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So, the Hush is beautifully designed and constructed, but is it quiet? Well the simple answer is yes, it’s pretty much totally silent. If you place your ear against the case you can just about hear the hard drive spinning, but that’s about it. Obviously when the hard disk is being accessed there’s a bit more noise, but you really can’t tell whether this machine is powered on if the screen is off.

It’s actually quite hard to review a machine like the Hush ATX, because the standard evaluation points of Performance, Features and Value don’t really apply in the way that they do with other PCs. Judged in its own context, the performance of the Hush is excellent, because it is totally silent, but remains beautiful to look at and is a fraction of the size of the Poweroid we looked at before. And as for features – again, as a standard PC, the features seem a bit sparse, but then the construction of the chassis both inside and out are the key features of this machine, and here it truly excels.

Finally there’s the issue of value, and it has to be said that this is a very expensive system. Being a German company Hush prices its products in Euros, so we ran the price through a currency converter and came up with a total of £1665.87, but that’s without an operating system or shipping costs. The system we saw shipped with Windows XP Professional, but Hush also offers Windows XP Home and Linux – or you could buy a system without an OS and install your own. Of course we’ve looked at PCs that cost far more than this in the past, but you have to remember that this one ships without a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers or any other peripherals – you’re getting the system box and that’s it. However, it’s that issue of context again, and you have to remember that this is a specialist product and the type of person that wants one has already decided that a standard PC is not right for them, and they’re most likely willing to pay for the privilege of having zero noise pollution.

So, what we’re looking at here is the Hush ATX system as an entity, rather than the box sitting in the labs right now. You can choose pretty much any configuration you like, and for someone that’s decided that a silent PC is what they want, the need to customise it exactly is probably strong. Here at TrustedReviews we’ve pretty much all decided to ask Santa for a Hush ATX for Christmas, but our dream configurations will probably all be different and that’s what makes the Hush even more desirable.

Verdict

The design and engineering departments at Hush Technologies deserve some recognition, because this is one stunning piece of hardware. Even if the design and construction were purely cosmetic, rich technology style junkies would be queuing up for a Hush machine. But the fact that these PCs look this good for a reason, just makes you want it more. The Hush ATX is a totally silent PC, which is a good attribute for something that deserves to be in a design museum.

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