Silent PC

I have recommended Silent PC (the company) in several of my posts. Their fans are good and their service excellent.

The best way is to use low powered components, but seeing as you want this for gaming too, that is out of the question.  Other things you can do are:

- use the biggest case possible, with a good airflow plan that complements your cpu fan orientation

- read reviews on what components are quietest (case, gpu, cpu fan, power, fans) 

- use the biggest fans you can at low settings

- SSDs

I wanted to build a very quiet pc. My friends advised me to go liquid cooled (which is almost silent). However, I went for the Silverstone Fortress FT02B using their big new APS fans and it is sooo quiet. I also spent a bit more on the gpus, getting the 570TIs instead of the normal ones because they are quieter. Other components I chose were Enermax Revolution 85+, Crucial SSDs & the Dark Rock Pro Advanced. I can play Crysis 2 at extreme settings and low fan settings and it is very quiet!

Think I'll have to take another look at the CPU fan when I get home from work. Hopefully, it's just not clippped onto the heatsink properly as the reviews say it's quite quiet and this is a noisy beast even on low Revs with the machine at idle

My bios said it was running at 720 RPM which is slow enough for not too much noise. Still think it might be something also relating to the PWM support but not sure.

I stll fancy a new case as well though!

So I opened the case, put a pencil in each of the fans and the noise one was the stock fan for my aged ATI 4870 graphics card.

I'd cleaned it with air spray but now need to look at a replacement cooler. Any suggestions?

Consider a new case definitely. I've got a Coolermaster and it is amazingly quiet. When I first switched the PC on I thought it hadn't booted! Only slight noise with my graphics card working hard (GTX 560 Ti), for example on Crysis 2.

Consider a new case. I've got a Coolermaster and it is amazingly quiet. When I first switched the PC on I thought it hadn't booted! Only slight noise with my graphics card working hard (GTX 560 Ti), for example on Crysis 2.

I swapped the Graphics card for a 6 year old Nvidia card which had a Zalman silentfan built in (taken from my old PC gathering dust in the loft). Ultra quiet and no different on day to day use.

I will buy a silent fan for my ATI 4870 card swap back when I get a chance.

I'll leave the case for now, but may consider a SSD to speed things up and go ultra quiet.....

Two SSDs with RAID 0 = super fast startup and applications. You barely need to worry about ram with such a setup. I ran a test and got over 600Mb/s read speeds

i can only recommend my pc case,hard to get hold of ill admit, but mega quiet, fans built in,awesome. But there are many on the market lol

Mines a Nox Coolbay "Devil edition".

Nice but no UK distributor? 

This is a great case for the money :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Storm-Mid-Tower-Scout-Case/dp/B0027YSEBE/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1314130126&sr=1-2

Some of my mates have this case,its silent but its a bit of a monster. Smart tho...

Cooler master...

Havent SSD's been on the news recentely saying they are going to be much cheaper????

CNET or summat??

Take a look at the Chillblast Fusion Whisper PC's, I use one to design speakers on and it's all but silent - extremely powerful too. When you look at their site you can see all the components they've chosen on the model to keep it quiet...

OP did you ever buy parts/system/case?