I've been putting together fanless PCs for my own use for a few years now, also disliking the aircraft-taking-off sound of many desktop PCs when they are switched on. I started with the Zalman Reserator[0] water cooling tower, then moved to the Zalman TNN 500-AF[1] where the case was a giant heatsink (it was an amazing piece of kit), although more recently have been using ready-made fanless PCs (which are more widespread now most of the components run much cooler). The site at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ used to have useful information for people building quiet PCs, and https://www.quietpc.com/ still has some good components (and ready-made machines) too.
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I can recommend the NoFan passive heatsinks. The CR-80EH costs less than many premium HSFs and will easily cope with an i7-6700. It's now possible to achieve dead silent operation without compromising on performance or spending a fortune on exotic parts.
I use an integrated graphics chip and a noctua cpu cooler, it's practically completely silent. I sleep right next to my PC often.
Different people have different noise threshold, and different ability to filter out noise. I couldn't sleep next to a running computer even using large low-speed fans until I built one using a Reserator. I have friends who can sleep next to what are essentially heli turbines. The big annoyance of the Reserator is it's a pain in the ass to carry around.
+1 for the Noctua fans and coolers too. When I need a full tower I always swap out the stock fans and coolers for Noctua.
I'd love to get just that water block back-plate to bond to my steel boat hull. How do you get components like in the TNN case?
The TNN didn't use watercooling it used heatpipes. These are not waterblocks, they're heat absorbers. The part that's bonded to the case would be a heat spreader.
A regular case wouldn't be that good at dissipating heat though.