What you see here is a com­put­er I just built for my­self, which was to be qui­et as pos­si­ble, while still keep­ing the ther­mal per­for­mance un­der con­trol. All of this, of course, in a ma­chine with more-than-ad­e­quate per­for­mance for gam­ing, 3D ren­der­ing, Pho­to­shop work, and video en­cod­ing. Here’s a pho­to of the fi­nal build:

uATX si­lent gam­ing build

I used a Ther­mal­take Lan­box Lite case to house this com­put­er. The ma­jor com­po­nents I se­lect­ed for this build were an In­tel Core 2 Quad, 2 GB of RAM, and an nVidia 9600 GT video card. The 9600 GT is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with an Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 cool­er, and the CPU is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with a Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon. Air ex­hausts from the sys­tem with one low-speed 60mm fan be­hind the CPU and one low-speed 60mm fan beside the video card. A 90mm PWM fan push­es air through the CPU cool­er. The thing you see in the top 5.25” slot is a Tu­niq hard drive si­lencer: it sur­rounds the hard drive with sound-block­ing but ther­mal­ly con­duc­tive foam.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, due to a stupid mis­take I made, I need to re­place the moth­er­board I orig­i­nal­ly pur­chased, so I can run the sys­tem right now… when my new one ar­rives hope­ful­ly I’ll post some screen­shots and bench­marks.