Digital Home Thoughts: The Fanless, Completely Silent Hush PC

"There are two critical requirements for a Media PC that's going to reside in your living room, it has to look great and be quiet as a mouse. Unfortunately, these two requirements are poles apart when it comes to designing and engineering a computer. In order to make a PC look good it needs to resemble a consumer electronics device with slim dimensions like a modern DVD player, but the slimmer and more attractive you make a PC, the hotter it becomes inside and the more fans you have to use to cool it, resulting in greater noise pollution. Tackling the problem from the other side, you can use a large case with lots of air flow, along with large fans spinning at low speed and making very little noise, but the result is a big, ugly system that no one would want in their living room. However, German custom PC builder Hush Technologies has managed to create machines that fulfill both criteria with aplomb. Hush PCs, as the name suggests, are completely quiet in operation."



If you're looking for a high-end, beautifully build Media Center Edition PC, this looks like the one to get, period. Opening up the platform to "second tier" manufacturers was the best thing Microsoft could have done, because it allowed companies like Hush to create products based on design excellence and flawless aesthetic value - not just mass-produced plastic like we've seen so far (though the new horizontal HP design looks nice).