Passive?

Has anyone had any luck going passive, without doing the garage floor radiator (frontpage) trick? I hate the noise (it's better than a high pitched heatsink fan, but still too loud)...

I tried passive with my little chevette heatercore for about 20 minutes. Then temps reached 60C and I still didn't want to plug the fan back in. The biggest noise was my cheap ti4400 fan, and thats an easy fix too...

Passive heat exchanger cooling you mean? Yeah, a heater core or any PC radiator will not work well passively because of the fin density. You need widely spaced fins with a lot of surface area to cool a CPU adequately. If you want really good performance with passive cooling, take the Hush PC and put it on steroids. Get some huge aluminum extrusions and bolt some water blocks to them and it should work fine. Thing is, large extrusions don't come cheap, unless you can find some old audio amplifier sinks or stuff from old test equipments. They often have nice heatsinks.

You'd probably be served better putting an adjustable speed fan on the heater core, and the same for any case fans you have. Thats what I do and I just leave them on the slowest settings.

I recently replaced my piece of crap thermal take GPU cooler that was loud in the most ungodly manner (which I had used to replace the stock OTES cooler, the sound of rushing air doesn't appeal to me). Put a Zalman heatpipe on that and things have been great since. I can even sleep with the PC on with no trouble now.