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***WARNING*** Reading the Contents found on the preceding link
may cause an unhealthy obsession with ending PC noise, possibly manifesting itself in detrimental amounts of PC related spending in addition to the unnatural habit you already posses as evidenced by your membership to
this forum.
The warning is no joke, I got sucked into SPCR last year and I'm an active poster (under a different name).
If you are building a PC with new parts the best thing to do is to select the correct hard drive:
1) Samsung's Spinpoint have a reputation for being the quietest consumer hard drives for sale. They are 1 - 2dBA quieter than their nearest competitor which is Hitatchi IIRC.
2) The capacity of the drive and the number of platters is also important. Drives with large capacities means they have more than 1 platter. More platters means more noise and more heat. More heat means internal temperatures increases, thus require fans to spin at higher RPMs to exhaust the extra heat. More platters means more heads clicking away to search for the data. The largest single platter drive is 160GM from either Hitachi or Samsung, can't remember.
3) Rotational speed also comes into play. Just like fans, the higher the RPMs the louder the drive will be. The fastest hard drive to consider is 7200rpms.
4) The physical size of the drive also matters. 2.5 " Notebook drives are quieter than the desktop versions, but only just came out with 7200rpm drives recently. This drives will be noiser than the typical 5400rpm notebook drives. Two other limitations of notebook drives are that they have limited capacity compared to the desktop version and they are more expensive on a per GB basis.
5) You can use hard drive enclosures that can help in both cooling and quieting 3.5" drives, like the Smart Drive 2002, or Nexus Black Drive-A-Way, but they require a 5.25" drive bay.
6) Suspending the hard drive in an Antec P150 will also help reduce drive noise by using "rubberbands".
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But hard drives are just one of many components in a PC that produces noise. As mentioned before, fans are a major source of noise, and many people have more than they need or have the wrong (cheap) fans to begin with. Fans are used to cool down a system so the first thing to do is to choose the correct component when you want to build a quiet PC.
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CPU:
The first step is to consider what CPU you want to build your PC around; AMD or Intel? I will just limit this to the desktop CPU since mobile CPU will make this a bit more complicated. First of AMD Athlon 64s are cooler than Pentium 4s. That is plain and simple, even a 65nm P4 is hotter than a 90nm Athlon.
Here is one article about CPU Power Consumpttion, note at 100% burn a dual core Athlon 64 uses less power than a single core Pentium 4. The higher the power consumption the greater the heat dissipation. Intel's upcoming Conroe CPU should be much cooler than the current P4s, but how will they compare against the Athlon 64s? I found Conroe's teaser benchmarks intriging enough to postpone my upgrade to an Athlon 64 X2.
A cooler CPU allows for the use of only a heatsink to passively cool the CPU. The Scythe Ninja is a popular heatsink to passively cool up to an Athlon 64 X2 3800+. A few posters at SPCR even boasted that they can passively cool a X2 4600+, that's a bit too daring for me. A case with good airflow is a must.
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Video Cards:
Video cards are also a major source of heat. For people who don't play games it doesn't really matter, but if you are a serious gamer you will want a powerful card. But powerful GPU consumes more watts, thus producing more heat. That's bad.
This article gives power comsumption of some of the recent GPUs. The Geforce 7900 series is not in the article because they came out after the article was written. As can be seen Radeons consumes more power than the GeForce series. The 7900GT/GTX consumes 6 - 10 watts less than their 7800GT/GTX counterparts because of the die shrink from 110 to 90nm. The 7900 series are also more powerful than thier 7800 series counterparts. The 7900GT is slightly faster than the 7800GTX and also consumes less power. That's a good thing.
Just like CPUs, GPUs must be cooled. However, stock cooling solutions are, well how can I put this? LOUD. So spend the extra $30 - $50 to get an after market HSF to cool down this beast. An example would be the Zalman VF700Cu or VF900Cu. Get the all copper version since copper conducts heat better. ArticCooling is another popular after market HSF.
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Motherboard:
Choosing the right motherboard is also important. Before I decided to postpone my next rig, I was considering the Asus A8N SLI Premium. I'm not such an avid gamer that I want two 7900GTs in my system, I chose that board because the chipset is passively cooled by heatpipes thus eliminating a noise source. Others simply replace the loud chipset HSF with a Zalman chipset heatsinjk, can't remember the model of the top of my head.
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Hard Drives:
Hard drives. Well I already talked about them before I decided to expand my post.
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Fans:
Fans. Most PCs will have an intake and exhaust fan. Bigger fans are better because they can move more air at slower RPMs. But not all fans are the same. Fans, even of the same size, have different characteristics so it's important to go by manufactures or brands, sometimes even by model numbers. 120mm fans are the ones to go for but which one? People who tend to build quiet PC buys fans from Nexus, Yate Loon, Papst, Panaflo (Panasonic), and Scythe among others. They can be expensive, but sometimes you get what you pay for. But that's not all, you need to control the RPM of the fans, because these fans will not be quiet when running on 12v. Speedfan is a free utility that can be downloaded to control fan speed, but it's not compatible with all motherboards. Another solution is a mechanical controller like Zalman's FanMate 2. Both solutions reduces fan voltage to about 5v to slow down the fan(s). Of course it isn't recommend to simply set the voltage to the lowest setting and expect the PC to run fine. Tweaking is necessary.
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Power Supply:
Power Supplies - Unfortunately people tend to give the PSU very little respect. For a quiet or silent PC this component is one of the more researched items. Some PSUs are quieter than others. My default recommendation is the Seasonic S12 series. They are quiet, reliable (except with DFI mobos, but a revision is on the way), and efficient. They are also relatively expensive. Most people say, "I just want to spend $40 on a PSU" but they want it to run a power hungry Pentium 4 D and a Radeon X1900XTX. Does anyone see a problem here? Many people at SPCR are sticklers for highly efficient PSUs, anything that that fits the 80Plus program. 80Plus basically means that the PSU has been tested to have a minimum efficiency of 80% at any load. In general PSUs tend to be at their lowest efficiency at low loads, Seasonic S12s meets this requirement and is at their most efficient at around 55% to 90% of it's total wattage. The lower the efficiency the greater amount of heat the PSU will produce and much of that heat is dumped into the PC case. Thus, fans need to spin faster to exhaust the heat.
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Cases:
I mentioned the Antec P150 case before. That and the Antec P180 cases are both popular over at SPCR because they have good airflow and prevents some noise from escaping. I personally have the Cool Master Centurion 532. It's not on SPCR's recommend list, but it is a personal choice. I like it because the controls and ports are on top of the case instead of simply on the front, since it's a mid-tower standing on the floor the controls are easier to reach. More importantly the front has a mesh design with dust filters that allows are to flow into the case, but can also allow some noise to escape. It's a compromise.
From reading this long post, I hope that it has become evident that no single PC component will make a PC inherently loud or quiet. it is the combination of everything put together (and how much $$$ you spend) that will determine how loud/quiet a PC will be in the end.
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Edit: Minor Update to breakout into sections for easier reading.
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