In one of those “what if” situations, Seattle PC company Puget Systems (of Windows 7 deal fame) recently shared information with Tom’s Hardware about how they went about building the ultimate desktop machine. Puget showed them their latest, a quad-Opteron powered monster with 32 gigs of RAM and custom water cooling. I can’t even imagine how much noise this thing would make if it was just air cooled, but the boys at Puget decided to do both and put no less then nine(!) 120mm fans on the radiator. This means that the fans can run at the minimum voltage, which keeps them very, very quiet but moves lots of air.

Tom’s has a really complete gallery and write up on the system, but here are some of the basics. It’s using a standard Cooler Master case (obviously drilled for the water cooling) and Koolance waterblocks, fluid, and pump. It’s got 6TB of space in RAID 5, and actually runs nearly silent.

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