If the sound of whirring fans spinning up grinds your gears, then how about building a PC that doesn’t just look cool, but also manages to stay cool without needing any fans? I spotted this mini silent gaming PC build on Reddit today, and I applaud the builder’s commitment to cutting fans completely out of the equation, all while using off-the-shelf parts. PC component makers often misleadingly use the word “silent” to describe quiet products, but this one genuinely fits the bill.
Naturally, there aren’t any super high-end components in this PC build, but it still contains an Intel Core 15-13400F, a ten-core CPU that’s listed as the best value option on our guide to buying the best gaming CPU. What’s more, the builder of Project Silence, who goes by the alias of Big_Muffin_574, says the CPU temperature normally stays at around 50°C, and only hits 60°C on a bad day.
It helps that Big_Muffin_574 lives in a cold region, but that colossal Noctua NH-P1 passive heatsink is clearly doing an outstanding job of keeping the CPU cool. Unlike all the heatsinks in our guide to buying the best CPU cooler, the Noctua NH-P1 is designed from the ground up to be cooled passively without a fan, and its big cube of aluminum cooling fins measures 154 x 152 x 158mm. There is the option to add a fan to this Noctua cooler, of course, but the builder says on the Reddit thread that doing so “would ruin the look, I prefer to have my CPU throttle.”
Meanwhile, the GPU is kept simple with an old-school Palit KalmX Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card, which doesn’t require an external power cable, and is fitted with a passive heatsink as standard. Wouldn’t this machine be better with an integrated GPU these days? “Agree,” says Big_Muffin_574 when asked this question, “but it won’t look cooooooool.” The builder says they’re also looking to upgrade the GPU to a Palit KalmX RTX 3050 graphics card, which is also passively cooled.
Even the power supply lacks a cooling fan, with the Seasonic Prime Fanless TX700 offering 700W of power on tap, which is well over the needs of this low-spec system, as well as a Cybenetics Titanium efficiency rating, without the need for active cooling. All the gear is then mounted on an open-air Monster Studio A45 Evo chassis, so none of the components are trapped behind glass or solid case panels.
What’s more, thanks to the use of a cable-free graphics card and M.2 SSD, the only cables you can see are all neatly gathered up in two bunches. If there is any noise coming from this PC, it’s going to be coming from coil whine, rather than spinning fans.
While I love the idea of a passively-cooled PC build, though, I don’t recommend that you build a gaming PC without any fans unless you’ve thoroughly researched the cooling requirements of all your components first. That doesn’t mean you have to put up with horrible noise, though. You can check out our guide to the best PC fans to find some spinners that can keep your PC cool without making it sound like a jet engine.
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