Just gota brag somewhere, SILENT PC, less than $500

[collie man]

Just built a system for a friend that I am proud of, need to brag about it somewhere.
My buddy has a brain tumor that, while not a danger to his health, makes him super sensitive to white noise in his right ear. This problem has gotten progresivly worse as he has aged, and is now at the point where even the quietest PC fans cause ringing in his ear and pain in his jaw. He had to stop using his Pentium 4 long ago and has been using an old "Centrino" laptop as his main rig with, as we all know, FAR less performance than desired. He has been trying to save the $2000 or so to build a silent power rig, but that is a hard amount of cash to build up. We talked about what he wants outa a system, and it's basic computing. No games, no sound or video editing, just browsing, streaming and torrenting video, and flash games and video. I reolized that with the new atom gen 3 cpu's from intel it would be rather easy to build a perfect cheap system that will handle all his needs. Here is the list of parts I used.

I started with a Foxconn D270S, a mini itx board with a hard wired Atom D2700. 1080p video, 6 channel sound, clock speed of 2.13 ghz on 2 hyperthreaded cores {4 threads}. not to shabby for basic use.
For a PSU I went with a FSP300-60GNF-R from ZEN, a lesser know company. It's a 80 plus bronze rated 300w fannless power suply that is pasivley cooled and has a true 0db sound output raiting.
the only internal drive is a solid state OCZ Octane OCT1-25SAT2-128G which is actually overkill as he already has several external hard drives for storage and archiving but I figgured with the rest of the budget so low we could splurge on the ssd a little bit
A pair of Patriot Signature 2gb 204-Pin DDR3 dims were the cheapest option so I went with them, cuz on a rig like this nothing more is needed
Since all the parts a silent and this will go under a desk, not be a htpc, I used an old beige metal case that used to house a p4. I took some time to get these small parts mounted in that huge case but all in all is't great to look in, TONS of breathing room for all these passively cooled units and it was very easy to keep all the wires tight and untangled.
Oh, and I popped in a of the shelf $80 blu-ray burner, just cuz he still thinks optical drives are important.

All said and done it works like a dream. It's slightly more powerful than a core2duo,{a serious boost for a guy upgrading from a Pentium M} with the super speed boost of a ssd, plays 1080p video and blu-rays perfectly on the 45 inch hd tv he uses for a monitor, and runs 100% silent so long as there isn't a disk in the optical drive all for just under 500 bucks tax and parts shipping included.

I for one am quite proud of this one, what do you think?

[bootmeup]

Nice and nice of you to help a friend

[collie man]

did a geeky thing, built a super cool quiet silent system for a friend, went geekier posted the specks online at a geek site. As of now, 1,590 other super geeks have read my post. Ultra geeky, have checked once a day to see how many other geeks have read my geeky geeky post about my geeky geeky actions.
I suddenly flash back to grade 7, computer class, learning BASIC on a Apple II, {after learning the basics on my VIC 20 befor going XT}my teacher smiles at me and says, "Some day, the Geek Will Inherit the Earth"

I keep wondering, "Or has the Jock inherited the Internet?"

[python134r]

Great Post.....u did a good thing.......

[collie man]

UPDATE!

so now the system is 30 days old, the real test of a build. Now that all the drivers/cookies/codec's/software is installed I can no longer say that this rig is perfect for 1080p video. Once "all the shit is in" 1080p videos stutter like crazy at anything more than 17fps, not so nice. HOWEVER, at 720p it works just fine. Awesome in fact. So too anyone who wanted to copy this system, it's not as perfect as my original post claimed, but still great for a $500 SILENT system.

It's always so interesting to see the performance difference betwixt a fresh install and a active system. My buddy is still super happy with the system, but as a hardware geek I'm a little less than completely satisfied. My hope is that as time passes the powers that be will create super powerful fan-less mini-itx boards so I can swap this one out for more power asap. Truth be told that's why I used a 300w psu, for room to upgrade.