I went for a tower server for those exact reasons - sensible idle power draw and quiet even under full load (I've got an x265 encode running at the moment, and

I went for a tower server for those exact reasons - sensible idle power draw and quiet even under full load (I've got an x265 encode running at the moment, and it's not quite silent but there's just a very gentle hum) without losing ECC. Some of the older dual Xeon servers on eBay were tempting, but the noise/power draw made it a non-starter.