I havea shuttle on my desk. It would be relatively silent when I actually would not have anATI Radeon 9700 pro in.
I throw it out next week against a MidiTower with handpicked silenced components: Passive Cooling for the graphics card, super-silent CPU cooler and super silend power supply.
The Shuttle behaves like a heating unig (the air coming out at the end is HOT), and is is NOISY.
I will see ow it behaves when I reactivate it without the additional graphics card and a new fan sysem (that is much less noisy).
Looks awesome, except for "no parallel ports" ;-)