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PC Power and Cooling makes a line of silencer power supplies. They are very quiet (at least the 235ATX is), but I boycot PCP&C because they gave me a big hassle on a return.

Also, if you're intersted in cutting down on hard drive noise, power usage (and you want to be super cool too) then get a Sandisk Flashdrive. No moving parts and they connect to a standard IDE connector, pretty pimp.

Lastly, don't get a highspeed PIII laptop because the fans are pretty loud and boy do those things get hot, almost as bad as hot grits down your pants.

Hum, perhaps a Transmeta laptop with Flashdrive storage, running Midori from good ol' Linus?

-Speed Costs Money how fast do you want to go?

I love their silencer cooling fans ($9 each), open up your power supply and swap this fan in place of it, works great. A lot cheaper than the ~$100 for a new PSU.

Throw this fan in the front of your case too, to get extra airflow lost when moving to this quiet fan.

Their CPU coolers also work well and are very quiet.

After switching my K6-2 450 to their 275W silencer power supply, a silencer fan in the front, their CPU fan, the loudest thing in my case was the hard-drive.

Modern 5400 RPM drives are a LOT quieter than 7200 RPM and older 5400/7200 RPM drives. Pick up one of the new inexpensive Seagate, Fujitsu or Quantum drives, they run just about silent.

After all these changes, I can finally sleep in peace (only a very slight whirring left) with my PC on all the time.

If you have a faster CPU, the CPU coolers that PC power and cooling sells aren't up to the job IMO. In that case, you'll want to look at water cooling your CPU. Cheap, and a lot quieter than most CPU fans, since this one uses a 120mm fan spinning slowly at ~2K RPM instead of the normal 60mm fan spinning at 5-8K RPM.

www.pcpowercooling.com has an entire slew of quiet fans and power supplies. Last year I bought a ultra-quiet power supply from them along with a spare case fan.

The power supply I believe was slightly overpriced, but those Silencer Auxilary Fans are a steal at 9 bucks apiece. You can take one of those fans and stick it in your current power supply and you will definately notice a difference.

I'm hired out by a small recording studio that mixes with Paris, Cubase, and Gigasampler on Athlon systems, and let me tell you that nothing is more annoying than a 7 foot rack of stuff with fans on them.. ugh. Go buy some quiet fans and seal off all your equipment in another room! ;)

PC Power and Cooling has some good very quiet power supplies. I've used the 400W stealth to power a couple of peliters in my liquid box and am quite happy with it. Very quiet.

For fairly quiet power supplies, take a look at PC Power & Cooling. Their power supplies cost a bit more, but they're quieter and longer-lasting than the typical cheapie power supply. They've been around since 1985. If you want power supplies or fans that are likely to last, this is the place to get them.

http://www.pcpowercooling.com/.

The only thing their fans don't have is the third wire for rpm watching, which also means you can't plug it into a mboard fan header.

coldmist

Best suggestions I saw the last time this came up was consider what quiet really means given your ambient noise. For me, it turns out to be nearly silent as the thing is in my bedroom. Based on my experience this is pretty tough to achieve. One issue I've yet to resolve, which you may like to look into, is how to build a *nix system where you can spin down all drives. The problem is swap disk. As for as I can tell presently, you always end up with one disk spinning (or constantly up/down) due to even the smallest swap accesses. What might be feasible, but exspensive, is a solid state disk for swap.

Anyone out there know of power supplies with quiet fans? CPU fans that are extra smooth?

...PC Power & Cooling, Inc.

I haven't tried their power supplies yet, but I will soon. I have my eyes on their 450W ULTRA-QUIET. I did manage to buy a few of their Silencer fans. They do wonders in my full tower :)

--
Neafevoc

It was for a quiet power supply! I think I've only seen one or two relevant posts so far; most of the rest are harping about computers, Macs, Suns, etc.

try this site, PC Power-Cooling.

My friend tells me they are really quiet (I've heard them) and swears by them, despite the slightly higher cost.

In their power supply section they have an ultra quiet section, and they even 'measure' the dB of their power supplies. The ultra quiet 275 ATX is only 34dB!

Geek dating!

As for case fans, you can often buy quieter fans that have nicer bearings and the like.

PcPowerCooling.com has a few web pages to cycle through that does some power supply sizing. You pick what type of power supply, how big a case, how many CPUs, RAM, disks, and it suggests. And they sell some really good stuff.

And while I'm on the topic of selector web pages, APCC.Com also has some interesting selectors. UPS, Cable, surge, and other things.

I know PCs don't draw very much power, either, but if the power supply were external, you'd have to include special internal cables, a power socket (or two or three) on the case for these connectors, and some stylish, fancy case for the external power supply. All of which would drive up the cost of the machine $20 (which is a lot these days).

The real issue here is that Intel and the hardware manufacturers are deliberately picking case designs that require several fans to cool correctly. It's as if these engineers never heard of the word convection.

The answer? Buy a decent, quiet power supply, and some cooling fans. Note that pcpowercooling.com has a new cooling fan that includes a thermistor. The fan spins only fast enough to keep cool, so it actually spins slower, and quieter, most of the time.

Most people don't care if they're going deaf from that little whirring noise, and OSHA's rules don't apply to the home....

I'd look at PC Power & Cooling. I've bought several standard power supplies from them, and they are good quality. They have an "ultra quiet" line you might want to check out.

Ultr a quiet line.

They're not exactly cheap, though. Figure about $70 to $100 :-(

When I build my dual processor Athlon box later this year (waiting on the AMD 770 chipset and Mustang core CPUs like the rest of the world), I'm going to use a PC Power and Cooling 350watt power supply. That'll handle anything I'm going to throw at it.

That said, judicious use of graphics is a good thing. I'm shopping around for a PC case, and it is so fucking frustrating to see one little .jpg of the (closed) outside of a case. I want to see shots of the outside of the case, the inside of the case, the stuff inside it coming off, and everything else! Even line art would be okay.

That said, don't make them all huge bloated SOBs that take forever to load. (Yes, I want pictures, but I'm on dialup, too.) Use thumbnails to link to larger pictures. The "$50/month ecommerce" pages at store.yahoo.com are particularly egregious in this respect. The graphics are 40-50k graphics that load nice and fast but are usually just one shot of the outside. They are links, but all they link to is the exact same picture off of the yimg.yahoo.com server.

That being said, use some damn text, too! Too many times, the description reads something like "$BRANDNAME computer case, $75". WTF good does that do me? I can see it's a computer case! I want to see something like the following:

$BRANDNAME mid-tower case

• Five 5.25" drive bays
• Three 3.5" external bays
• Three 3.5" internal bays
• Removable drive cage
• Rolled-back edges inside the case
• Slide-out motherboard tray
• Removable side panels
• Thumbscrews for toolless access to the inside
• Polished interior for better EMI and ESD prevention
• 300W power supply
• ...and so forth

When will these people learn? That last thing we want (especially if they're selling cases, the tech-savvy crowd is who is going to buy this stuff, mostly) is fluff! We want to know what we're getting, not just one crappy jpeg and a one-line text description. Sure, you can always email for more info, but personally, I don't want to wait for that. I want to find out everything now and not wait on someone else's schedule. Besides, I don't want to give my email address to you, a business I've never heard of; if I want to get "product updates" from you, I'll give you my email address with my explicit permission for that.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or so it is said, but the person who came up with that never shopped online.

(/rant mode)

OT: Does anyone know any sites where I might actually find cases such as this? Sites that sell cases are few and far between. I've also tried to find just thumbscrews, but the only place I've found so far is pcpowercooling.com. Even better if there are any Philadelphia geeks out there would be a local store that sells them. (I thought that CompUSA did, but they were just the dinky, crappy little plastic kind.) My email address is bj.XYZ@ZY.netaxs.com, and you should be able figure out what to do with it. If not... :)

Time to submit this, I think. I've probably gone grossly over quota on this posting, :) but I hope this helps some budding web designer. Either that, or I'm preaching to the choir.

If that's not you then there are two alternatives, the SuperMicro 760a with 400W option pack, it comes with 4 fans! (uuugh uuuuugh uuuugh oooogh) or the monster, make sure you get the wheels. Be careful if you get the monster, I wasn't wearing my weight lifting belt when the UPS man came and I hurt my back lifting the box trying to get it inside my house. It's solid steal and can push 500W, make sure you get the wheels too! While they haven't announced it yet, I understand that they are building a special pad you can place on top the monster so that it doubles as a weight bench because it's that strong. These two are for the "home office" where you need something a little bit more industrial.

Then if it is for the actual office, I think rackmount are the only way to go. The style and convience make it very compelling. I recomend all steal or all anodized aluminum racks and mounts. If you get the right kind of rack you can also mount an oscilliscope in there so it looks extra cool. Sure you could have some sort of apple macintosh styled case with one of the LCD thin monitors but that's only if you want to look like some kind of feminine-MBA-anti-programmer wuss. If you're a real engineer you have an office that doesn't have carpet on the floor cause it's raised, has bare concrete walls, and your computer live in a rack and have handles on the front so you can pull them out to work on them.

check out addronics cases: www.addtronics.com

I have the 6890a and it has great cooling solutions, its about 1 to 2 inches wider than most cases which allows for a fan mounted on both sides of the case next to the drive bays, check out the picture

Use this case with an ultra quit power supply from pcpowercooling and some of their case fans you got a really cool and really quiet solution. I have their power supply and my friend has their fans, you cant hear the power supply over your own keyboard and the fans are quiet for their speed.

My machine is a dual 450 and it almost never gets to be more than 5 deg (F) or so higher than room temp w/addtronics case and pcpowercooling power supply, and is still quiet.

Chris

check out addronics cases: www.addtronics.com

I have the 6890a and it has great cooling solutions, its about 1 to 2 inches wider than most cases which allows for a fan mounted on both sides of the case next to the drive bays, check out the picture

Use this case with an ultra quit power supply from pcpowercooling and some of their case fans you got a really cool and really quiet solution. I have their power supply and my friend has their fans, you cant hear the power supply over your own keyboard and the fans are quiet for their speed.

My machine is a dual 450 and it almost never gets to be more than 5 deg (F) or so higher than room temp w/addtronics case and pcpowercooling power supply, and is still quiet.

Chris

• PC Power and Cooling "ultraquiet" PowerSupply.
• Silencer 80mm Fan (sold by someone else but made by PC Power&Cooling)
• CoolerMaster PIII Fan ... they list the noise level as 29dba
• 24dba SECCII fan

The same outfit also makes low-noise active and (no-noise) passive CPU heat sinks, and at one time they also made quiet power supplies.

When Silent Systems was independent, they had a low-volume retail business. Unfortunately, Molex apparently doesn't sell these products at retail, and the distributor mentioned on their pages doesn't list them among the products they sell either. Does anyone know where to get these, or a similar product?

Once your hard drives have been muffled, the next most annoying noise is the power supply. PC Power and Cooling's Silencer 275 (rated at 34 dB) is a big improvement over typical power supplies.

They make very quiet CPU fans as well.

A while ago, I saw some solid state disks packaged just like the regular spinning kind, but built with NVRAM or something like that. Very fast. Very expensive. Very quiet. Now that I think about it, probably very hot as well....

There was a company called Ergo that used to make a system called 'the brick'. It was very small (for those days) and had no fan. The case was one big heatsink and they used a clever device to transfer the heat to the case. It looked like an anti static bag (size of one wall of the enclosure, about 3 mm thick) filled with some sort of heat conducting liquid.

You can replace many 'fan required' situations with an oversized heatsink that has outside the case exposure, as long as it has good contact with the hot component. (don't forget the heat sink compound).

Hmmmm maybe that would be a good oddball case direction, something that looks a bit like a porcupine, lots of external heatsink on the case itself....

The Athlon needs a minimum of a 300W peak PSU

Okay, I know that a CPU cannot possibly be drawing that much power. I imagine this specification is due to the fact that AMD expects the Athlon to be in big, hefty machines, with lots of drives, memory, etc. Throw your average (i.e., total crap) PC case at that, and yes, you'll undervolt.

and midi/full towers tend be around 230-250W

Maybe the ones you buy. :-) Even my personal machine, a full tower, has a 300W PSU.

High power PSU's are pretty tricky to find as well.

PC Power & Cooling

A/Open (I have the HX-08 case)

--bdj

Try PC Power and Cooling. Also, Silent Systems has some nice stuff quiet enough to use in sound studios.