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I'm not sure how the heat conductivity of sterling silver would compare. Being 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, linear interpolation suggests that it would be pretty good, but I'm not sure of the details. Perhaps alloys scatter phonons more.

The picture on the site says 'patent pending' ... hm? What about Silverado? I have one of those for a couple of years now. You can track it as far back as February 2001.

I've been using an acoustically sealed case from Noise Control. I really can't hear my PC anymore.

I also use one of Noise Control's modified Enermax PSUs and a Silverado CPU cooler. That's all I did to my PC to make it quiet, everything else is stock. A quiet case seems to be the most logical (and least expensive) first step if you ask me. If you can still hear any of your components after you've put them behind 2 cm of noise blocking fluffy stuff, you can start replacing noisy those one by one until the noise stops.

Noise Control now has their own fan control circuitry and new modified PSUs come with it built-in. Also, they have hard drive cages that catch vibrations before they reach your case. With all of that equipment it should be easy to quiet any PC.

Search ebay and those "opinion-sites" for some weeks to get a feeling of what is good and what is bad.
Never buy the cheapest.

Noise Control
although there is not so much mention of this new tower. Bit odd

The only new thing about this is that they're using a normal "blade" type fan instead of a radial one. Probably the magnets are out of the ordinary too.

I've been using a Silverado cooler for a month now and it's extremely quiet. Plus, it's a solid German piece of work that makes it obvious how they can build such good tanks. If you're looking for a tried and true quiet CPU fan that's winning awards left and right, this is the way to go.

The site was down, owing thanks to /. effect. I could only read the leading page so bare with me.

I had my focus on building a silent computer when I did my hardware upgrade plans. It still amazes me, that some people don't bother to check the noise levels of their gear prior to purchase. I spent some two to three weeks browsing through stuff, reviews and user reports.

In the end, I got myself a Q-Technology (sold to new owner now, unfortunately) silent power, NoiseControl processor cooler, and a tube of Arctic Silver thermal compound. The cpu cooler did not have the best of contact surfaces, so additional help was required there.

My case didn't have enough space to fit a Silverado MkII, so I settled for even quieter model. After putting the components together, I was happy to find out that the absolutely noisiest part of all this was the fan on the motherboard chipset. Which I promptly unplugged. Now the loudest sound I get from my computer is the sound of the hard drive spinning.

All this required only some thought and a little effort to try to find out things in advance. Why more users never bother to do this, I can't even imagine. So much post-purchase whining could be averted, if they only did at least some research... Yes, this was far from the cheapest of solutions, but I was prepared to pay some extra for silent quality parts.

As my mom used to say, 'poor people can't afford to buy products that are cheap and lousy in quality.'

I build myself a quiet PC about 18 months ago. It has been upgraded a bit since (only the fans - they do get lounder as they get older and a new fan is not that expensive). The only thing that I can hear right now is the IBM Deskstar 7200RPM harddrive. I seriously consider switching those out with one of the new Seagate ultra quiet Barracuda IV disks which is mentioned somewhere in this thread also. Here is what I have:

Case: I bought a Noisecontrol case. They aren't cheap, but they are pretty okay and have a "door" in front of the your CD-drive which takes away a lot of the noise. I'm pretty happy with the board

Fans: I'm using fans from Papst (they are mentioned somewhere here also. They are great and I highly recommend them!) As said before, I can only hear my harddisk now, if I pull the plug in the harddisk, I can't hear my PC, even with the case open it's practically quiet.

You could also watercool your PC, Koolance is looking pretty okay and their latest version have gotten pretty good reviews.

Some people says that noise is not a problem and they don't think the noise from the computer is a problem. I think they haven't tried to use a quiet PC. You get used to the noise that comes from you PC, which makes you more or less ignore it, but when you first try a quiet PC - you don't want to go back!

Besides that, I plan on upgrading my current Celeron with one of the new Athlon XP processors. I haven't upgraded yet, because boards with the new VIA KT266A chipset has just arrived and furthermore boards with the new Nvidia Nforce chipset is finally starting to arrive. The Nforce is currently looking pretty good imho. Take a look at this review.

Question: What is the most quiet CPU fan for an Athlon XP?

I agree -- 64C sounds too high. Here is a good article on the subject from Via Hardware.

I recommend the following three steps to cool it down:

1. Run H.ODA's WPCREDIT/WCPRSET and set the ACPI HALT cooling on, if your processor is running at under 1.33 GHz or if you're not running Win2K. This will keep your idle temperature down. See the end of the VIA Hardware article for the admonition about CPU speed and Win2K stability.
2. Use Arctic Silver II thermal paste. I bought some at Fry's and it's pretty cheap. It brought the temperature down 2-3C under load.
3. Try the NoiseControl Silverado fan, if it fits in your face. North Americans no longer have to buy it from Germany, as Plycon sells it in the US now.

I have a 1.2GHz Athlon which I run at about 1.35GHz by upping the FSB. My IWill KK266 board claims that it idles at 26C, and it gets up around 41C during heavy use, and 49C in a tight loop.

I have a shutoff at 50C, which it last reached when Outlook went into a tight loop overnight. I ran a program called MBM to check on it, and it recommended a program called Shutdown Now to shut down and power off in case of alarm. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that Shutdown Now was nagware, and my system was up all night at 50C, sending me pages every 5 minutes. When I got to work in the morning, there was a pop-up dialog saying to please send in $15 to them before it would shut off my computer. Talk about lame! It would have been fine to nag a boot time, not not at shutdown time! I'm just glad the program didn't fry my CPU. Anyway, I replaced it with the NT Resource Kit program called shutdown.exe that took a little bit of mousing around to get into MBM's configuration, but no way was I going to give money to the guy who almost fried my computer.

I use a Noisecontrol Silverado. It's really quiet and was the winner in a Tom's Hardware roundup, and the quietest at 38db.

It cools my 1.2Ghz Athlon running at 1.35GHz just fine, and I can't hear it at all over the Antec case fans (which are quiet as well).

Price is an issue though -- it was $88 shipped to the US from Germany, but it arrived quickly.

It's 80mmx56mm, but it's 133mm tall because it uses twin squirrel-cage fans, so it's certainly not going to fit in a rack-mount, but it fits in a tower just fine.

I use a Noisecontrol Silverado. It's really quiet and was the winner in a Tom's Hardware roundup, and the quietest at 38db.

It cools my 1.2Ghz Athlon running at 1.35GHz just fine, and I can't hear it at all over the Antec case fans (which are quiet as well).

Price is an issue though -- it was $88 shipped to the US from Germany, but it arrived quickly.

It's 80mmx56mm, but it's 133mm tall because it uses twin squirrel-cage fans, so it's certainly not going to fit in a rack-mount, but it fits in a tower just fine.

An alternative would be to get yourself a really quiet fan.

Like the Silverado, which you can buy from this german company.

As you can read in this article on Tom's hardware, they are both VERY quiet and able to dissipate all the heat the Athlon generates. A bit expensive though.

Go buy a Silverado and improve your Quality-of-Sleep.

I use this in my computer to soften the noise from the hard drive. Maybe you'll need something like this?