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As previous awards will testify, Quiet PC knows its stuff when it comes to making silent systems. We’ve already seen the Nofan IcePipe A43-H67, complete with a ludicrously oversized heatsink. For its next trick, Quiet PC introduces the Zeno HT-H67 Fanless PC – and, as you’d expect, it doesn’t make a peep.

It’s made from heavy-duty aluminium and, while it’s wider than your average Shuttle PC, it’s about half the height, so it will fit nicely under a TV. The brushed-aluminium front is sparse, with only a small Zeno logo, power button, hard disk LED and a Blu-ray reader – there’s nothing so useful as a USB port.

Much like the similar-looking Tranquil ixLS, the sides comprise aluminium fins that have just as much function as form. Undo four screws, remove the top, and you’ll see what we mean. The Intel Core i3-2100 processor is topped by a tall, thin heatsink, with two copper heatpipes carrying heat away to be dissipated by those imposing fins. Unlike the Tranquil, the Zeno’s fins are down both flanks for added effect.

The mini-ITX motherboard – Gigabyte’s H67N-USB3-B3 – is slotted into the base, and the optical drive and hard disk are stored in a caddy attached to the front of the machine. The space underneath the caddy is given over to cable storage, and past that bundle of wires is a daughterboard providing power to the drives. It’s a neat system, but you’ll have to remove the caddy entirely to access the two spare DIMM sockets below.

Upgrade room is, understandably, at a premium. The two vacant SATA 3Gbits/sec ports are rendered redundant by the lack of drive bays, and the one PCI Express x16 slot hosts a BlackGold BGT3600 hybrid DVB-T TV tuner – which is good for media purposes, but not so good if you want to add some light graphics or a Wi-Fi adapter.

The Quiet PC’s passive nature also limits the power on offer. The 3.1GHz Core i3-2100 is Intel’s lowliest full-fat Sandy Bridge processor and it’s missing a couple of features: there’s no Turbo Boost, only two Hyper-Threaded cores, and you get Intel’s lesser HD Graphics 2000 chipset rather than the HD 3000 core we’ve come to expect.