Okay, you both seemed to miss the question, but thank you for trying. :)

I'm not worried about the speed impact of using @, because I'm learning about using the Exception class, and in particular the try {} catch {} and throw expressions. I'm also aware of mysqli_connect_error(), errno(), and die() the problem is I don't want to use those just yet. I want the throw new exception to handle the error, without turning off all error reporting on my test server.

@ isn't working anyways, it's not suppressing the error. Neither is error_reporting(0), it's still pumping out Connect failed: Unknown MySQL server host 'DB_SERVE' (11004). The mispelled CONST is on purpose, I'm trying to cause the error in this case.