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Quiet is relative but from my perspective if all it's doing is running XBMC under OE and doing hardware decode of video it is virtually silent.

By comparison the "quiet" mini ITX I had prior was quite loud compared to this.

well i will be 2m away from it so if its loud enough that i can clearly hear it then it could be a problem, i dont mind a gentle hum

As I said, where I have it installed (about 3m away inside of an entertainment hutch) it is more or less completely silent... by comparison my previous PC was fairly quiet but I could definitely hear it when it was running.

As someone else points out, only you can truly be the judge. I would say that during media playback of any kind you are very unlikely to be able to hear it. If it's a meter away from your head when you are sleeping maybe it would bother you.

The good news is that if the noise becomes a problem you can buy a completely passive case/cooling-solution for it that should take care of things for you.

thanks for your help

also found this from someone on the forums "tip to make the nuc quiet"

https://communities.intel.com/thread/53372