[NBLUG/talk] Quiet SFF reccommendations/opinions?

[thiessen at sonic.net]

Hi,

Summary:  I'm looking for personal impressions of whatever SFF systems
NBLUG members have used, especially with respect to noise levels.

(appologies in advance for the long-winded wind-up)

I'm currrently in the process of picking out computer components for my
wife's next system.  It's going to be in our bedroom, which doubles as
her office.  This, of course, means that the system needs to be fairly
quiet.  Neither of us want to hear "whir-whir-whir" all night long,
and Christina (like me) tends to leave her primary system up and running
24/7.

It'd be nice to have something a bit more compact that most of our computers
have been.  I think I currently have enough big old towers hanging around
the house to armor a few Humvees, and I'd like to slow down our rate of
mass accumulation before neighborhood kids start to orbit the house.  A
laptop doesn't fit the bill because of the combination of imperfect
ergonomics, limited upgradeability, and higher cost.  I'm hoping to get
away with spending no more than ~$600-$800 on the setup.  We have a decent
display and a fairly new DVD burner that I can reuse, but most everything
else will need to be bought.

My wife does put a fair amount of load on her computer, which rules out
the quietest options (I.e. - Pentium M-based setups).  Besides typical
web/email, she does a lot of photo and some video editing.  I guess here
is the place to confess that it's probably not going to be a Linux system
(BOO!  HISS!), as we already have the windows applications, and she knows
Photoshop backwards and forwards.  I know there are Linux substitutes
for many of these apps (e.g. - the Gimp), and Christina is not particularly
fond of Windows, but the irritation of MS-Annoyances hasn't reached a
high enough level to discard 10+years of experience mastering Photoshop.
(And yep, I've heard of the "Gimp-shop" makeover project.)

I've been doing pre-purchase research and looking at a lot of the SFF
systems, which are really appealing in terms of size and convenience, but
which the reviews indicate typically run a bit louder than comparable
full-sized desktops.  If I wasn't concerned about the noise we probably
would have already bought one.

For reference, I've spent time reading through reviews on

http://www.silentpcreview.com
http://www.sfftech.com

and looking up whatever other reviews/info I could find on particularly
promising-sounding SFF systems.

As a possible alternative I was condsidering building a system in a really
quiet case, such as the Antec P180.

http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=81800
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article254-page1.html

And just living with the fact that we've accumulated yet another fair-sized
tower.

So (If you've made it this far) what I'm looking for is members' personal
impressions of various SFF systems, particularly noise levels.  There
don't
appear to be a whole lot of these in local stores, so I've been unable to
inspect many personally.

I'm not looking to do a lot of modifications to a system.  If it doesn't
run quietly in a stock setup, I don't want to deal with it.  The system
needs to NOT be a "tinkerer's" box.  (I've got enough of those already.)

Thanks,

Justin Thiessen
---------------
thiessen at sonic.net