if I bought a regular mini-case power supply and disabled the fan, would it melt?
Melt? No. Fail or shutdown? Yes.
There is a lot of discussion about quieting power supplies in the articles and forums at Silent PC Review The technical quality of the articles & posts is uniformly high. You would do well to read more there.
Bottom line for passively (or just quietly) cooled systems at affordable prices: - Select very low power parts like Via mobos (or notebook CPUs), notebook drives (cfdisks or pendrives), and embedded video - Use highly efficient power supplies like the PicoPSU - Use external power bricks
Commercial examples: Apple's Mac Mini (Intel or PPC), AOpen's clone of the Mac, Shuttle's forthcoming X100 and the ASUS Pundit
Think about it; you're really building a desktop with the power requirements of a laptop. Use the appropriate parts and you can have a fanless system. Not rocket science™.
original here.
