Last year, I got really tired of loud hard-drives and noisy fans. I decided to build a passively cooled computer (without fans :). I wanted it to be high-performance, small, energy efficient and completely silent.

This became the recipe:
Case: Morex T3500 (80W PS)

HDD: Intel 160GB G2 SSD

MEM: Corsair XMS3 8GB DDR3 PC10666 1333MHz

MOBO: MSI H61I-E35

CPU: Intel Core i3-2100

CPU Cooler: Thermal Right HR-2 Macho

PCH Cooler: Thermal Right HR-05 SLI/IFX

I got big heatsinks and a case with a external passive 80W powersupply. My thought was in the beginning to under-clock the Core-i3 to match the 2100T == 35W TDP, but sins it worked out pretty nice at the orginal frequency(3.1Ghz) I didn’t had too. A little bit of Ghetto-mod about this project, but I really wanted the heatsinks to be outside of the case for maximum cooling and performance. So had to modify it a littlebit 🙂

So whats the temperature?

It becomes pretty hot at full-load, but still good temperatures thought.
36C idle,
65C in usual full load. But with some prime-benchmarking-software ive got CPU temp over 70C. In normal condition, at normal usage, like running some virtual-machines, browsing the web, coding and such, the CPU never gets over 50 degrees.

This computer have been a Linux Server/Desktop computer for almost a year now, and I never had any stability or heating issues. But the project became a little bit more expensive thought.. cause when my computer became silent I noticed that my monitor had a nasty beeping sound, hehe.. so I had to replace it 🙂

I got a article about my project at sweclockers.com and fanlesstech.com