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Comment by timc3 | Hacker News Reader

This is an extremely badly researched and edited article.

As someone that has been building very quiet PC systems to have in close proximity to sensitive microphones, it is full of non-truths.

For a start Dell is one of the better manufacturers in quietness out of those he listed and comparing a dell from 2004 to something built in 2012 is madness. Machines get noisier over time, chips and chipsets more efficient.

Go and read silentpcreview and it's forum if you want real advice.

Personally my quiet machine has a water cooled radiator, taking the heat out of the chassis, ssd, fanless gpu with water block, fanless PSU mounted out of the chassis. My mistake in that system was using an AMD processor. Intel will be swapped in soon.

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I wrote this article and was very surprised someone posted it on Hacker News, where the audience is highly technical. Your criticism makes it sound like the post was intended to be the ultimate guide to custom building silent PCs for the technically inclined. It was not. It was meant to answer the question: For about $600-$700 can an ordinary person with no technical know how buy an off-the-shelf system that is very quiet (and clean, while you're at it)? Among the thousands of possible off-the-shelf systems, what simple rules of thumb can you apply that insure the system will be quiet and clean?

Excluding my friends in computer/technology only a small number of people I know feel comfortable reinstalling Windows and hunting down all the drivers (I know how to do it and I personally find it to be an annoying waste of time). None of my nontechnical friends and acquaintances would buy a custom-built PC. I considered doing that when I purchased the systems and decided not to invest time in learning how to do it right (I agree with you that silentPCreview is a great resource for going down that path).

I considered the Mac Mini - which was quiet enough. But to run Windows Media Center I'd have to buy a copy of Windows and to run movies an external DVD which brings the cost up to about $1000. I considered boutique builders like Pugot but they all charge $1000 or more for their better Mac Mini like systems.

I actually started to write a much more detailed article half a year ago that you would no doubt have preferred but abandoned it because I thought only a sliver of systems building enthusiasts would care. My blog usually tries to make technical topics understandable by the masses.

I sometimes share my posts here but didn't consider sharing this post for a second - not the right audience.

>I wrote this article and was very surprised someone posted it on Hacker News, where the audience is highly technical.

That someone would be me. I expected that HNers who are busy with software projects or with a startup would be interested to know that quiet systems are now available for about $700 without having to do a lot of detailed research (and I defy anyone to make use of Silent PC Review Dot Com without personally doing a great deal of detailed research) or assembly, but in retrospect, I see your point about its opening you up to criticism if posted here. I will be more careful in the future.

I improved the post intro, it did get posted to lifehacker, and it was even introduced very well with "Joe Golton set out with $600-$700 to see if an ordinary person with no technical know-how can buy an off-the-shelf system that's also very quiet. Here's what he learned."

And yet dozens of people still felt compelled to point out how it is possible to do better with custom builds. I'm astonished at how out of touch the typical geek is with:

1) what a mainstream person is willing to do to purchase a PC.

2)There's a cost to all this geekery. You can buy a Lenovo e420s or a Mac Mini in a couple of minutes. Or you can spend a number of hours (5? 10? 20?) educating yourself on everything you need to know to build the absolute perfect custom PC for you.

I'm kind of glad you did because I realize the intro could be improved to make the scope and audience of the post clear (and acknowledge what else exists but is outside the scope of the post).

I'll improve the intro tomorrow.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

This would be a good place for me to say that I really appreciate your blog. You are very skilled at conveying the information the typical consumer needs to make a good buying decision without overloading the reader with details.

I appreciate your compliment, which describes exactly my aims with writing style. It's actually much harder to write that way then stringing together a technical guide for the technical, which is what the first draft looks like for many of my posts. By far the hardest thing I ever wrote on my site was the extensive series on password management, which is a more technically challenging subject.

I'm really appreciating your posting it here as it caught the attention of Adam Pash at Lifehacker, who will be publishing it today or early next week. I made it clear with him that the audience is mainstream, not custom builders, so hopefully he includes an appropriate preface.

It's funny how some answers to tech questions are really very simple. My entire article can be boiled down to one sentence: If you want a quiet PC for mainstream purposes (no heavy gaming) for less than $700, simply get a Mac Mini or a laptop that has a mobile chip inside from the following chip familes . . .

I presume all that cost less than 700 USD, right? :)

Sure, why not? That watercooling setup is probably like $150-200, PSU $100, $400-450 is plenty for the remainder of a modern machine.

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