Building a 'Quieter-than-a-Whisper' Mini-PC |
This project is inspired by the article Building a Mini 'Quieter-than-a-Whisper' Linux PC by Mike Chin at Silent PC Review. The original article is dated by April 2002, and this was the main reason for me to write a newer one. I also recommend to check the mini-itx.com website for a lot of related information and interesting projects.
Objective: assemble a very quiet, highly ergonomic, easily portable, and low power consuming PC, which would be powerful enough to run modern OS and applications. The PC is designed for performing a wide range of everyday tasks that do not require very intensive processing, including office applications, text and graphics processing, Internet browsing and email, basic software and Web development, playing audio/video media, occasional digital image processing, scanning images, home network/printer server and firewall.
Using a decent desktop PC for these purposes over years, I am now tired of investing into silent parts like power supplies, case fans, graphics cards, etc. A low PC noise is a deciding factor for me. For the applications mentioned above any contemporary PC is nearly idle most of the time, making it no sense to increase its processing power, which would be fully used very occasionally.