Might be best to drop MikeC a PM directly.

The SPCR badge my Anitec SilenT3 comes with is quite nice. I saw some other forumgoer in the General Gallery section of the forum put one on their very nicely-painted Antec Fusion so I'm not sure how one obtains them--if MikeC gives them to donators or something.

Update: Replaced my ACTIVEly-cooled Sapphire DDR4 HD4670 (I believe it is an Arctic Cooling HSF) with a passive DDR3 HD4670 Ultimate from Sapphire as well and it runs fine.

It's strange the active one died so soon after purchase. No reflection on the T3 at all.

Are you aware that one of your systems was reviewed by SPCR a few years ago?

I assume this requirement is missing a NO?


Isn't this a bit unfair? This means extra performance can't be offered if it causes extra noise.

Yes, you are right, thanks for catching that typo. It should read "...the overall noise level to rise NO more than 2 dBA SPL above the reference sample or beyond the SPL requirements of the certification class"

I don't think it's unfair. The Silent PC spec allows up to 5 dBA rise between idle and max; the Quiet PC spec allows 7. The latter's max idle SPL of 20 dBA is not that hard to reach these days; if a high power gaming rig can be made to be say 15 dBA at idle (possible with the right combination of components, esp. video card cooler), then the allowable rise at max load becomes 12 dBA, which is a lot to work with.

Beside if the spec was not at least a bit of a challenge to achieve, it would be meaningless.

Sure. But suppose we've got two PCs, A and B. B is more powerful, A is silent and B is quiet at full load. At full load performance of B is (much) higher.
But if performance of B is limited to performance achievable by A, it's quieter in all cases. Yet it doesn't qualify for the silent label.

I could write down a car analogy, but I guess I won't for now. :p

Olaf, it's not a perfect rating system, and you've identified one of the flaws... but I don't see any way around it. Very simply put, if you want the very quietest system, then you cannot have the very highest performance -- that was true 10 years ago, and it's still true today.

What I expect (and hope) is that potential buyers of SPCR certified PCs will take the time and effort to read my review as well as the certification report -- the review would always include the kind of qualitative observations that would allow the kind of insight you just made.

The other option, I guess, is to turn my review into a PDF and simply use that as the certification report. This needs further consideration.

Note that I'm not complaining, I love your work. I wish more manufacturers would pay attention to noise.