I’m hoping the MB community can provide me with some insight for a suitable mid tower upgrade for my needs based on our shared interest in noise isolation in our listening rooms.
I’m presently running Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS on an SSD in an old Lenovo ThinkCentre-M78 SFF tower with an AMD A8-6500b apu with radeon hd graphics and 7GB of DDR3 RAM (as 1 chip is failing). Lossless audio capture and Gimp image editing are my most resource-intensive tasks, along with my daisy-chaining two DVIs while working from home. I also use my PC as a media server to access my content on my mobile devices. No HD viewing of any kind.
This old PC has only a single VGA input. Due to COVID I’m now working from home and needed a secondary display. I tried a low profile single slot graphics card but the SFF tower is just too small to insert the card. The solution I came up with was a Dell d6000 universal dock which provides DisplayPort over USB for the second monitor.
But the most critical element of my setup is that of minimizing fan noise. My office is also my record/listening room so I need it to be as quiet as possible. (MB members will understand.) As such I’ve run 25-foot long extensions on all of the PC’s cables to the tower in another part of the house to minimize fan noise.
Unfortunately this causes problems with DP over 25 feet of USB resulting in sluggish mouse movement, painfully unwatchable choppy video, and audio playback skips terribly. All of this is resolved by switching off the power to the universal dock and secondary display. I’m looking for a simpler solution.
My goal is to invest in a new tower with the following:
- Two DisplayPort inputs, or one DP and one HDMI (I have an HDMI-to-DP adapter handy)
- Two SATA and power inputs to support the SSD I use for the Ubuntu OS and the older HDD I use for my media
- Sufficient processor and RAM specs for the daisy-chained VDIs, audio capture, and image editing in Gimp. (Ubuntu is fortunately very light on resources so I expect any midrange tower should suffice for these tasks.)
- And as quiet a fan as possible (this is critical)
I apologize - I’ve not bought a PC in some time so standard mid towers may in fact be quiet enough for my needs, but I’ll defer to the group’s expertise. Can anyone suggest a solution which meets these criteria? Need I invest in higher-priced “silent” towers or these days will any small form factor PC run effectively silent?
Thanks for your input!
SUPPLEMENTAL NOTE
I wanted to be proactive so I performed an initial search of NewEgg and Tigerdirect for the following properties in the DESKTOP category:
Form Factor = desktop or mid tower or tower, SSD = none, HDD = none, memory = 8GB DDR4, Operating System = none
The best match:
https://www.newegg.com/hp-z-series-z...quicklink=true
HP Z240 MT Workstation i5-6500 3.2GHz 4-Cores 8GB DDR4
Relevant Specs:
- Model - HP Z Series Z240
- 8GB DDR4
- No SSD
- No HDD
- Intel Core i5 6th Gen
- CPU Speed 6500 (3.20 GHz)
- HDD Interface - SATA
- Front USB - 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0
- Rear USB - 4x USB 3.0
- Video Ports - 1x DVI, 2x DisplayPort
- Internal Bays - 2
- RJ45 (ethernet port) - 1
- Date first available - September 03, 2019
- Price - $208.99 with free shipping
Unfortunately there’s no way to tell how loud the fan is on this, but it at least gives me an idea of what I can expect to spend on a full-size tower with the specs I’m after.
How does this option sound? Any red flags? Thanks again!