Silent PC for Studio Audio Recording

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9 Oct 2008
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Hiya, I am hoping somebody can help me. I need to by a pc which is as close to silent as I can get for up to £700. I am hoping to find somewhere that will custom build but at a push I would be comfortable building it myself but Its been a few years since I built my last one so would need a shopping list of quiet running components.

The aprox spec I would like would be
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU
4 GB PC8500 (1066Mhz) DDR2 RAM
Quiet Hard drive with quiet mounts 400 gig aprox

Any help would be brilliant.

Thanks

Stu
 
well quiet is best achieved with as much passive cooling as you can muster... something that is not likely to happen with a higher end Quadcore. Better going for the ultra low voltage model dual cores.
As for storage I'd recomend a small SSD for the local PC and some network based storage to keep elswhere. Any disk with moving parts will make noise and SSD in those capacities is expensive so one way round it would be to move the noisy disks away from where you need silence and for unavoidable local storage like performance apps and OS use a Solid state drive which has no moving parts and is hence silent.
 
Some components to look out for going the traditional route:

Case: Antec P182, Solo or sonata plus.
PSU: Enermax modu82+.
CPU cooler: Thermalright HR01 Plus or Ultra-120 extreme.
Hard Drive: Samsung F1 1TB or 750GB, or Western Digital 640gb Caviar Blue
Graphics: Anything passively cooled.
Fans: Noctua 800rpm 12cm.
 
Had a very brief mosey round the internet.
CPU suggestions would be anything 45nm Wolfdale based with something like an HR01 on it. Provided you have a decent case airflow you shouldn't need to fit a dedicated fan to it.
HDD wise i'd use one of these http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=164 probably the 32GB one, and have some magnetic storage in NAS elsewhere.

GFX wise it depends what you want to do but onboard would be ideal from a noise perspective as passive cooling is easy and lack of additional cards improves case airflow.

PSU's i haven't looked at yet but assuming you get a nice one with a quiet fan you should be able to run the whole shebang off one 120mm fan. (be it in the PSU or case mounted)
 
All the sound studio's I have been in have the pc's located outside of the studio.

Monitors/Mic's/Speakers/Keyboard/Mice/CD-DVD/cardreaders/samplers/midi etc can easily be wired into the room. avoiding any of the problems.

Xeon's also have a super low voltage cpu's available, which don't get hot and run on passive cooling. - but slightly more pricey.

Be weary quite a bit of the cheaper equipment can give off a high pitch noise from the components themselves, sometimes not noticeable until your in a studio environment.
 
All the sound studio's I have been in have the pc's located outside of the studio.

Monitors/Mic's/Speakers/Keyboard/Mice/CD-DVD/cardreaders/samplers/midi etc can easily be wired into the room. avoiding any of the problems.

Xeon's also have a super low voltage cpu's available, which don't get hot and run on passive cooling. - but slightly more pricey.

Be weary quite a bit of the cheaper equipment can give off a high pitch noise from the components themselves, sometimes not noticeable until your in a studio environment.

The man has reminded me of something I bumped into while looking at stuff regarding internet cafes. These little boxes that resemble KVMs but run virtual machines off of a networked PC. They're about £150 but are completely passively cooled. They would probably be just the job assuming you can network your PC outside of the studio and don't need to connect high quality audio input to the PC directly. Watch this post i'll look for the website.
 
http://www.ncomputing.com/products.aspx

There it be! they basically just ship video audio and KB/mouse over the network (or a direct connection in the X series case) so you don't lose any of the power of your actual PC. Pretty much like Remote desktopping the PC outside only better :)
Not seen these before, looks like a great solution for running your PC in another room...

Do they add any input lag as I really need low latency in programs like Reason and Logic...?
 
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