve not found a Wintel machine of comparable noise level in the portable world and was only able to achieve parity in the desktop world by basically building my own PC from components. Besides, these Apple machines are truly beautiful in their design. The 12 inch Powerbook G4 notebook with its gorgeous aluminium design, stunning screen and DVD writer is a modern mobile marvel with genuine sex appeal and quite portable to boot. Just put it in your backpack and go.

Sure, PDAs have their place if you need something even lighter or pocketable but I found them too limiting for my needs and battery life has always been disappointing since the Palm V. I’ve now ditched my various Palm and PocketPC PDAs ever since I got a PowerBook with built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, DVD burner and a 60 GB disk for lots of MP3s. Ironically, its battery life is better than my iPaq 3970 (now sold) and my Palm TT (about to be sold), plus I can now watch or burn DVDs, read eBooks, communicate with any wireless device or network and carry around my entire music collection with me (includes a stereo headphone socket as well as built-in speakers and subwoofer for amazing sound quality). Give the 12 inch PowerBook a try, you *will* be amazed. I even run Windows XP Pro and my favourite OS OPENSTEP on this baby using the Virtual PC emulation software. Everything is built right in, no dangling cables, external drives or antennae required. As elegant as an electronic gadget can get. And this from a man who’s owned pretty much any gadget worth owning.

You can run PCs and Macs side by side and they’ll happily co-exist and share files and once you get a taste of Mac OS X and use things like iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie, you’ll find yourself using your PC less and less. I basically only play games on my PC now. All other stuff gets done on my Macs.

You don’t need to give up Windows to start using a Mac.

E@

I have a Direcway satellite system which uses USB to connect to a PC. Unfortunately, it won’t work with a hardware router. Also, I want my main machine to be upgradeable (hard drives). I want to have my entire music collection available on it.

Originally written by Julie
I kicked around the idea of buying a nice desktop replacement notebook and using it, but I’ve changed my mind and want to stick with a regular desktop type system. The reasoning there is that the system will be powered on 24/7, and it will be the network server and internet server (Direcway satellite) for my network.

Hi Julie,

What about using a hardware router for an internet server instead of a PC, if you want to get a laptop instead? I have a router, and use a Dell Inspiron 8100 as my primary machine. Unless I’m traveling, I leave it on 24/7, and it works great that way. I have another computer on the network that can access the internet via the router.

Will

[B]
Last fall I put together (45 minutes) a mini PC that works great, has very good specs, very compact, nicely designed, and is pretty quiet. It’s the ‘XPC SS51G’ by Shuttle <http://www.shuttle.com>. I put a P4/2.4 GHz in mine with a Leadtek Ti4600 video card. Very fast…
[/B]

I have a friend that just recently purchased a Shuttle system and is going to demo it for me this coming saturday. He’s also built his own water cooled PC / PVR which is really cool. I don’t want to go to the trouble of a water cooled system, but I will check out the Shuttle as he thinks it is pretty quiet.

ArchiMark:

Thanks for the links! I’ll be sure and check out those systems as well

http://www.millennium-music.biz/home/packages3.pl

Also there are a load of mods available to use this technology to quieten your existing PC:

http://www.quietpc.com

That way you can build what you want, and get rid of the runway environment.

Number one job is to change the PSU. That makes most of the noise.

While I’m primarily a die-hard Macster (since ’86)…here and there I’ve used a PC….

Last fall I put together (45 minutes) a mini PC that works great, has very good specs, very compact, nicely designed, and is pretty quiet. It’s the ‘XPC SS51G’ by Shuttle <http://www.shuttle.com>. I put a P4/2.4 GHz in mine with a Leadtek Ti4600 video card. Very fast…

The case is only about 8x8x11″ deep!

Perhaps that’s one of the PC’s you were referring to…

They have some new models I just saw last week at Fry’s here in Silicone Valley. Other stores here carry them as well.

Really like mine…

HTH,

Mark

I just know though that when people think “server”, an iMac doesn’t come to mind… if you were thinking about using a Mac, obviously you’d wanna check out what the gurus and experts say too.