Glad to see some info on the effectiveness of the soundproofing material. I had come across this recently, and was wondering how effective it really was. I'm going to be building a new system this summer in time for QuakCon, and want to make it as quiet as possible. I dropped the desire to overclock after the Celeron 300 days, so that should help a bit. I'm aiming at building a very small case, so that could lead to the need for more fans to help move the air around.

I wish one PC maker out there would actually sit down and try to engineer a decent, but quiet PC. The best that I have seen is the Compaq iPaq Desktop, but it has no graphics expansion capabilities.

The best expandable design I have ever seen was the Apple Cube. It has no fans, had a replacable AGP video card (that could include a fan), replacable hard drive, memory expansion, and wireless networking addon. I'd love to see a PC designed like that, with the goals around making a small and silent, but powerful system. Some cube owners have even upgraded the processors to a dual processor config.

I guess the past few years of working on quiet laptops, and more recently a quiet iMac have spoiled me. Or it could be all the work around 8 proc fan noise from hell servers at work.