JerryD,
Too often you pay for 'quiet' at the expense of 'cool', or vice versa. And the quieter the power supply, the less power it supplies.
This is the best advice I can give.
Look at the
- iStar D400L 19" rackmount case. It has three 120mm fans in the middle of the case that draw air in from the front through filters and one 80mm fan in the back just to help a little bit. Here is a third party review.
- Control the fans with a Silverstone SST-FP52 multifunction fan control panel.
- Mount your HDD in Kingwin KF-22IPF removable HDD trays. Available also for SATA drives, these place the HDD in an aluminum enclosure cooled by two dedicated 40mm fans.
- Cool your CPU with a Zalman CNPS7700-CU 120mm copper heat sink cooling fan
- And, finally power your computer with a ePOWER EP-450P5-L1 ATX 450W Power Supply
Now, appreciate that you can get
a lot more anal than this. This is simply the setup that I would spec'd out as being the most bang for the buck with the least amount of bleeding edge pricey tech. Take special note the the ePower power supply. This thing has a MASSIVE heat sink in the back that you can, no sweat, grill steaks (or hand, or curtain) on. It MUST have SUBSTANTIAL clearance, but by Jimminy, is it quiet.
Yeah, it all adds up. Figure about $550 when all is said and done, but keep in mind that people are dropping over $200
just for a water cooled CPU and you might come to the conclusion that this setup may be the way to go.
Oh, and regardless of how you go, keep in mind that larger fans (i.e., 120mm) move more air at lower speeds than medium fans (i.e., 80mm) and are thus substantially quieter. I use the Kingwin enclosures and have found that the 40mm fans are, perhaps paradoxically, quite quiet, though I purchased them to keep my drives as cool as possible, not to keep the rig quiet.
Luck.
