Yeah, ventilation is important. A hot office is not conducive to low fan noise.

Insulating from outdoor noise but allowing air circulation within the home is the plan.

How would I be able to insulate noise from the entrance door of the room (from the hallway) and the window leading outside without it being overly conspicuous?.

Fanless power supplies are an option, but in mid-range builds, a fanless PSU is money that could be spent toward the processor or RAM.

Is there a power supply that is ATX-sized, ~$50 (or less), has at least 400 watts of capacity, while also being quiet (<25-30 db)

Of course, a quality power supply will never truly be obsolete because parts are becoming power efficient. However, are recently made power supplies more effectively cooled than previous ones? Is a good power supply from this year more quiet (on average) than a good power supply from 2007 or 2012?

CPU: i5-7600k for the best performance for your dollar. i7-7700k if money is not a concern. Consider waiting for Coffee Lake though. RAM: 16 GB for your uses, though, if price is a concern, start with 8GB and upgrade whenever you need to. Video Card: GTX 1050 Ti is the best video card in the $150 pr...

I am in the process of building a home recording studio and I want to replace my USB microphone with an XLR microphone that can produce high quality sounds for professional-sounding songs. Recording instrumentals is a possibility in the future, but at the moment, I am focused on recording song vocal...

For silent builds, Micro ATX is appealing. With many builders forgoing optical drives and multiple-HDD setups, builds can be more compact. At the same time, Mini ITX (especially in setups which use over 250w of power) may risk reduced air circulation, higher temperatures, and more noise as a result....

Yes, you are right. There are ATX boards with Wifi (albeit not many) but Micro ATX boards do not. For Intel's Kaby Lake CPU's there are at least a dozen viable options in each form factor. To an extent, a motherboard is really just a motherboard, but I hope AMD gets around to ensuring that there is ...

The PS4's high noise level is because of its fundamental design and won't be remedied simply by replacing the fan. There's a CPU, dedicated video chip and a full power brick densely packed inside of a very small chassis, not because of its fan. inherently designed has a CPU, dedicated video chip and...

A spinning heatsink may have a place in small form factor builds but rapid movement and concentrated hot air seems counterproductive to silence. With a smaller heatsink, there is less ability to absorb the CPU's heat and more burden is placed upon the fan to spin faster.

The CPU could be a problem. The AMD FX line is notorious power inefficient.

Intel's processors come with integrated graphics, so dedicated video cards are not needed unless gaming, video editing or for extremely heavy streaming perhaps. Small form factor and silent builds benefit from not needing a video card. The "K" processors allow for overclocking, but they are more exp...

AMD Ryzen series' lack of motherboard choices is its greatest weakness. At the moment, very few Mini ITX boards exist. And none of the Micro ATX or ATX boards have built-in Wifi.

CPU: Ryzen 5 1600
Motherboad: Asus Prime ATX
RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3000 MHz
Video Card GTX 1080
Storage: 500 GB SSD + 3 TB HDD
Cooler: Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3
Case Fans: Be Quiet! Pure Wings 2 (x3)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4
Power Supply: Seasonic Prime Titanium 650w

The Streacom cases use a copper pipe which attaches from your CPU to the aluminum case, and the case itself is a heat sink. It does command a high premium and it is largely for aesthetic value. As far as a conventional Mini ITX would go, there would probably need to be a Pico (or modular SFX) power ...

The GTX 1080 Ti requires 70 more watts of power than the 1080, making it unideal for silent builds.. It's overkill for video editing, 1080p gaming and even a lot of 1440p gaming. This card may be relevant for 10 years, but it's more cost and power efficient to just buy a mid-range card every years t...

$500+ is a lot to spend on a video card. However, with the price of the GTX 1070 and many other sweetspot mid-range cards being inflated, the GTX 1080 stands as a better performance to dollar value than it once was. For 1080p gaming, it's overkill. It can allow 1440p games to have very high frame ra...

The GTX 1050 Ti is a great card for gamers on a budget, offering a comparable performance to the Playstation 4 Pro. Insofar as it costs around $50 more than a GTX 1050, it's an added investment but it is more powerful. It will probably be relevant for a year or two longer than the GTX 1050. Particul...

The GTX 970 is significantly stronger than the GTX 1050 Ti, comparable to the RX 480 and is slightly weaker than the GTX 1060. I would assume it lies somewhere between a Playstation 4 Pro and an Xbox One X in gaming performance. At 120 watts, it's not as power efficient as current-gen cards, but it'...

The RX 560 is mostly comparable to the GTX 1050 in temperature and performance, but it's slightly cheaper and slightly weaker. For a little bit more money, it's a more capable version of the RX 550, though it does use 25 more watts. As I stated with the GTX 1050, it's graphical capabilities comparab...

At $100-110, the GTX 1050 is an optimal entry-level video card. Most cheaper cards are significantly weaker in performance and are not a good value. Builders with a larger budget may want to upgrade to the 1050 Ti or the 1060 (3 GB), but in each case, those cards offer a proportional increase in per...

a 4tb ssd like 850evo costs $1500 ... expecting SSDs half price every 1.5 years... it will take at least 6 years to reach $187, but by that time we will probably have 20tb+ HDD These are very large numbers. It's kind of hard for me to conceive files needing that much space, but 20 years ago, people...

Consider that HDDs for long term storage don't always have to be spinning. My archive HDD just spins up at boot/wake for a few minutes and when accessed. Otherwise it's not spinning/not adding to the noise environment at all. This is a good point, although, it depends on the use. Will it spin while...

SSD performance is geting better, but for the average user, the performance increases are not noticeable Yes. This is true. It will be a long time until a well-sized SSD becomes obsolete. I may want to upgrade again if the speeds double or triple, but at the moment, booting/loading/transfer times a...

Here are all of the heavy (>150 MB) applications on my laptop, and I have a wide variety of professional apps on it. Professionals who do creative work for a living may have far more heavy apps for good measure though. Screen Shot 2017-09-25 at 1.14.19 AM.png Screen Shot 2017-09-25 at 1.13.30 AM.png...

As most of you probably know, cryptocurrency mining uses multi-GPU setups and the large increase of demand, alongside the unchanged increase in supply has resulted in inflated prices which may not return to normal any time soon. Currently, on a performance to dollar basis, the big-three are GTX 1050...

GT 1030 is unfortunately beat by both sides. Intel's integrated graphics are more silent, small, cost efficient and power efficient than any video card. But for gaming and video editing, the GT 1030 is very limited. For just a bit more money, the GTX 1050, RX 550 and RX 560 all offer a meaningful im...

Micro ATX cases are probably the best middle-ground. A case like the Raijintek Metis Plus is a very small form factor for a desktop PC, but parts may be too densely packed together to allow for air flow. My assumption is that as long as parts have a majority of their surface area exposed to air, tem...

The InWin 301 appears to be one of the best micro ATX cases available. Although it is larger than a mini ITX cases, it has one of the smallest footprint (width and length) of any micro ATX case, yet it also is well designed inside and relatively roomy. A large window panel for aesthetics is a bonus ...

Drawing only 50 watts, the RX 550 is a good affordable entry-level video card for builds that want to do semiprofessional video editing and 4K streaming. For gaming, it can handle light to medium titles at 1080p 60 frames per second at high settings, but bigger budget titles will face a tradeoff bet...