Which PowerEdge Lowest Noise?

With any 1U rack mounted server, you are limited to small diameter fans that need to spin at high speed to be able to pump the required cubic feet per minute though the server chassis just to meet the basic cooling needs of the server itself and the equipment/cards contained within. Faster fans = more noise. Hotter room = more airflow required = faster fans = more noise. More equipment within server = more heat to remove = more airflow = ...

Further, rack mounted server cooling design is based on the unit sitting in an air conditioned server room that only houses equipment and not people. These servers can scream like a banshee when fully loaded, thus from my perspective noise issues do not seem an important part of their design brief. Even the larger 5U rack mount servers housing larger diameter fans can suffer from noise issues for this reason. It also seems some vendors have noisier servers as compared to others. I believe HP servers are quiet. I guess it's just to look at the specs and compare the dbA levels defined within. 

So even if the web chatter is that one rack mounted server is much quieter than another, without real dbA measurements quantifying the noise output at a given distance from the unit, you may still find a 'quiet' Dell rack mount server to be too noisy when it's next to your desk. You may quickly become tired of listening to it scream on a hot day. As an example comparison, many PC's are just too noisy to be used as a HTPC (home theater PC).

Even pedestal servers can be problematic as they are designed with the same/similar mindset as rack mount servers where noise issues are not of major concern. In my case, i have a sparsely populated T610 pedestal server (1x Xeon 5606 CPU, 1x 8G DIMM stick, PERC6i, 2x300G 15K HDD hot plug drives and unsupported modified 30W x8 PCIe graphics card & PCIe sound card). This is clearly a sparsely populated server yet when the motherboard temp is at 26C, as can happen in a poorly air conditioned office, the fans spin at i think 6500 or 8500RPM from memory. Even in our noisy shop setting, it's rather noticeable by staff walking past the counter where the unit resides and even customers on the other side of the counter can hear it in these circumstances. When i take back my server, i plan on doing some mods and changing to quiet fans and lowering the fan speed thresholds in BIOS (i read that it helps a lot but possibly at the expense of rock solid server stability). Noise aside, this modified Dell server has been rock solid since we got it...

One day i may get a sound meter and measure the noise output at 1m but that will just quantify what i already know, that it's too noisy to have by ones desk. In fact conversation is around 60dbA while a quiet office is around 35dbA and a T610 is around 53dbA from memory. Who wants someone always talking next to your desk?

So, if you want a quiet machine next to your desk, a server is not your best choice :emotion-1:

You may be better off with a workstation running WinServer 2012 and do your web development and experimentation on this unit unless you really need 100% up time and server redundancy or you must experiment with server hardware. Also remember a server is limited on what cards can work within (USB3 cards problematic), while a workstation is more relaxed and a consumer desktop even more so. Horses for courses.

[edited to add last paragraph]