welshmousepk :
you may want to look up the word 'passive'
watercooling and silent fans does not even come close to passive. its about as far from passive as you could possible get actually.
No need for the snarky remarks, I *do* know what passive means.
the points I were trying to make were that it is possible to build a system that is virtually passive for the vast majority of its component parts - no mb fan, no psu fan, no graphics card fan and no CPU fan - this accounts for the vast majority of the usually actively cooled components, and still have a system that can run games respectably.
The reason I mentioned water-cooling is that many systems with a big radiator can cool high end components with very little noise - and for most people noise is the main factor in deciding go down a passively cooled route, so much so that I almost think of passive and silent as interchangeable terms.
If it makes you happy, I can take the side of my PC and turn off the two tricool fans and voilà, passively cooled gaming pc, if i had the money i could put in two 4850s retrofitted with accelero s2 coolers and its suddenly a very decent gaming rig......