Hi, I am wondering where I can purchase a barebone silent PC. I don't mind adding the hard drive and the memory myself, but I woudl like the rest of the system to be pre-built. Any informatino would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

It's not barebone, but Mike posted a review about the STEALTH XP2000+ by ARM Systems here http://www.silentpcreview.com/goto.php?t=s&id=51&a=1

A lack of Hard Drive and Ram to not a barebones PC make. An actual barebones PC will be a tower, PSU, and chipless motherboard (and power buttons...). You supply the CPU, heatsink, floppy drive, cabling, network card, graphics card, audio card, CD drive, DVD drive, and Hard Drive and Ram.

Are you sure you don't just want a quiet pre-built, or do you not want to forget some obscure, key component when building one yourself?

Thanks, guys.

A quiet pre-built would do perfectly fine. I kind of would like to avoid assembling the case, the CPU and the heatsink. (I have done it and it worked fine, but just would like to avoid it as a preference.)

Maybe I should rephrase my question to:
Could somebody advise me where to purchase a pre-built quiet PC?

Thanks again.

I don't have any experience with the Stealth Arm systems, but my old company was completely a Dell shop and the Dell Optiplex line of systems was pretty damned quiet. They are the business line of systems, not the home line, so they don't have the kick ass graphics or anything, but they were fast and quiet.

Some Dells are pretty quiet but they are generally a notch higher in noise than those built & sold as quiet PCs by specialists. (Dell also don't specify their noise! ) Dells typically use non-standard, customized parts for all kinds of things in the case. Having struggled with what ought to have been a simple 2nd HDD addition in a friend's Dell recently, I have to say that unless you will never go inside for a change, don't get a Dell. It's like they use their own form factors. I guess they're big enough to have the economies of scale to make that work.

I know what I found in this PC is not unique to Dell -- many of the big PC makers -- HP, Compaq, etc -- follow similar practices. The advantage of a small system integrator like ARM in Calif or Captech in Sweden is that they use standard FF parts, which makes upgrades, replacements & changes so much easier. For most SPCR visitors, I think this is preferable.

Just my 2 cents.

PS -- Check SPCR's web links for quiet system makers.

I read somewhere that Dell makes a special effort to make their PC's quiet because they have some sensitive Scandinavian customers or something. That was kind of irrelevant, but I do have something relevant to say. I have a friend who owns a Dell and when it's under his desk, I can't even tell if it's on. I have to get on my knees and get within 1 foot to heat anything. His Dell is about 1 years old (I don't know the model, it's "midnight grey" as I think they call it). He added a second hard drive, but there was no 3.5 in bays so it's just on the bottom of his case. I had a Dell XPS T500 that would be 3 years old now and at first it was really quiet, but towards about a year ago the hard drive became very noisy. That Dell did have a place to put a second hard drive.

my mom has a dell 4500 (p4 with ddr ram) and its fairly quiet but no where near silent, right now i can hear the washingmachine in the next room, but the power supply fan noise from the computer is still audible over the loud washingmachine noise.

It wasn't that there was no place for a second drive -- but what you had to do to get that drive there, plug it into the mobo, and then configure the mobo to recognize... The mechanical setup was really terrible, all kinds of interlocking bays & brackets, etc: to get to that you had to open this & pull that there, push this wire off, but to do that, you had to standup, turn around, hope on one foot, clap your hands...

For people used to the sophisticated ease of BIOS these day (me), that was like working with stoneage stuff. I can't recall exactly how it was bad, but it took way more time/effort than it would on any of my homebrew machines.

Maybe this was particularly a bad one.

I've been looking at EndPcNoise.com

Thanks for the suggestion. Their prices aren't bad either.

Saw some on the Ambient Computing Technologies website, ambientct.com (not barebone though).

I purchased a machine from "endpcnoise.com" about two months ago for my wife. Very quiet and overall quality seems to be excellent. People at the company were friendly and helpful and very willing to modify their basic designs to meet user needs.

Brian Elliott

I and a few others are thinking about starting a low key business venture assembling quiet pc's into custom made cases, to be used as multimedia style in the front room jobbies. Anyone think theres a market for these out there?!

Not yet. At least, that's how it feels to me. But maybe coming soon. I think first people need to figure out that the vast majority of them don't need Hyperthreading 3.05 Ghz processors. Then they will figure out they need quiet PCs. So let that first one be your road marker.

How do I know this? I just do.

Not quite sure what you mean with multimedia style in the front room jobbies. Do you mean an info kiosk for the people visiting the building, or som nice looking computers for the receptionists?

At least in Norway, my impression is that the info kiosk market is very small. There are some ok looking info kiosk cases, but we are thinking about teaming up with a local industry design company to be prepared if we get a info kiosk job that require something more. We are mostly working with e-learning/CBT though, and after six year in the business, I've only been slightly involved in one project about six years ago. I started a new company together with two others a year ago though, and we are thinking about telling some of our big customers that if they need an info kiosk, we can do it, so maybe I will get to work on such projects too

For receptionist work, I think a VIA EPIA would be ok for most places, and it should be rather easy to hide from public view. But maybe the point was to not hide them?

I was thinking the Shuttle small form factor modified would work,
The mods are pretty basic, but with the size of the little thing, would require a different case cover. The mods are basically this, to put a Panaflo L series 80x15mm side intake fan were the video card is located and put in a 300 watt Seasonic were the little power supply (with that horrible 40mm fan) is located.
If I took the stock cover off and made one that was wider to clear the added 15mm thick fan on one side and the larger Seasonic power supply. Actually, I would prefer to use my Antec Trupower 430w for the extra ventilation and case fan controls (A little louder but I like the temp controlled case fan option) Put in my Samsung CDRW/DVD combo drive, a memory card reader in the floppy slot and strap the floppy inside somewere (in case I need to use a floppy once a year)
With the increased flow and decreased temps afforded by the silent intake and quiet power supply fans, the BIOS will see lower CPU temps and slow the CPU/Exhaust fan down. The added airflow would be nicer to the suspended/side sinked hard drive and combo drive. A Radeon 9700 AIW with a Zalman (cooled aided by the Panaflo blowing on it) The video card's mass is a concern, I will bolt a bracket on the card to hold it in place.
The main thing is to figure out how to get the power supply to fit in it. Aluminum channel, rivets and custom sheetmetal work would do it. The added width of the thing is not too bad, I could make a custom front panel addition to hold my temperature monitor displays and maybe mount the floppy drive sideways.
Slap in the nForce2 all in one mobo, put the Barton cored Athlon in place (burn it in and drop the voltage a bit) dual 400MHz DDR memory and it will be done. The ultimate, small and quiet multimedia box!
Anyone out there have one of those little boxes to let me know how much fabrication I would have to do to fit a normal ATX power supply in it?

Sorry, I can't let this go. Hyperthreading rocks, and should have been developed years ago. There is ample power now in a processor to allow you to load a resource hog like Photoshop or Word in the background while doing something else. Hyperthreading is a real first step for Intel away form that silly MHz treadmill they got their arm caught in... providing processors that behave in intelligent, human, centric fasion rather than just brute forcing some outdated instruction sets. Hyperthreading slices your bread while toasting a completely different and unrelated loaf of bread. Hyperthreading means Kazaa doesn't make video playback unbearable.

3.05 ghz processors on the other hand...

-C