Silent i5 Build Spec

fishlick

fishlick

fishlick

Associate
Joined
20 Aug 2007
Posts
44
Bought a Saphire HD5770 over xmas after a little bit of research and it looks great on my new 32" Samsung B650 but my CPU is maxing out so lo0king to upgrade.

It's got to be quiet (been lurking the Silent PC Review forums) and will be doing a bit of gaming and music production to push it and general browsing and HTPC use.

Budget is about £1000 (saving some would be good), not goin to overclock and i need to buy Win7 64bit in with that too.

What do you guys think of this?-



Not sure on the RAM, just picked a decent brand. Might get 8GB.

Have a Sythe Ninja for a cooler if i can get a 1156 adaptor and got a couple of drives to swap in from current machine.

Really want the SSD for performance.

is there an i7 vs i5 debate to have?!!
 
Well i5 is more than enough for anyone and your uses it will be fine.........I would suggest another psu such as the OCZ Modxtreem series as they are modular and so reduce cable clutter and so improve airflow which in turn means cooler can run slower :)
BTW there is no need for that asus motherboard.......any 1156 motherboard will do the job great
 
thanks will read some more mobo reviews. Think I want ASUS as have had to rma a gygabyte in the past. will look at the one for £108, dont suppose it matters if i'm not going to OC or use 2 GFX cards.

The Corsair is modular too
 
I'm quite interested in this thread as i'll be looking to do something similar down the line (as close to silent pc which can handle games and double as a HTPC).

The sapphire card you bought is the vapor-x version i take it for the extra silence. I'm still torn between the 5770 and the 5870. The build looks good with the P183 which is meant to be a great case when it comes to blocking out the noise. I'm curious as to what you are going to do with the case fans and the sythe ninja (im not sure if you can passively cool an i5 with it). I've read mixed reviews about the antec case fans and the one that i found in my original sonata didn't impress me much. If you are using fans with a speed controller could you please post some details about your choices :D
 
unfortunately i didnt get the vapor x just the HD but it has a "stand up" cooler rather than a full cover, i think the fan is bigger which reduced noise. I leave it on auto which runs at 30% and i cant hear it over the PSU which is the noisiest part of current setup.
The gfx card gets noisy when u ramp it over 40% but i've hammered it and it hasn't ever got to that point during a game (maybe i'm doing something wrong!)

I bought a 3rd party fan for the Ninja and a Zalman fan controller and drop the rpm to about 600. The temps are fine but I up it in the summer and when gaming. (C2D E6400 no overclock). I'll do the same on the i5

Will consider replacing new case fans and applying controllers but my mate has same case and it's so solid it should drop the noise to tolerable levels. I'm only looking for comparative silence when watching films, not like i'll sleep next to it!

Have a Sonata II case and it rattled and resonated really badly so i suspended my HDDs on elastic as recommended on SPCR and it sorted the issue right out.
 
Depends how serious you are on the level of quietness you want for your PC.

For music production / HTPC use I'd really suggest watercooling, if you use a submerged pump (e.g. xspc 450 or 750), and an external 240 or 360 rad. then you can run all your fans (the main source of noise) at half speed with the fan controller.

The only retail watercooler that is 'near' silent is the passive Zalman Reserator
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=183
which is perfectly fine for a HTPC.

However a gaming PC requires more power, thus for my setup, an o/c Q6700 and nv260, I had to augment the cooling with a 240 rad (the fans running at 5v) - which is still extremely quiet.
 
Sounds good fish. Nice to know that even the standard 5770s are fairly silent as i get a bit paranoid that all the higher end graphics cards are going to sound like delta fans.

I know what you mean about the sonata resonating i've got that same exact issue with the one beside me now. I've not gone that extreme as to suspend my HDDs yet but that definitely sounds like an option.

Best of luck with the build!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom