Silent PC

Few things can take the shine off a new HTPC faster than a noisy fan, and few components are more likely to be the source of that noisy fan than the power supply. There are many ways to hide the sound of a CPU cooler and eliminate case fans, but for most folks, there is little remedy for a PSU with a buzzy fan. This is where passive power supplies come in. Choose a power supply without a fan and you are one step closer to a silent PC, but given how few passive PSUs there are on the market at a given time and that passive PSUs tend to be rather expensive, how to choose? A noisy PSU is bad enough, but a poorly built passive PSU zapping your precious components is even worse. How fortunate then that our friends at X-bit Labs have put together a roundup of some the best passive PSUs available today. They don't include my personal favorite, the SeaSonic SS-400FL, but they do have its big brother and three other top-notch contenders.

I am sure that anyone would love to have a quiet power supply unit in their system. The products addressing these wishes are the fanless PSU models, which have no noise-making components by definition. Today we are going to talk about four products like that from Enhance, Kingwin, Seasonic and Silverstone.

X-bit Labs