TOP3 hardware

Recommended for Quiet / Silent (passively cooled) / Energy efficient PC & HTPC

List of my recommended manufacturers for quiet and silent pc components. More detailed information about noise levels, heat production and power consumption, compare charts and links to reviews can be found later on other tabs. Last update: 9.9.2010 (next update is scheduled to 02/2011)

QUIET CASE

  1. Antec
  2. Silverstone
  3. Lian Li

QUIET & SILENT PSU (power supply unit)

  1. Seasonic X-serie
  2. Corsair X-serie
  3. Seasonic S-serie

ENERGY EFFICIENT MB (motherboard)

  1. Gigabyte
  2. MSI
  3. ASUS

QUIET & ENERGY EFFICIENT CPU (main processor)

  1. Intel
  2. VIA
  3. AMD

QUIET & SILENT GPU (video card)

  1. Gigabyte
  2. MSI
  3. Powercolor

QUIET HDD (hard disk drive)

  1. Western Digital
  2. Seagate
  3. Samsung

SILENT SSD (solid state drive)

  1. (not enough info to compare)
  2. (in general all models are inaudible)
  3. -

QUIET OPTICAL DRIVE (CD/DVD/BlueRay)

  1. Lite-On
  2. Sony
  3. Samsung

QUIET FAN (for air cooling)

  1. Scythe
  2. Nexus
  3. Mechatronics

EFFICIENT HEATSINK (with or without fan)

  1. Zalman
  2. Scythe
  3. Arctic cooling

DUMPING MATERIALS

  1. (not enough knowledge)
  2. -
  3. -

WATER PUMP FOR WC (water cooling)

  1. (not enough knowledge)
  2. -
  3. -

OTHER QUIET COMPONENTS

Some passive cooled components can emit noise too (like coil whine). In general this noise is inaudible, but in passively cooled silent computers it might become an issue. Unfortunately I have not too much knowledge about manufacturers who consider this in their design, if you know some I'd like you to write a comment for me.

BACK TO SILENSSIMO FRONT PAGE


FEW NOTES ABOUT THIS LISTING

There are several other manufacturers doing good work and many of these lists should be much longer. I've chosen listed manufacturers because of good single products or wide variety of decent products. This means that a best single product might be ranked to 3. place or even lower if the manufacturer doesn't have enough of other options.

Lists are based on several sources and years of reading them. I've visited several hundreds of reviews, more than twenty user forums, manufacturers own pages and other pages to read consumers comments. Listed manufacturers are not sponsoring this page or me. Possible advertisement of listed manufacturers are chosen by Google, not me.

Manufacturers: to get listed, please just do good work with quiet or energy efficient components. If my next update is close, feel free to ask me if I have yet noted some of your new quiet or silent products, especially if your company is not know worldwide but your products are sold in several countries. If there are no objective reviews yet, please consider sending me an example to be reviewed. Money / other gifts are not accepted. Reviewed components are always returned if delivery back is paid by manufacturer/shop. Review is posted back before publishing it. My test rig is waiting, please send all questions to: simo.ruoho[a)gmail.com
Read more!
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)