While I have been building computers for years, I've never really taken silence seriously until now. I wanted something kind of quiet a few years ago and made the mistake of getting the Aria case (which was a bitch to work with) and pairing it with a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz. Even with a Zalman HSF and a replacement fan for the PSU, it wasn't all that quiet, especially when I didn't have it behind glass in a TV stand.
This time, I wanted something that was an upgrade but also something quiet. While I'm not done yet because I'm waiting on a shipment of my copy of Vista before I install the hard and optical drives (since I will be using the same ones as now), I'm very impressed so far.
I bought:
Antec Solo case
Corsair 520hx PSU
Intel Core 2 Duo e6750
CoolerMaster HyperTX HSF
2x1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR-6400 memory
MSI Geforce 8500GT video card
I'm not sure about the sound and network yet. I'll give the onboard stuff a try first.
I know some of you will think the video card is a bad choice, but I don't play modern games on the PC, just things like emulation and classic games sometimes. I have a PlayStation 3 for modern games and I'm more of a console gamer. What I wanted out of the video card was just something passive, cheap, yet adequate to run Aero, an HDMI output (to send to a projector), and Purevideo HD support for offloading some of the tasks for playing Blu-ray Discs/HD DVDs (as soon as the price comes down I'll get a BD drive). Most cards don't have an HDMI output, presumably because people want to run two monitors side by side rather than a monitor in one room and a projector/TV in the next like me. I'll probably upgrade the card later though.
Today I set up the motherboard, CPU/HSF, memory, and the video card in the case to see if it would POST, and that's where I made a SPCR rookie mistake. It seemed that the system was dead. Nothing was happening as far as I could tell when powering up. I had removed the Power LED and the monitor was facing the other way where I couldn't see it, so those weren't telling me anything.
Then at one point, I put my ear close to the PSU and heard a faint sound coming from it, and that's when I noticed that the CPU's fan was spinning. It turns out that the system was powering up just fine, it's just that I couldn't hear it! I guess I was just conditioned to think something is wrong if I can't hear anything when the system powers up, regardless of how barebones the setup is. I don't expect this level of silence when I install the case fan and the other stuff, but I was just amazed that it fooled me into thinking it wasn't working because it was so quiet. Since I'm waiting on the OS to arrive, all I've really been able to do is update the BIOS.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone at SPCR for all the helpful information.
Big thanks to SPCR!
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