Disclosed is receiver for a noise limited system. A front-end circuit amplifies and band-limits an incoming signal. The amplification increases the signal swing but introduces both thermal and flicker noise. A low-pass band limitation reduces the thermal noise component present at frequencies above what is necessary for correctly receiving the transmitted symbols. This band limited signal is provided to the integrator circuit. The output of the integrator is equalized to reduce the effects of inter-symbol interference and then sampled. The samples are used to apply low frequency equalization (i.e., in response to long and/or unbalanced strings of symbols) to mitigate the effects of DC wander caused by mismatches between the number of symbols of each kind being received.