goodbye fans hello passive cooling.
Those who build their own PCs seek different objectives and have different requirements, but there is a particularly suggestive market niche: that of totally silent PCs.
That is precisely what a user achieved with a PC that offers zero noise levels. Those 0 dB are achieved through passive cooling, a careful selection of components and, yes, an investment of almost 2,000 euros in an interesting but not super powerful team.
Power is the enemy of silence
That is one of the basic principles of building any silent PC: if you have very powerful components, these end up dissipating too much heat, and there are limits to what passive fanless cooling can accomplish.
This is precisely what a user explains on his blog detailing the entire construction of his silent PC. Everything about it was geared towards not generating noise, and the first of those specific components was the box used to integrate all the components, a Streacom DB4 prepared for Mini-ITX motherboards.
From there, the selection of components, which could not be too ambitious in terms of power. This user chose to base the team on a processor AMD Ryzen 5 1600 with a 65W TDP, a more than acceptable consumption and that could be cooled passively without problems.
In fact, this user made use of an ASRock motherboard with the B350 chipset that also allowed him to even opt for a Ryzen 5 1600X with a more powerful 95W TDP for being able to force the mic by overclocking and still have temperatures under control with the optional LH6 cooling kit for your chosen enclosure.
Its construction was completed before the launch of the new second-generation AMD Ryzen, something that, as I mentioned in an update, would have been perfect to provide the system with greater power and efficiency. In fact, he explained, I would have chosen the Ryzen 5 2600 of having been able.
Other components like RAM – he chose Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4 modules – and storage drives (a 1TB Samsung 960 Evo and a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo) they weren’t so crucial in that goal —They are already silent in themselves— but what was key was the chosen graphics card.
Dedicated graphics can also be passively cooled
Here the user opted for an ASUS GTX 1050 Ti which, according to him, was the most suitable both for its small format and especially for its consumption and the possibility of passively cooling it. To do this, he removed the fan integrated in the card and applied the Streamcom cooling kit for this graphics card, in addition to placing small heatsinks in the four VRAM chips of the graphics to also control the heat dissipation in these chips.
The power supply was also chosen with that goal of total silence in mind, and here he once again opted for the Streamcom ZF240 solution, a 240W fanless source Enough to provide room for maneuver for all components.
The result? A completely silent PC, perhaps not suitable for intensive gaming sessions but certainly perfect for long work sessions in which PC noise will be conspicuous by its absence. This type of construction is not cheap, and this user spent 3,000 Australian dollars on it (about 1,900 euros).
Silence is expensive, but we believe that the result achieved by this user is an excellent example of what can be achieved if you look for a PC of this type. The alternative, of course, is to opt for one of the many laptops – here’s a good list – that have appeared in recent times and offer passive cooling systems (without fans).
