Silent Computing update
 

I've been out of this arena for a while, but my ears are pissed at me - so here I am.

Is water cooling still the best option for silent computing? I don't see fan-less computing working for anything more than low end environments. My CPUs may be near 100% utilization for several hours, so I'll still choose fans over a system crash. Am I missing any options - or is water the only solution?

This will, of course, require a water-cooled PSU. Are those any good? I always gotten PCP&Cooling because most others are not trust worthy enough - and they don't offer anything fan-less. My solutions for storage, especially because I cannot fit enough hard drives in my case to store everything, is to put the hard drives off site and use a solid-state drive that is also backed up off site (NAT works great for this stuff).

Not much else can be disassembled for efficiency, flexibility, maintainability, and reliability. The screen needs to be close to you - so the 3D card(s) must be relatively close too. Which means the motherboard and thus the CPU(s), optical drives, memory, and PSU must be close too. Out of that stuff the GPUs, CPUs, and PSUs need active cooling. For a silent setup this active cooling, I'm assuming, must be water.

Any disagreements? If not, then please recommend the proper PSU and water cooling system for my situation. Thanks.

Re: Silent Computing update
 

More info about your build. There's a huge difference between an E7200 + 9600GT and a Q6600 + 9800GTX SLI.

Re: Silent Computing update
 

Are you suggesting that a lower end rig could use all passive cooling?

For now, say Q6600 + 8800GTS (probably don't even need that much GPU power). For 2 CPUs I'm assuming that (if you're talking water cooling here) you'd just need another water block and a slightly better radiator system.

If the answer to my original question is "yes" (that the practical solution is just water cooling), then I thought the issue would mostly be the PSU since they are rarely water cooled.

Re: Silent Computing update
 

Why do you NEED a water cooled PSU? There are some very quiet PSUs out there, some fanless. You should be able to passivly cool the whole rig with a large tank of water, a large radaitor or a few smaller radaitors. If you don't want to go to water and don't want to overclock then scythe makes a very large heatsink called the orochi that can passivly cool pretty well. I recomend using fans quieter (or undervolted) than your hard drive or pump - this way you get to benefit from the airflow and still end up with minimal noise.