Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott
Originally Posted By: Simon - PG Music
An idea rather than using a rack case is to use an HTPC ITX case.

Agree, provided one doesn't want very high performance, though it's surprising just how much performance one can get.

I have two mini-ITX PCs here, one fanless and virtually silent, and one almost fanless. The former is my fileserver with an Atom CPU at 1.9GHz and has a few TB on one conventional hard drive, the an i686 at 1.7GHz with similar storage lives in an outbuilding and is my automated backup PC.

As one raises the performance, though, one raises the fan noise.

Certainly, but you can cram a lot of performance into an ITX machine these days. This one has a 6-core i5-11400 CPU, 32gb of ram (could do 64gb), a GTX 1060 6b video card, and a 2tb NVMe SSD. Fan noise is pretty minimal. This case came with a 450w PSU as well.


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