Help me put together a silent rig with great cooling?

TomMartin

TomMartin

TomMartin

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8 Feb 2013
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45
Hi,

I'm looking to build a new computer based around an overclocked 3930k running at 4.5ghz ideally, but that's about the only component I've settled on.

Regarding motherboards, I haven't made my mind up but I'm thinking the Asus sabertooth x79, as it has 4x sata 3, and one of the old style PCI slots, which I still need for my sound card which I am in no hurry to replace, as it will add an extra £500 to my build... If you would reccomend any other motherboards which meet my criteria, that would be great too!

GFX wise, I just need support for 3 monitors, no gaming.

PSU obviously needs to be as quiet as possible, Corsair AX series?

RAM and hard drives I shouldn't need any help with, however the big question is...


Cooling. I'm thinking it's going to have to be watercooled to keep it silent even at a relatively mild overclock of 4.5ghz? These chips run hot right?

In my current build, I'm using a Corsair H100i, which really doesn't meet my noise requirements at all, will a custom loop be much quieter?

I don't have the case yet, but it will probably be either the 800D or I may wait for the release of the 900D, or wouldd you suggest anything else?

So I just need help picking out parts like radiators, pumps, fans etc for the lowest noise level possible while still providing great cooling. I would also like the option to overclock even higher should it be appropriate, so I don't mind going overboard on the cooling a bit.

What do you think? What parts would you reccomend?

Thanks!
 
Weclome Friend,

Can you explain to me what this build is for? There seems to be a lot of money being spend but you don't go into detail to what your using it for..

What sound card do you have? How come it costs £500?

What res are your monitors?

Look at air cooling. The D14, K2 and TC14PE are all great silent coolers. Adding a 3rd fan to each would improve temps even more..

Custom water loops cost a lot, but that could an option..

Whats your overall budget?
 
Doomedspeed said:
Weclome Friend,

Can you explain to me what this build is for? There seems to be a lot of money being spend but you don't go into detail to what your using it for..

What sound card do you have? How come it costs £500?

What res are your monitors?

Look at air cooling. The D14, K2 and TC14PE are all great silent coolers. Adding a 3rd fan to each would improve temps even more..

Custom water loops cost a lot, but that could an option..

Whats your overall budget?
Click to expand...


Thanks for the reply.

The PC will be for audio production, I think a lot of people underestimate how much power can be required for this application. I do mainly orchestral scores, and for workflow reasons like to have a ridiculously large template setup with a lot of sample libraries constantly loaded into RAM. 32GB would be very easy to use up.

I am currently using an older RME soundcard. There is a newer PCI-e equivelant, the RME Raydat, but as mentioned it is rather pricey, and will offer no better performance than my current card. These RME cards are so expensive because they offer rock solid driver performance at the lowest possible latency settings.

These low latency settings require an awful lot of cpu power, increasing depending on the amount of voices being used, and the amount of audio processing being done on each voice. This adds up very quickly in a full orchestral situation.

I was thinking custom water for the possibility of reaching higher overclocks, and future proofing myself as much as possible.

Screen resolution will be 3 monitors at 1080 each.



Budget? Well, I don't want to say limitless, but I'm not going to be buying it all at once, so I'll just get whatever is needed as funds become available. My first purchase will be the motherboard and cpu + gfx, then I'll take apart my current build to put something together. Then after that, case and cooling. And then all the bits necessary to put my current build back together!

Thanks.
 
Oh and in case it wasn't obvious, silence is required for critical listening reasons. I've spent a lot of time and money sound treating my room for the best possible listening environment, it seems a shame to have a big box whirring away in the corner! The H100i really isn't cutting it.
 
Try changing the fans on the H100i, its a common complaint that they are loud at full speed and the difference between the mid and high fan settings makes little odds to the cooling performance.

I could suggest something like this if you reuse the H100i.........

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor - Retail £455.99
1 x Gigabyte X79-UP4 Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £209.99
1 x Plextor M5 Pro 256GB Extreme Series Solid State Drive - (PX-256M5P) £185.99
1 x Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 7850 OC Windforce 2X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £169.99
1 x Corsair Obsidian 550D Quiet Midi Tower Case - Black £119.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD30EZRX) HDD £109.99
2 x Kingston HyperX Black 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (KHX16C10B1BK2/16X) £71.99 (£143.98)
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L8 530W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - With 120mm Silent Wing Fan Built in £66.95
1 x OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £16.99
Total : £1,496.35 (includes shipping : £13.75).



Mobo has a dual bios and a 3 year uk based warranty, takes a max of 64GB of RAM (32GB in the basket). Case is fitted with sound proofing, PSU is modular and the fan is dead quiet (I own the 630W version). Good sized, fast SSD , it's a rival to the samsung 840 Pro. GPU has a fair bit of grunt and can be overclocked well, it's gaming capable but remember some software suites can use GPUs to accelerate them. You can use MSI afterburner to overclock the GPU and set custom fan speed profiles to keep the fans quiet.

Hopefully that gives you an idea, I look forward to seeing what you settle on
 
Do you really need to be at 4.5 g overclocked ?

Go 100% passive

Heatpipe cooler
large very well ventilated case
Passive video card
Seasonic X series PSU
Fanless GPU

Nothing to stop you putting in a couple of very quiet fans on a fan contoller for very hot days.

For your application im sure your better off being 100% passive over a smallish increase in speed.
 
You want to go with a sound proofed case such as the Fractal Design R4, Corsair Obsidian 550d or Coolermaster Silencio 550/650.

I also think passive is the way forward as having fans isn't going to help noise wise. Although you could probably stick one onto the CPU cooler as long as it is a quiet one.
 
Domi said:
Do you really need to be at 4.5 g overclocked ?

Go 100% passive

Heatpipe cooler
large very well ventilated case
Passive video card
Seasonic X series PSU
Fanless GPU

Nothing to stop you putting in a couple of very quiet fans on a fan contoller for very hot days.

For your application im sure your better off being 100% passive over a smallish increase in speed.
Click to expand...


Well I'm currently using a 2700k clocked at 4.8 ghz, and would like a noticeale upgrade from this. From benchmarks it looks like a stock 3930k would offer very similar performance so it's not really an upgrade performance wise, but perhaps noise wise. It would be nice if I could get both!


I've found for my particular application, any projects that use more than about 60% of my cpu become problematic for real time audio processing. So even though I'm not pushing the cpu to it's capabilities, higher clock speeds definitely does free up more "useable" power.
 
dacads said:
You want to go with a sound proofed case such as the Fractal Design R4, Corsair Obsidian 550d or Coolermaster Silencio 550/650.

I also think passive is the way forward as having fans isn't going to help noise wise. Although you could probably stick one onto the CPU cooler as long as it is a quiet one.
Click to expand...

Do you think passive would be sufficient? I believe these chips run very hot, even at stock speeds.

Also consider that regardless of the overclock, I will need to disable all the energy saving features and be using maximum Vcore 24/7.
 
dacads said:
Or inside of some sort of cabinet? Not sure how this would affect air flow / temperatures though
Click to expand...

I'm a bit wary of putting it inside a cabinet for temperature reasons, putting it in another room is a possibility, but not an attractive one as it would require an awful lot of cabling. One of my monitors will only use a HDMI cable, and I'm in no hurry to buy a 15m one of those!

It would also be quite a mess or require some serious home DIY. 3 monitor cables, 2 midi cables, 6 optical cables, 2 ethernet cables, power cable (everything in my studio has to run from the same outlet due to some "inconsistant" wiring in my appartment) mouse/keyboard probably wouldn't work great wirelessly from another room.....it's a lot of cables!
 
honosuseri said:
Try changing the fans on the H100i, its a common complaint that they are loud at full speed and the difference between the mid and high fan settings makes little odds to the cooling performance.

I could suggest something like this if you reuse the H100i.........

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor - Retail £455.99
1 x Gigabyte X79-UP4 Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £209.99
1 x Plextor M5 Pro 256GB Extreme Series Solid State Drive - (PX-256M5P) £185.99
1 x Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 7850 OC Windforce 2X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £169.99
1 x Corsair Obsidian 550D Quiet Midi Tower Case - Black £119.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD30EZRX) HDD £109.99
2 x Kingston HyperX Black 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (KHX16C10B1BK2/16X) £71.99 (£143.98)
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L8 530W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - With 120mm Silent Wing Fan Built in £66.95
1 x OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £16.99
Total : £1,496.35 (includes shipping : £13.75).



Mobo has a dual bios and a 3 year uk based warranty, takes a max of 64GB of RAM (32GB in the basket). Case is fitted with sound proofing, PSU is modular and the fan is dead quiet (I own the 630W version). Good sized, fast SSD , it's a rival to the samsung 840 Pro. GPU has a fair bit of grunt and can be overclocked well, it's gaming capable but remember some software suites can use GPUs to accelerate them. You can use MSI afterburner to overclock the GPU and set custom fan speed profiles to keep the fans quiet.

Hopefully that gives you an idea, I look forward to seeing what you settle on
Click to expand...

Thanks! I hadn't considered the gigabyte board, as I'm very comfortable with Asus at the moment. I used to use gigabyte, but had a couple of bad experiences with grounding/noise issues. This was years ago though, and maybe I'm being a bit sill by not considering them, especially with the features of that board at that price.
 
I should add that my plan is to harvest parts from my current build and then replace them when possible and have two pc's running together (2nd one will be in a different room, and use the noisy H100i as it won't matter)

Currently I'm using

i7 2700k @ 4.8
asus p8z68
32gb ram
on board gfx plus basic card for 3rd monitor
corsair ax850 PSU - quiet enough for me!
couple of ssd's
1tb hdd that makes some noise but is only used for backup so noise never a problem when it matters

So the only noisy part of my setup is the h100i really - and the fans spend most of their time running at 800rpm so they don't seem to be the main noise issue, but they certainly could be quieter. It seems like the real noise is coming from the pump. The fans are loud as hell at max speed though!



One more thing to note, as well as for my work, I also want to build this because I'm at heart, one of you lot, and love building ridiculously specced computers. This is a big part of why custom watercooling appeals so much, it looks like a lot of fun, and I have a bit of a fetish for getting the temps lower... it just HAS to be done quieter than the h100i, which I should think wouldn't be difficult at all.

I'd like to use a big enough case with a big enough radiator or 2 to let me get away with using inaudible fans.
 
dacads said:
H100i is probably not the best option as you don't have a set budget. I would be looking at a kit that you can assemble yourself

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=962&catid=1532
Click to expand...

Yes ideally the H100i will end up back in my 2700k rig when I get some proper cooling sorted for the 3930k, but that's ok because it will be used as a slave via network and can be in a different room.

I'm having trouble speccing out a custom loop, I've no real experience with aftermarket fans, so I've no idea which are the quietest yet still provide decent air flow, and what kind of radiators would be suitable for such fans, and how much radiator I would need to get adequate cooling with very quiet fans etc etc...
 
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