Quiet PC DA2a Silent PC

Built around Streamcom’s gorgeous DA2 chassis, the DA2a Silent takes advantage of Nofan’s fanless components to produce one of the best looking and most functional silent PCs available, anywhere!

An air cooled version of this system can be found here.

Total silence in a small package

Apart from the tiny UltraNUC, the DA2 Fanless is one of the smallest PCs we offer. Unlike the UltraNUC, the DA2 Fanless uses a conventional fully-featured motherboard, albeit a Mini-ITX sized one. The machine can accommodate one M.2 SSD and up to two 2.5” hard drives. And because we offer the latest power-frugal processors, it can be cooled fanlessly, thanks to the Nofan CR-80EH fanless CPU cooler. The power supply is the full sized ATX fanless Nofan P-500, so unlike the power supplies in many other small PCs, this one is fully integrated so there are no clumsy black “bricks” which you need to have lying around behind the PC. The benefits of fanless operation include zero noise, does not attract dust, no moving parts, meaning the PC requires very little to no maintenance.

Top Performance and Reliability

Because we use a fully-featured mini-ITX motherboard, the PC is a very capable unit. As standard the motherboard contains the following; Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI 2.0 port, USB 3.1 gen2 ports, built-in Intel gigabit LAN and excellent audio capabilities. One of AMD’s latest generation processors forms the brains of the system. Famous for their excellent performance/value balance, these processors have the latest architecture and offer excellent performance. It can be built with up to 32 Gigabytes of memory, but we recommend a minimum memory specification of 8GB for this PC to perform at its best.

Graphics Card Options

Some of the processors available with this system have integrated graphics, but there are some that do not. This can be a little awkward when configuring the system, as to whether a discrete graphics card is needed or not. To try an make things clearer all processors that include built-in graphics have the following, “with Radeon Vega Graphics” in their product name. Those CPUs that do not include built-in graphics have “Requires Graphics” in their product name and therefore a graphics card must be selected.

The number within “Radeon Vega Graphics” indicates how many graphics cores each processor has. For example, the “AMD Ryzen 5 3400GE with Radeon Vega 11 Graphics”, has a total of 11 graphics cores. The larger the number the greater the performance.

Storage considerations

When specifying your new PC’s storage options using our system configurator below, you will be offered a choice of drives which vary by price and capacity. There are two primary types of storage. A conventional hard disk drive (HDD) offers huge storage capacity for a low price, but it won’t be especially fast and it will generate a certain amount of running noise since it contains a constantly-rotating spindle. A solid state (SSD) or a M2 drive on the other hand, offer tremendous speed and absolutely silent operation, but they cost more than an HDD for any given capacity.

So if you need a lot of storage space (for videos or large quantities of digital photos for example), then we would recommend an HDD. On the other hand, if you prefer silence and speed (especially boot-up speed), then an SSD or M2 drive would be a better choice. Of course, you can have more than one drive, so you could have the best of both worlds by choosing one of each! We recommend that customers choose an SSD or M2 drive as a boot drive that contains the operating system and important programs. A conventional HDD would store other data but remember that if you intend to have a totally silent PC, you might want to forgo the HDDs altogether as they will make some noise due to their moving parts.

Clean Build™ Promise

The price of many pre-built PCs these days is often supported by cash kickbacks from software companies who pay hardware manufacturers to pre-install limited or trial versions of their software and then hope that the customer pays to upgrade to the full version. The downside to this approach is that the new PC comes pre-loaded with a lot of “junkware” which bloats the operating system and can cause severe performance degradation.

Here at Quiet PC we believe that customers have every right to expect the best possible performance from a brand new PC, so every system we build comes with our Clean Build™ promise. We install the operating system (if you order one), motherboard drivers, OS updates and Microsoft Security Essentials / Windows Defender - that’s it. You won’t be pestered by pop-ups and nag screens and you can get on with using your new PC immediately without having to uninstall lots of junkware first. Your new machine will boot in super-quick time and will stay running quickly for many months and years to come.

Free hardware support and fully inclusive warranty

We offer free hardware technical support for as long as you own the machine. This support covers any hardware query or problem, including advice on maintenance and upgrades. We regret we can’t offer software support or training so we would recommend contacting the software vendor in this instance.

Our hardware warranty runs for two years and is “collect and return” meaning that you don’t need to worry about getting the machine back to us - we will instruct our courier to collect it from you on a day of your choosing, then after we have checked and repaired it, we will send it back to you by express courier at our expense. In addition, unlike many other PC suppliers, we have an “open-case” policy which means you are free to open the machine and perform your own minor modifications or upgrades without worrying that your warranty might be affected.