Quiet PC Streacom FC5-Z68 Fanless Media PC review

We don’t often have totally silent PCs turning up in the PC Pro Labs, but we’ve now had two in short order. Tranquil PC’s impressive MMC-12 is this month followed by up the Quiet PC Streacom FC5-Z68 – another PC that focuses on offering a media experience without the noise usually associated with a Windows PC.

The Streacom chassis is bigger than the Tranquil – 450mm wide rather than 392mm, and 71mm tall instead of 40mm – but it’s been designed along similar lines. The smart, brushed aluminium black or silver chassis is as minimal as it gets: the front is tarnished only by a power button, hard disk light and a slot-loading optical drive. Each side edge is made up of a row of metal fins, with the right-hand row used to dissipate heat from the CPU inside.

It might look like it belongs in a hi-fi stack, but remove the roof and you’ll find a fully featured PC inside. Screwed into the base is a Gigabyte GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 motherboard, and its LGA 1155 socket has an Intel 3.3GHz Core i3-2125 processor plugged in, complete with the most powerful integrated HD Graphics 3000 core.

That’s an advantage it holds over the Tranquil, which had a low-power Core i3 with a lesser graphics chip. Thus, the Quiet PC scored 0.76 in our benchmarks, compared to the Tranquil’s 0.62, and it easily played back 1080p footage from a local disk as well as top-quality streams from YouTube HD and BBC iPlayer. An average of 38fps in our Low quality, 1366 x 768 Crysis test won’t set the gaming world alight, but it’s enough for light entertainment.

As you’d expect with those large fins, the Quiet PC kept its components cool despite the absence of fans. Its processor peaked at a very healthy 64°C – a full 13°C cooler than the Tranquil – and we measured the top panel of the chassis at 41°C, compared to the Tranquil’s 52°C. Both systems clearly have some headroom when it comes to cooling, but the one area where the Quiet PC is beaten is in power consumption: its 117W peak draw is much higher than the miniaturised Tranquil’s 44W.

Given the space left inside, Quiet PC has sensibly included a BlackGold BGT3650 DVB-T/T2 TV tuner. There’s also 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and you get both a 64GB Crucial SSD and a 2TB mechanical hard disk, which puts it way ahead of the Tranquil for storage. ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 is included for Blu-ray playback, and although you get Media Center as part of Windows 7, the system doesn’t boot straight into its front-end in the same way as the Tranquil.