Here's my quiet rig. I've been using it like shown in this video for over 3 years. Everything inside is on passive cooling: CPU (AMD Athlon 64 3000+), GPU (nVidia 6800), motherboard (Gigabyte K8VNXP), 2GB DDRAM. Even the power supply is fanless, an Antec Phantom 380W. The orange fan, a Nexus Real Quiet Fan or whatever is called, cools pretty much everything inside the case. The front one, an Aerocool Turbine, is there to cool only the hard drives. The Nexus fan is spinning at idle just over 700rpm and during full load at its maximum 950rpm, while the blue one is always at a lazy 640rpm.
I might lose the blue one when my conversion to SSD is complete-right now using a G.Skill 64GB boot disk and a "fossil" Samsung 250GB SATA hdd, enclosed in a SilenX Luxurae hdd case. What you hear at the start is the maximum of noise the rig would ever emit, with the Nexus fan at its maximum speed. After a minute, the SpeedFan software slows it down to just over 700rpm for proper quiet computing. I use CrystalCPUID to reduce CPU's voltage from stock 1.5V to 1.0V at idle. Should there be need for maximum power, it goes back to 1.50V while the orange fan ramps up as the CPU temperature increases.
I wanted to show the idle temperatures, not sure I succeeded, you might have to pause the video to see it properly. During compressing this video, the CPU reached a maximum of 56C, just as hot as the nVidia GPU. Ambient temperature was about 26C.
I've been reading a lot about how harmful could be to play with your PC's cooling. Well, after more than 3 years, mine is just fine. Providing you don't go over the top with temperatures and you always keep things under control, quiet computing is fairly easily done. The most difficult thing for me was to tame the hdds-they are noisy buggers and very difficult to cool down while they're kept quiet. Thanks to SSDs though, my "one silent fan cools all" rig is closer than ever :)
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