I play to buy a new computer by 2016, currently I am concerned that the
computer I want is not for sale/possible.

These things exist. They're just less powerful and/or more expensive.

My "home office" is in the living room, so my home desktop needs to be
very quiet.

For about 5 years, I've had an AMD Athlon X2 4800+ passively cooled
(with a monster heatsink), tho the whole machine still had 2 fans: one
for the power supply about which I don't know much, except that when it
got noisy I bought a new power supply; and another fan for the system,
the typical 120mm fan running at the lowest possible speed.

I retired this machine and replaced it with a mini-itx system hosting an
AMD E-350, again passively cooled. This one doesn't have a system fan,
tho I haven't bought a pico-PSU yet, so it still has a fan within the
power supply.

In the real office, I use a fit-pc2 which is fully fanless, and if
you're interested in fanless PC, I recommend you take a look at
www.fit-pc.com.


Stefan