Silent PC for Special User

Put it in a cabinet far away, run a long-ass HDMI cord, and use a wireless mouse/keyboard.

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That would get you around the main conundrum of performance vs noise levels.

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Have you tried digitalimpuls.no ?
They’re pretty good when it comes to service and price.

What @Ruffalo said but I would even suggest if it’s a real health problem he could move the PC to a different room.

Basically 10 meters is the maximum you can go between your PC and your monitor. That’s because a really high quality DisplayPort cable (I have the Lindy 10m DP cable) can get you 4K at 60hz with that length.

Trust me nothing on earth beats the feeling of sitting at your “battlestation” and turning of the speakers/headphones and sitting there in complete silence.

If you need any advice PM me. I am running 3 1440p+ monitors, peripherals, USB DAC for audio and some Arduino/NodeMCU stuff. The distance between my battlestation and my cabinet is 8 meters. So I have experience.

This kid is a ward of the state on a strict budget who wants to play minecraft, 4k is not a priority. HDMI will stretch 15 meters for 1080p.

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Ok One last stab att this.

If all the kid wish to do is play Minecraft and Fortnite, a Nintendo switch is a viable option, both games are free downloads. If he must have mouse and keyboard those are available and fit within your budget. That said, here is my PC suggestion;

Motherboard: Included in case
PSU: Included in case, fanless brick
Case: asrock Deskmini A300 1563 NOK
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G 1634 NOK
Cooler: Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 469 NOK
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MHz 2x8GB 954 NOK
Harddrive: Kingston A2000 500GB M.2 nVME 749 NOK

Total, 5 369 for a 23 dB system - you pretty much need to put your ear to it to hear anything and the sound of any game will drown it out.

I know it is slightly over budget, you can save 500 NOK on a 3200G over 3400G though, which brings the total down to 4800 NOK. Another cost saving is a 2666 2x4 memory module instead of 3200 2x8, which brings you within budget. Also a 250 GB SSD instead of 500 GB.

Do not recommend either downgrade, since APU need higher mem speed, modern Windows is a memory eater as well as a harddrive space hogger and the 3400G allows for so much more gaming, but if you must those are the biggest cost savings.

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Why not a case like the streacom DB4?

Could help you, The case walls are the cpu cooler for maximum no fan cooling

The budget for the build is $500

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Yes @Pixels, wait for a Black Friday sale. The difference in pricing can mean a lot in buying components.

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im using a zotac amp extreme which is a “2.5” aka 3 slot card. the fans dont turn on until/unless it hits 60C and when they turn on i can not hear them. spinning at the lowest possible speed it has never gone above 63C, and with a bit of a custom fan curve + undervolting you could probably have them never spin. i have full blow swords that weigh less then this gpu. has a ridiculous vrm idr the number of phases but the 1080 and ti version are 14 phase.
a undervolted 1080/1080 ti is overkill but quiet.

You are very kind, but I don’t know the legality around it, much less how to do it. I am seeing alot of good suggestions, problem with putting the PC in another room, is that the only other room available is the users bedroom. And they are not allowed electronics there because of the potential fire risk. We did consider a Nintendo but this idea was dismissed as it is protable, could break easily during a tantrum, and the PC would be used for Schoolwork also.

I thought I would ask :slight_smile:

For completeness, is this replacing a computer? Do you have a windows 10 license? (Maybe it can be transferred) If not that needs to be considered and will take a chunk out of the budget.

Ah, we have not thought of that. how much is windows these days? Stupid me thought it was free since win10?

Unfortunately not free, there are some ways around it though, full price is 1000 NOK but some discounts are available;

  • Become a beta tester for free, not the best solution but workable
  • Bring a work license, technically not legal but noone will punish you if you do it
  • Buy OEM for 200 NOK, again not really legal but again noone really checks it
  • Install it anyway and endure the constant nagging to pay for it

If you know Linux you can get Minecraft working pretty easily, but Fortnite is unfortunately a no go thanks to anti cheat systems. Fortnite in itself work but not the anti cheat software :frowning:

On a side note it baffles me how the MS Monopoly still allows them to charge for what is essentially a free commodity at this point, but such is the way of the world. Don’t have to like it just have to pay :smiley:

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I got you fam.
Stand by.

Det forklarer alt.

Already gave a decent offer using proshop.no and komplett.no, but if you can shave that build further go for it!

What about buying an Nvidia Shield TV for gaming and a Raspberry Pi for programming? If he just wants to play Minecraft and Fortnite those run without any problems on that thing and I’m pretty sure it’s a completly silent console that, even if it has a fan, it’s not audible from couch distance and makes no coil whine like a PC.

Alright, this was tougher than usual, but we did it. @Pixels

So the only thing that will have a fan in this build is the PSU, and that fan only starts when needed, which should not be often.
You use the Be Quiet! CPU cooler, but without the fan.

Now, the only issue with this build is cooling of the CPU might be a bit underwhelming without the fan.

An optional build that will not have problems with cooling, and have similar performance looks like this.

These builds should handle fortnite at 1080p medium at around 50-60fps.

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Thank you! And thanks to everyone, I will present the options to the user and see what he goes for! I will update once we have ordered parts!:slightly_smiling_face:

Ok, finally got access to a laptop PC so I can do some final lookups on the improvements I posted;

  1. If you go with the Ryzen 3400G, definitely, absolutely go with 2x8 GB of DDR4 RAM, and the faster you can have it the better. This is because 2GB will be allocated to the GPU, meaning you will only have access to 14GB of system RAM. If you have to slim things down, RAM go last.

  2. 3400G vs 3200G, here is one video I found informative. I do not recommend the 3200G over the 3400G in this scenario.

  1. 500 GB SSD vs 250 GB SSD; Go with the 240 GB option instead of the one I linked you, after looking up average sizes of Minecraft and Fortnite, it will fit comfortably on a 240 GB drive.

So, to fit your budget better this is my updated build, still 350 NOK too much, but going any cheaper will make huge tradeoffs that are not really worth it for a few hundred crowns more. If you really must lower it further, do the 3200G swap.

Motherboard: Included in case
PSU: Included in case, fanless brick
Case: asrock Deskmini A300 1563 NOK
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G 1634 NOK
Cooler: Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 469 NOK
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz 2x8GB 874 NOK
Harddrive: Kingston A400 240GB M.2 SSD 349 NOK

Total: 4889 NOK

Last thing to note with the @anon46267848 builds is that it is a PC desktop case, at 4509 and 4445 NOK respectively, with lesser RAM, so you trade quite a bit performance (~10%) and size for that build. But yeah, equally viable otherwise, and 400 NOK cheaper.