Silent PC - PSU wattage requirements help?

I want to make my PC silent

I assume I need a silent PSU - do I need a silent CPU fan too or are they pretty quiet anyway?

More importantly - how much power do I need to run and Athlon XP 1700, 1x80 gig HDD, and 1x40 gig HDD with room for upgrades in the future?

I use a mini itx computer with a 1ghz cool running chip, it has a fan on the cpu but if you use a heat pipe it can go without. It has two 40mm fans on the case and and external fanless 60w psu and a 120gig hdd. I also have an ext usb2/fw dvd writer for it. Its not silent but its a damn sight better than almost any other computer ive seen.

The key to making it quiet is good airflow you should easily get by with a psu fan a cpu fan and 1 case fan if you block up all the unneccessary holes aroud the case and make the air com in past the hdds then out the back.

If you want to be really quiet you could get a dell as they have one psu fan and then a 120mm case fan that pulls air through the front past the hdds and then over the cpu and out. They run pretty damn quietly.

For a completely quiet comp you could get a mini itx 600mhz fanless mb/cpu and network boot it from a server = no hdd no case fans no cpu fans. Of you could get a cf/ide adaptor and boot terminal services or rdp off it to a terminal services server or just an xp pro machine somewhere out of hearing.

None of these options would that good for playing games tho with an althon 1700 your not going to get far these days anyway :p

there is only one way to make your pc quiet....... h20. it doesnt matter what fan you use its never going to be quiet enough.

i would recommend 300W, its enough to run that equiptment with room for expansion, if you start going over that they tend to be dual fan which is alot more noise. A good way to get it quiet as well is to look at the case ur gettin, the heavier ones dampen the noise more

The standard CPU's are really quite quiet, more than most of the custom ones cause those are for performance. if your really worried about it you could go water cooling. You lose the fan noise but there is a slight hum from the water pump.

the silent power psu units have adjustable fan speeds and so do the psu/ case fans - you can get away with running them quite slowly.

water still needs a fan on the radiator and you need to extract some air out of the case or components which normally dont need a heat sink or fan wil overhreat in the stagnant air.

youve still got hdd noise too.

Ascent used to sell pc noise dampening kits with sound absorbing pads and dampening mats to put in different places but the noise still gets out when the air does. If you can get the air coming in and out the back as some cases do then you can cut the noise down heaps.

I think theres a case that has air intakes on the bottom of it and a sealed front the only exit is a psu fan and a 120mm fan at the back.

if you dont need much cpu power you can go for celerons which are perhaps cooler cpus and only need a little fan. big and fast hdds make a fair bit of heat too so you need a fair bit of airflow and hence noise.

yea its pretty simple though as far as fans go, its alot of air through a small space, its gonna make noise.

This may or may not work for you but this guy I know has a PC dedicated to his A/V system. It's an XP 1800+ UNDERCLOCKED to something like 1ghz. This took enough pressure off the cooling system to make it pretty darn close to silent.
If I recall, it has a 120mm fan on the front intake, running pretty slowly mind you and a 80 on the back, also running quite low RPM. This is enough to keep things all ship shape and quiet enough so he can have it sercing content to his AV stuff in the same room.

Cool eh?

Of course if you dont want to lose that much power then water cooling might be another option. I dunno much 'bout that tho.

Funk that. Just look for a quiet PSU. They run plenty quiet enough. Quite often I find the noisiest parts are the video card and CPU fans. This shit you're stuck with. Especially seeing as you use an Athlon. Having said that I think you're probably going for 'mostly quiet' and not 'silent' so yeah a 320 watt quiet PSU will do you good for upgrades. I don't recommend getting anything below 320 cos the next components you put in will probably be the ones that use up teh juice.

i think the noisiest parts are the extra case fans and harddrive fans. i think harddrive fan is great but you really only need one case fan to suck the warm air out. I had like 4 case fans and they really dont make that much difference except for noise

Theres no point blowing air in as well as outa good silent psu dual fan and one extracting case fan should be enough if you have the air coming in over the hard drives.

use 120mm case fans if you can, they are way more quiet than 80mm

also a good idea are fan controllers so you can lower the fan speeds when it doesnt need the extra cooling, then crank it up whilst gaming andput on some music so you dont notice noise innit