Quiet PC Zeno NT-H67 Fanless PC review

Most PCs produce too much noise to ever be a comfortable addition to your sitting room. This is usually the result of the fans required to cool your case, graphics card and processor. You can lessen the effect with special noise-reducing cases or sound-deadening foam, but these can be expensive and don’t eliminate all noise.

Quiet PC’s Zeno NT-H67 is entirely passively cooled, so makes no noise at all. It’s also compact – at just 100x290x270mm, it’s not much larger than a magazine so should fit on your TV stand. The only moving parts are in the slim laptop Blu-ray drive and the 2.5in hard disk, but you can only hear the hard disk if you put your ear against the case, so you definitely won’t hear it from your sofa.

The whole case is a giant heat sink for the processor. Copper pipes lead from a small cooling block over the CPU to the case’s solid metal sides, which are covered in cooling fins. The 3.1GHz Core i3 processor won’t break any performance records, but it’s easily powerful enough for a home entertainment PC, with an overall score of 60 in our tests. Core i3 processors use Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 2000, rather than the more powerful HD Graphics 3000 found on some Core i5 and i7 CPUs, so 3D gaming isn’t really an option – our Dirt 3 test wouldn’t run at our laptop settings of 1,280 x 720 with High detail and 4x anti-aliasing, let alone at the 1080p settings we normally use for PCs.

It’s fine playing back 1080p high-definition content, though, and if it’s entertainment you’re looking for, you’ll be pleased to find a Blackgold DVB-T2 TV tuner occupying the microATX motherboard’s only PCI slot. This is a dual HD DVB tuner, so you can watch and record TV at the same time, including HD TV channels. The Blu-ray drive gives you access to high-definition discs and the 1TB hard disk means you’ve got a decent amount of space for media storage. Two HDMI ports and one VGA port can be used with up to two monitors, projectors or TVs simultaneously.