I’ve rebuilt the tower pc on my desk every couple of years since the 90s. Everything’s been replaced including the case, so depending on your philosophical bent it may or may not be new, rather like the Ship of Theseus. I’ve always done it just behind the technology curve and this has had some great benefits, like allowing me to experience cutting edge tech at a fraction of the usual cost:

I don't actually play FPSs, since I get travel-sick from them. But you get the idea.

As ever, XKCD understands.

The problem is that in a franken-puter one can rarely do a decent job of acoustic engineering. In 2001 that didn’t matter; I could almost cool the beast by radiation and gentle convection[1].  Now I have a motherboard crammed into a case not really designed for it. It has big fans to keep the PSU, processors and GPU cool. The air is genuinely steered and prevented from closed-circuiting by drilled holes and duct tape. I tested the air routes using joss stick smoke.

I love what the machine can do, and Ubuntu gave it a new lease of life and made it fun afresh. Even so I actually unclench when I turn it off each night; only then do I realise how constant and almost-intrusive the noise is. The noise isn’t damaging physically – I used to work managing health and safety, so I’m careful about stuff like that. But I dodn’t think I took as much notice of my acoustic environment before my son was born (he’s profoundly deaf). This is a small, noisy, terraced house and the noise is too much. Now I find it’s also going to be my full-time office, I have to tackle the issue.

My first instinct was to rebuild the bea(s)tbox. Typical systems-engineer thinking: ‘I could replace the enclosure for one with proper airflow and good damping, get quiet fans or fanless cooling, add a secondary enclosure…’ But this is stupid. The cost and effort are too great. I had the answer when I caught myself considering using my eeepc more. I just don’t need the spec I have on my desk. I have a beefy processor used for work on OpenOffice. I have an  nVidia 8800 GPU used mainly for playing I.F, MUDs and roguelikes. (What I really need is one of these!)  And an ATX tower has a bloody huge footprint.

At this point I got yet another pleasant slapping from modern computing technology. The spec I actually need can be silent. Not ‘quiet’. Completely inaudible. And it costs less to have someone send it to me, nifty and tidy, than the cost of my time building it a bit shoddily. Having shopped around I settled on the D1 from Aleutia with the optional solid-state hard drive. After I’ve sold some of the hardware in the old pc to defray the cost, this office should become a place of Vivaldi and contemplation. We shall see in the inevitable review.

[1]Historical Footnote: I used to work at Harwell AERE. The basic historical induction claimed that the first reactor on site, being air-cooled, showed a notable reduction in power when the doors were opened at each end of the hangar where it was housed. I’m unsure about this to this day.

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