I would pay for a silent PC. I paid a lot for a quiet Apple PowerPC Mac pro back in the day and built a quiet PC but they are not silent and I have moved to a quieter place and I can hear them (yes the Mac runs Fedora now). I have some silent ARM machines but they don't quite cut it yet though maybe the new quad core one will.
I haven't used a Puget machine myself, but I've relied on Silent PC Review's component recommendations for nearly a decade, and never been disappointed.
I have seen full size ATX cases from Silverstone with passive cooling, where the entire case is machine out of aluminum and acts like an enormous heat sync. Have yet to find a good fanless power supply. The new Mac Pro supposed to be only 12DB. It's hard to beat that, most rooms have ambient noise of at least 18db.
Teach me oh great one. Honestly I've never managed to clean a fan. You can brush off the obvious dust but the noise comes from dust getting into the fan itself.
Spray it with compressed air inside and out. You can get into the slit between the fan housing and the motor and blow it out there as well. Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust. I have a small home server with 4 fans. After almost 10 years now 3 out of the 4 fans are as quite as they were on day one, the 4th has developed a bearing issue and needs to be swapped out eventually. I am assuming that Apple will use hire quality fans then the $3 crap fans I am using.
>Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust.
That exactly is the issue. They don't just mysteriously develop bearing failure / wobble...they do so because dust gets into the bearings. And that exactly is my point...no amount of compressed air can fix dust in the ball bearing grease. I just end up replacing all the fans after a few years...
My MacBook Air (2012) is completely silent most of time (except viewing videos in Flash or Silverlight). Given is silent, I can actually hear the power supply of my monitor buzzing! (actually it's very quiet buzzing) - be careful what you wish for I guess.
Yeah I know it's awful, if my Celeron 450Mhz could play DVDs at no effort, I don't know why this can't play videos on 5-10% CPU and not spin up the fan.
If an i3 is fast enough for you, and you don't need high end graphics, you might want to consider an Intel "Next unit of computing" system... You'll need to get laptop components for it though. I've considered it, but not that into quiet, and want a bit more power.
It's tricky getting a passive GPU to actually work, mine has a tendency to overheat and halt the system rather than throttle down under load. It required a fair bit of tweaking to case fans and driver underclock settings to get it stable.
