Anybody built a near silent HTPC???

My HTPC is near silent. All I've done is 7v the already quiet fans. You don't need to go to great lengths, just choose components wisely. Passive GPUs and slow fans. The main source of noise in my experience, or at least the most difficult to deal with, are hard drives. Either go for a laptop drive and suspend, or a quiet (ie WD Green) desktop drive. Only use one drive and have storage elsewhere (NAS/fileserver).
 
^^ Sound advice, no pun intended. You can build anything you like really, as long as the sources of noise are covered. That's moving parts basically. Fans and hard disks.
 
I built one earlier this year which was silent from anymore than a meter away.

Antec Fusion case with fans set to low.
Gigabyte 780G motherboard with a 4400+ X64 CPU with passive Mini Ninja HS.
4GB RAM.
Samsung 160GB OS Drive and Samsung 1TB Media drive.
BR Drive.

Ran all media perfectly including 1080p BR.
 
Both. Mine is slightly louder than a sky box, but with a 7v fan mod (yet to be done) I imagine it'll be about the same. The HDD in the Sky+ box here is pretty loud actually.

My spec is very similar to Orange Peel's.
 
Can you buy sound proof cases? You must be able to get something to go inside a case to make it quiet (without turning it into a furnace)
 
You can get cases with thick panels to deaden the noise. I expect the high end offerings from Zalman for example may have this. I know my P182 has this, but it's hardly a HTPC case. The Antec Fusion Micro doesn't, but it does have vibration dampening pads here and there. This could maybe be improved with some of those Akasa sound deadening mat type things OcUK have or similar, though room is typically quite tight in HTPC cases.

The better way to go about noise is to remove the sources or target them specifically as I mentioned above. If budget permits, basic watercooling (very case dependant) can also yield good results, especially if your HTPC will be sitting in a cramped area.
 
Michael.T said:
as quiet as say a SKY+/SKY Hd box ?????????

and when you say BR do you mean actual blue rays discs or rips ?

cheers guys :)
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Quieter. The HDD/Fan in my Sky+ box was clearly louder.

Yeah Blue Ray discs.

It also played rips and divx/avi/h.264 etc perfectly.
 
I've got a Cubit 3 running a mobile Core 2 Duo and HD 4 series graphics card, and that handles pretty much whatever I throw at it and the noisiest thing in it is the HDD!
 
Mines onboard the motherboard. Does a fine job of blu-ray. It's the 780G chipset, so a Radeon HD3200. The 785G chipset, which is available new at the moment has a Radeon HD4200 IIRC.

No need for an external card with the right motherboard, but if you feel the need grab yourself a Radeon 4350 or 4550 with HDMI onboard and a low profile bracket if you get a smaller case. They're nice and cheap and will let you pass audio over HDMI as well as coping with blu-ray no problems. Will be crap for gaming though.

EDIT: Should also note, for silence, you'll want a passive card. Most of the 4550's have a fan and passive are not low profile, so a passive 4350 would be best. Sapphire do a well priced one.
 
alexhull24 said:
Mines onboard the motherboard. Does a fine job of blu-ray. It's the 780G chipset, so a Radeon HD3200. The 785G chipset, which is available new at the moment has a Radeon HD4200 IIRC.

No need for an external card with the right motherboard, but if you feel the need grab yourself a Radeon 4350 or 4550 with HDMI onboard and a low profile bracket if you get a smaller case. They're nice and cheap and will let you pass audio over HDMI as well as coping with blu-ray no problems. Will be crap for gaming though.

EDIT: Should also note, for silence, you'll want a passive card. Most of the 4550's have a fan and passive are not low profile, so a passive 4350 would be best. Sapphire do a well priced one.
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This. The 780G chipset does all the decoding so the CPU just sits on tickover. Great setup for HTPC :)
 
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