Quiet PCs

Dell PCs

• The new Dell GX620 UltraSmall form factor PCs are very quiet. Instead of a power supply fan, they have an external brick. That helps a lot.

General Notes on purchasing other quiet PCs

You can see some pretty pictures at http://www.canadacomputers.com/quiet.html .

I'm considering the Antec 330w power supply from that page for one of the faculty members here. Another faculty member bought from Canada Computers some time ago and reports good results, although I'm not sure what power supply he got.

Other hints and tidbits: most hard disks are apparently ~30db. So getting other bits quieter than that is good, but means that your hard disk will be the noisemaker. Anecdotally, I know of a fellow who replaced his power supply. Then his CPU fan was the noisiest, so he replaced that. Then the hard disk. Then the video card fan.

Our "standard" PCs don't typically have fans on the GPU: they use onboard graphics. So the biggest noisemakers are the power supply and the CPU fan.

Procurement tells me to order from a place like canadacomputers, we can just print out the website page, mark what we want, and attach it to the requisition, they'll handle it from there.

See here for some more tips. ST-enabled types can look at ST#46590, there's a bunch of details in there (interspersed with other junk related to purchasing and setting up a PC).