Have a look into the fan-less tiny desktops that Lenovo makes.
Thank you, but Hubby is looking for a full tower. These little ones seem like you might as well get a laptop.
vyger
Why does he want a tower? Do you have peripherals like CD/DVD you want to bring over? You can get external components that connect via USB. I haven't had an optical drive in years and I don't miss them. A full tower will need a full fan to keep it cool. The tiny desktops are more than capable. They won't clutter your desktop or have a footprint beneath your desk. And the parts inside are chosen to run with low power requirements saving you the need for a fan. If quiet operation is a priority, you may want to reconsider a small form factor/tiny desktop.Thank you, but Hubby is looking for a full tower. These little ones seem like you might as well get a laptop.
daftcat75
That's just what he wants, couldn't tell you why except that he wants a bigger hard drive (2 TB) and a CD/DVD burner. He has thought about laptops but desk isn't big enough for it. I will definitely pass along the fact that a smaller desktop might eliminate the fan noise.
When customizing it, you can ask for a lower power CPU and SSD storage. The lower the power requirements, the less the cooling needs. You'll trade some speed for lower heat (e.g. a 2.4 GHz vs a 4 GHz.) You probably won't miss it unless you run graphics-intensive games or do CPU-intensive loads like video editing. You can ask your custom shop if they can build a fan-less system. But they would have to have a motherboard, case, and components that are specifically built for fan-less operation or you'll just fry your new computer. Generally the bigger the form factor, the more fans that are required to keep air moving over the components to keep them cool. Otherwise, you'll have an oven within your tower case. That's not to say that you can't build a tower with quiet fans. That's just out of my experience. I have either had a noisy tower/desktop and never minded the noise (or ran it headless in another room as a server), or I primarily use laptops, usually the one work has issued to me. But over the lockdown, I had some time between jobs to pick up a few of those tiny desktops and run server loads (containers and virtual machines) to learn new skills while I was waiting for the next job to onboard me. Those tiny desktops are more than capable if you're willing to externalize your peripherals.
You can get the tiny with a 1 TB SSD. If you need more than 1 TB, you'll probably need a different form factor. As I've been saying, the main advantage of a tiny is that they are built for fanless operation. But if you need internal peripherals--which will increase the power drawn, the heat generated, and cooling requirements--then the tiny is not the right form factor.
We've had a lot of full size towers over the years that didn't have noisy fans. I have an older XPS that's pretty quiet and his is a 10 year old Inspiron that's very quite. None of them every got fried. He doesn't want a lot of peripherals and not enough room on his desk for a lot of stuff anyway. Tower sits next to the desk. My setup at home for my job is a laptop hooked to two monitors and keyboard and it works great, but I'm not an engineer, and my work is saved to the cloud so I don't need a huge disk drive. I do thank you for the advice. I had always wondered how good those little ones were.
Yeah and make sure memory is expandable.
Heat pipes, they still use them. They are used inside notebooks also.
Thank you for the links. We are willing
Which model did you buy? I have an XPS I bought in 2013 which is completely quiet. The designs have changed, I think, and it's the case design that's causing the issue. But I don't know when the problem started with Dell, but it seems to be widespread based on all the complaints. There is even a YouTube video where you can hear the noise and it's loud.
