Performance vs speed

Darkmatters

Darkmatters

Darkmatters

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Joined
4 Nov 2009
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121
Location
Liverpool
Hi folks,
I am new to the board tho I have been reading it for several months.

I have been trying to weigh up the balance between wanting high performance (oc) and a quiet machine. Can you have both or is it a compromise?

I plan to build a new machine as a project with my daughter - she will want to do games and I will want a quiet machine for boring stuff and a nice sound system. I have three pcs which have AMD duos with stock cooling and I think of them as annoyingly noisy but I don't have the experience to know how quiet you can expect.

My thoughts so far are for i7 system with liquid cooling but I kind of got stuck on case selection. Dgtr wants transparent side, dyed coolant and lighting. Cost is not a problem but I don't want to waste money on components that don't help with 'silent running'.

Your thoughts on this would be most appreciated.
 
I would imagine she will play anything good that her (boy) cousins have if the machine is capable. I will do video editing, CAD, graphics, photos, music, net, email and maybe try out some games too. Most of which I can do on current machines. A big part of this is to show dgtr what can be done and give her the experience of diy building. As for how quiet... it would be nice to play music without fan noise.. but as I said before i am not sure how quiet it is possible to get.

I was trawling through this site hoping to find a thread where somone put together a system with the same objectives that I have, but not found it yet!
 
You could do the same setup as me. Use fan profiles.
If your playing music wich uses hardly no cpu u can slow the fans right down and not worry about temp. Then when your sprog wants to play a game the fans go up to noisier speeds
 
Fast/quiet/cheap, pick two. If cost doesn't matter much then you can water cool it, at which point it can be faster than air cooled overclocked systems while being quieter than air cooled stock speed systems.

Obviously there are drawbacks, cost, difficulty changing components, if you mess up you can pour water all over your motherboard etc. However well researched water cooling is definitely the normal way of picking fast and quiet out of the three options :)
 
Steep learning curve!!

Thanks for the input guys.
What system have you got Bradley - I hope you sorted out whatever the problem was?
John - is there some performance drawback with using non-conductive coolant in your h2o system?
Ta.
 
An air-cooled machine can be very quiet without the hassle of watercooling.

A case with decent airflow, some low-noise fans (Akasa Apaches rock!), a decent cpu cooler like a Megahalem, quiet PSU, quiet HDDs, and a 3rd-party cooler for your graphics card, and you can have a overclocked machine that is whisper quiet.

In fact, going with water cooling still needs you to have quiet fans, HDDs and PSU, so the cpu cooler and decent fans are arguably cheaper and less hassle.
 
My PC is very quiet the only thing l hear is the DVD-RW SPIN UP, l,m using FTO1 Case(2x180 fans), H5O CPUCooler(2xApache fans), Graphics Card Powercolor 4890 came fitted with Zalmen Cooler. The PC sits right next too me, see sig
 
Watercooled with a fan controller where you can switch off the fans.

My system has two 120mm case fans and two 120mm radiator fans on a four fan controller and I can have have the fans switched off for surfing and word processing (only noise is a very quiet fan on the psu and the odd seek noise from the raid drives, main drive is ssd) and have them turned up slightly when gaming.

Also have speedstep and all that enabled which keeps the temp down on the cpu for passive to work yet when cranked up to full can keep the system cooled at 4.9Ghz and the 5850 overclocked to 1110/1300.

Key things are selection of quite psu,case, fans, radiator to have a system capable of both.

Oh and there is a great internal fan controller you can buy with temp probes which you can set up in software to automatically increase each of the fan speeds as temps rise.
 
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Oldphart (me too),
Tempted by H50 but daughter wants coloured coolant in clear tubes - I guess H50 a lot less hassle to install - does it perform as well as other water systems?
 
Darkmatters said:
Greebo - like the idea of the fan controller. Is speedstep a feature in the bios?
Click to expand...

Yeah along with all the other power saving, reduced multi settings. It means my overclocked cpu runs at 3ghz when surfing/word processing and hence requires much less cooling.

Of course, if you weren't overclocking to the extreme like me then you can have have a system which runs at stock speed normally and still a decent overclock when gaming.

The fan controller either manual or automatic is a must for either the air cooler or water cooled setup IMO.

Automatic based on temperature is neater as you don't have to rely on your daughter to adjust the fan speeds depending on what she is doing.

Have a look here for a good automatic one:

http://www.t-balancer.com/english/mng.htm

You set up the profiles in software.
 
Yeah it is neat and they do a more expensive 4 channel controller one as well although you will notice that even the two channel controller has enough wattage to control more than one fan on each channel so long as you don't mind two fans increasing in speed at the same time.

For a system you could have your two case fans on one channel and the two radiator or cpu cooler fans on the other.

Then as case temps rise, set it to increase the case fans speed and same with cpu temps.

They weren't around when i did my system so I have a 4 channel manual fan controller but I am quite tempted to get on of these though in my case I would have the 4 channel one and use one channel to adjust my waterpump speed aswell.
 
Greebo,
can't see that make of fan controller on Oc. Can you recommend a good supplier or should I just google?

Also, looking at your system spec and comparing the various intel cpus I am getting confused. I assume that the most expensive processors are the latest and yet most seem to have lower clock than your Q9650 (3.0GHz). What gives here? Do you know of a good article that explains the ins and outs?

Regards.
 
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