Building a silent computer (fanless?)

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

Soldato
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England
I'm literally on the verge of ordering a new computer to act as a home server and want to make sure that it runs as quietly as possible as it will be in my bedroom and will be running 24/7.

I can't afford to go with water cooling so that is not an option.

The machine will be running an i3-3220 and will use integrated graphics. I will not be overclocking it. There will be 8GBs of RAM and 2x 2TB HDDs.

Will just putting a big heatsink on the CPU with no fans be enough to keep it cool? I can't imagine that the computer will kick out much heat as it will be running idle most of the time and the only other "hot" components are the RAM and HDD.

Any suggestions at all?
 
I think most good sized heatsinks will cool that chip passively. My D-14 certainly would. But with fans at 400rpm it's inaudible anyway.
 
It's always worth having a tiny bit of airflow and having fans running at very low RPM will be inaudible but still generate some airflow.
 
PSU will probably be louder than anything else.

You need airflow for more than just cooler.

Good fans running at 700rpm will be quieter than your bedroom ambient is.

Ram doesn't generate much heat.

Motherboard chips do and often need airflow. Keep in mind most were designed when downflow CPU coolers were the norm.. and they moved air over/through chip heatsinks around CPU. Many motherboards still use this cooling design.

My X58 NB chip is hardest thing in my system to keep cool. Next is HDDs ;)
 
If you want to go near silent then one option worth considering is mini-ITX with an external power supply. My home server has an old E1600 in it with 8GB RAM, 2x 2TB and 1x 750GB drives and the only audible noise is the when the hard drives spin up.
 
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