Very boring home PC build - Emphasis on quality, reliability and quietness.

[ClassicCar]

Good afternoon,

Having owned my workstation PC for 8 years, it's time to move on and build a new PC. My requirements are as follows;

1. Primary purpose is general use and admin, with a rare smattering of low level photo processing, vector imaging and other such tasks. There will be no gaming.
2. High quality, strong reliability and longevity.
4. As quiet as possible, ideally silent.
5. The entire tower is required - no monitor etc.
6. Must have WIFI in some manner.
7. Upgrade potential is irrelevant - it won't be upgraded.

I'd be grateful for any input or suggestion for change;

CPU: Intel Core i5-12400 2.5 GHz 6-Core Processor £137.99 Good performance in a general range of tasks, good value/performance ratio.

CPU Cooler: *Thermalright Assassin Spirit V2 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler £15.00 Looking for quieter performance than the stock cooler, and it's not very expensive to achieve that?

Motherboard: ASRock B760M Pro RS/D4 WiFi Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard £122.00 Very unsure about motherboards - simply chose this on the basis that I don't feel I'd benefit from DDR5, that it includes WIFI so negates the need for a PCE card, and is a bit higher quality than the entry-level motherboards - but I honestly have no idea and would be grateful for suggestions. I'd happily ditch the WIFI and get a WIFI PCE card if that opens a better door.

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory £39.95 Quality RAM, good DDR4 speed at a reasonable price.

Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive £150.00 I want SSD's with good long reliability and integrity primarily - and the 2tb would be appropriate for my storage requirement. I'm wondering however whether having the OS/program files and all my documents on the same drive is a good idea, and whether perhaps two SSD's would be preferable to keep the OS on one drive and my documents on another.

Case: *Aerocool CS-106 MicroATX Mini Tower Case £19.99 God knows. How can I know if a case will be quiet? Can I put in very quiet fans?

Power Supply: be quiet! Pure Power 11 400 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply £55.49 Quiet, high quality? I don't know if there's any quieter?
Total: £540.42

 

[ClassicCar]

black on blue is even worse, tip, try white on blue

It should be better now.

If you haven't used this forum much it's not as straight forward as you'd immediately think. In the editor your text is black, but publishes as white. If you select black however, it publishes as black......

Anyway - I've abbreviated the post as I'm uncertain as to whether the TLDR was in reference to me, and hopefully it's easier to read.

 

[ClassicCar]

you would be better just posting for a build advice stating your budget, and what you need it for, you're going about this the looong way around
extra tip, you can preview a post before you post it.it's at the top right of the editor box, you press the preview button again at the top right to come out of the preview if you want to edit more

I would hope that the list below provides some guidance, and that the type of parts selected give a rough indication of what I'm looking for. I've added a couple of additional points to be specific. The budget is approximately £600.

1. Primary purpose is general use and admin, with a rare smattering of low level photo processing, vector imaging and other such tasks. There will be no gaming.
2. High quality, strong reliability and long-life.
4. As quiet as possible, ideally silent.
5. The entire tower is required - no monitor etc.
6. Must have WIFI in some manner.
7. Upgrade potential is irrelevant - it won't be upgraded.
8. At least 2tb of SSD storage
9. Reasonably basic connectivity required.
10. Budget £600

It is fine and remove the need for a graphics card. The 12600K is another option, which gets you higher clocks and 4 E-Cores, but you'd need to upgrade the cooler from the assassin spirit to a peerless assassin or phantom spirit.


I'd strongly advise you buy 32GB at this point, it'll be the first thing you have to upgrade and shouldn't cost a lot more (depending on the brand). I wouldn't worry too much about the speed and would be tempted to buy regular 3200 that doesn't need XMP to operate and can run at 1.2v like Kingston value, but that's your call.


Not a bad board for the price, I'd check it has the USB ports you need and you're comfortable with 2x M.2 slots.


Generally speaking: the more expensive steel cases that are designed for silence have thicker and noise insulated panels with a minimum of mesh, while cheaper cases have more mesh and thinner steel.

Obviously noise is subjective, but my opinion is that you don't want to eliminate ALL the fan noise because then you'll start hearing electric buzzing and coil whine, which is far more annoying than a light hum. To achieve that (a light hum) pretty much any case can do this, since with PWM fans they'll just ramp down when you're not under load (sometimes you'll need a custom fan curve for the optimum behaviour). Getting a CPU cooler that is overbuilt for the CPU you're buying is also a good idea.

I have a few Aerocool cases and while the steel is pretty thin, they're fine and not noisy with average fans and CPU coolers. They're not noise-optimised though, I mean.., £20? That's close to a bottom of the barrel case there, but I'm happy enough with mine.


If it was me, I'd pay more for the Phanteks AMP 650, which is Seasonic built, has higher quality components, a passive fan mode and double the warranty length.


It is fine and smaller SSDs for the OS (like 250/500GB) are often very bad value. You also only have 2x M.2 slots on the board you linked, so you'd have no room for expansion without dropping one (or getting a USB caddy or PCIE M.2 adapter, I guess).

Many thanks for your suggestions Tetras. I'll have a look at the 12600k, but think that it might be £40 I could use elsewhere, as I'm not sure I'd gain much in my personal use case over the 12400. 32gb is an easy one so I'm happy to do that. The board seems basic but I can't see any shortcomings, other than keyboard and mouse and the occasional backup to external SSD's via the USB3.2 ports I can't think of why I'd need more. I'll perhaps need to look at the case and get something slightly better if it means better insulation and perhaps vibration reduction etc. And again I'll look at the Phanteks. Thanks for the help.

 

[ClassicCar]

Have you considered a NUC? Check out the Servethehome and Etaprime channels on YouTube.

I hadn't, and have had a look at them this afternoon.

I really like the look and concept of them, but it seems that noise can be a bit of an issue at anything other than a gentle idle. It seems that some companies make passive cases for them but that would push the price upwards of £850, so getting a bit expensive I think.

 

[ClassicCar]

As a general note if you want quiet over spec the PSU a bit - many modern PSUs will run passive up to a certain amount of utilisation and the higher the rated wattage the the higher load they will run passively and with less fan utilisation when they do start spinning up active cooling. I don't think that 400 watt PSU even has a zero fan mode so is running active cooling all the time.

Thanks Rroff. I'm now looking at the;

- NZXT C750 80+ Gold for £90
- Seasonic Focus GX 80+ Gold for £110

 

[ClassicCar]

CPU: Intel Core i5-12400 2.5 GHz 6-Core Processor

CPU Cooler: *Thermalright Assassin Spirit V2 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler

Motherboard: ASRock B760M Pro RS/D4 WiFi Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard

Memory: Crucial Pro 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory

Storage: Western Digital WD_Black SN850X 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive

Power Supply: Phanteks AMP 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply


This is what I've currently settled on, given the advice above.