a close your
eyes seek
Paradise won't change your
mind can't shake the light I'll take the
chance and throw the dice I want it all
just for the night I live it out like I'll never die I lose
my head in the
St today's PC build guide theme is one
that I've wanted to do for quiet some
time and while we've all heard the arguments against silent Computing LOL
it doesn't matter if your PC is loud just put on your headphones to me that's
about like saying it doesn't matter if your armpits stink just wear a nose plug
no I'm not going to wear protective ear coverings to use my computer that's
ridiculous especially given that Modern
Hardware if configured correctly can achieve near silence without
compromising performance and that is what we're going to show you today
welcome to the near silent gaming PC build guide start by preparing your
workspace a safe uncluttered static free
Workstation is a must I use a modmat and
an anti-static ankle strap now the only tool we really need for assembly is a
multi-bit screwdriver but a magnetic Parts tray a pair of side Cutters and a
pair of needle-nose pliers are all nice to have now before you actually start
putting stuff into the case I recommend
verifying that the system posts or powers on and outputs to the display you
can use your motherboard box as a free non-conductive test bench our CPU Choice
was all about pushing the limits of Silent Computing and the core i7 5960x 8
Core Extreme Edition processor from Intel is the best of the best of any
Enthusiast grade chip available today you could substitute it for a 582k or a
5930k hex core processor if you don't
need the extra two cores but I wanted to
validate this build concept with the hunger EST version of hasell e that we
could get and this is it hold your CPU
by the edges and identify the corner with the gold triangle align that with
the corner of the motherboard socket that has a triangle as well lift up the
first retention ARM on this side then the second one on the other side lift up
the socket cover place the CPU in with no Force lower the cover and fasten both
retention arms in reverse order while water cooler can be quiet! and I normally
use them for these guides for a computer to be truly silent it needs to eliminate
as many moving Parts as possible and all
highperformance CPU water coolers will have at least three of them a motor in
the pump and two more Motors one in each fan so I went instead with a massive be
quiet dark Rock Pro 3 and removed its cooling fans outright for a total of0
moving Parts screw the four posts that look like this into the four little
sockets around the CPU apply a thicker
than normal line of thermal compound to the processor there's a big D underneath
there then put the heat sink down with the brand logo sideways for slightly
better cooling or right side up if you've got a touch of the OCD like I do
using the included wrench or a pair of needlenose pliers tighten down these
four nuts onto each of the posts on
until it is secure our RAM Choice was
just about made for us this CPU supports
Squad channel ddr4 so we knew we'd need a kit of that and thanks to clearance
challenges with the fins of our heat sinks we scrapped the original plan of
using 32 gigs of Dominator Platinum 2666
MHz RAM and went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx memory at 2400 MHz pull
back the tabs on the four Gray RAM slots
then starting with the innermost on each side position each dim so the notch in
the bottom lines up with the notch in the socket then press firmly on both
ends until the tabs snap back into place on their own there are actually a few
great choices out there when it comes to quiet cases but I went with the be quiet!
silent base 800 for a couple of reasons one when I was planning this video it
was definitely the newest and most exciting silent case on the market with
included noise dampening material high quality included fans and a solid
internal layout and two even though now it has some competition for that other
title it's definitely the only one available in this awesome black and
orange color scheme that feels very Linus Tech tipsy so put both side panels
in the box where they'll be safe and use your magnetic tray if you have one to
keep all the included screws in one place take off the rear 120 mm fan and
replace it with a 1500 RPM silent Wings
2 blowing into the case with the fan
lead coming out this corner use the anti
vibration corner pieces with the push pins and washers to secure that in place
using the same fan mounting system install another silent Wings 2 fan in
the top this time the 1000 RPM 140 mm
variety simply pull the top bezel off using the three tabs on either side I
recommend starting at the back and moving forward then stab that fan and
pop the bezel back into place we w won't have any hard drives in our system due
to noise concerns so for better airflow we're going to remove all the 3 and 1/2
in Drive cages by pulling out the thumb screws on the right and left and sliding
them out also watch out for those screws that go into those long standoffs at the
back keep these cages somewhere safe though so you'll have the option to put
one or both back in the future now arguably we could have chosen any
motherboard and ASUS's x99 lineup for this build since they're all passively
cooled and therefore for silent but I went with the Ws board because the
quality and efficiency of the components is second to none which is very
important if you plan from the start to not cool your system properly I mean
most motherboards even if they don't have any fans of their own will be
designed with the expectation that there will be some airflow provided by the
system fans or the CPU fan but we won't really have any unless the going gets
tough oh and yeah did I also mention that it looks amazing even when there's
no side panel window I a bit of a sucker for beautiful motherboards so there you
go press firmly on the four corners of
the io Shield until they snap into place if you want to save yourself some
trouble for later grab the 24 pin and 8
Pin motherboard connectors from your power supply box plug them into your
board like so then feed them through these holes place the board down on the
integrated standoffs and install the screws that look like like this into the
eight positions around the perimeter of the board the middle one can be left
blank this is just a post to hold the board in place while you secure it while
you have easy access to the board plug in the front power and reset switches as
well as the power and drive activity LEDs follow up with the block style
connectors for USB 2 front audio and USB
3.0 then finally connect all of your
fans with inline low noise adapters with
we used KN 21's but anything will work our top fan will use the connector at
the very top right our rear fan will use the CPU connector and our front fans
will use the one that's middle of the board on the right hand Edge and the one
that's at the bottom right I struggled a lot with the power supply choice for
this rig a lot the main options are
always on active cooling load or temperature activated fan cooling with a
silent mode and fully passive as it is I
settled on a fully passive seic 520 FL
squar because it's fully modular allowing us to keep unnecessary wires
out of the way of what little air flow we have in our system and because a
single GTX 980 and 596x is well within its comfort zone if
you decided to add a second graphics card to your build though you may want
to consider going with a hybrid fan model so you keep that silence when the
system is idling and the fan only kicks in when the power supply is working hard
Slide the power supply in Grill Side Up For Better Cooling and attach it to the
case using four of these screws you already ran the 8 Pin and 24 pin power
connectors so just plug those into the modular interface on the power supply if
you have SATA drives in your system you can attach the wire harnesses for those
now and then finally plug in the PCI Express power connectors that we need
for the graphics card and Route them through through this Cable Management
hole our SSD Choice was one that
honestly I made to make our PC more Mac
Pro Lake I mean SATA drives are still fine and you can mount them to the back
of the motherboard tray but we figured hey we're dead quiet already we might as
well have lightning fast PCI Express based storage while we're at it with no
clutter due to SATA data or power cables this is the mushkin Scorpion a PCI
Express 2.0 2x expend iion card that
boasts an onboard RAID controller two sand Force driven 480 gig ssds 100,000
4K random right iops and sequential reading WR speeds just shy of 1 Gigabyte
per second oh and all of this comes in at a price that's less than a dollar per
gig it's also brain dead simple to install find a PCI Express slot that you
don't need for the graphics card later take the thumb screw and Slot cover off
align the card carefully with the PCI slot below remember guys a 1x card can
go in a 1x 4X 8X or 16x slot press
firmly down on the card and put the thumb screw back in the GPU for this
build guide since it's more of a how to buy a silent yet extremely powerful PC
rather than being strictly about gaming type of video is kind of up to you but I
chose a single GTX 980 stricks from ASUS
because it features a fanless mode when running two 2D applications at the
desktop and the fan only kicks in when the graphics card is working hard just
like the case fans that are plugged into the motherboard with an alternative
graphics card you can still build a very quiet computer but if the goal is near
silence at idle a hybrid fanless card like the strict series is the way to go
to install our card simply remove the two thumb screws holding in these two
PCI covers we're using this 16x slot to
give our c CPU and video card a little bit of breathing room and the power
supply too then align the card carefully
with the slot push down firmly put the two thumb screws back in and plug in the
PCI Express six pin and 8 Pin power connectors that we cable managed earlier
which leads nicely into cable management and finishing touches at the back you
can see we've run so few cables for this system that it's almost laughable how
little there is to clean up back here uh just use the zip ties included with the
case and the power supply to Route the front fan connectors up so we can't see
them bundle together the motherboard connectors behind the tray don't worry
about making them perfect there's tons of room for cable management back here
in this case and then our cherry on top is a Silverstone magnetic fan filter to
put over that rear fan that we're using as an intake maintaining positive air
pressure with only filtered intakes will keep our system nice and clean for a
long time with minimal maintenance required now sometimes we include
Monitor and peripheral recommendations but because there isn't really a
straightup intended purpose for this
machine all I can really do is point you in the direction of Some solid premium
stuff we've checked out recently LG's 34 UC 97 curved 34-in monitor is great for
productivity And ausa's Rog Swift g-sync
monitor is great for gaming and to match the black and orange theme some RGB
peripherals like a k70 RGB keyboard and SA Optical RGB Mouse would do just
nicely our scorpion pcid comes
preconfigured in rate zero so you can skip the menu to change its settings
that you would access with contrl M during Boot and just press delete or F2
to get into the ufi BIOS for the x79 ews
motherboard once we're in here everything we need for this system is in
Easy Mode fan RPM monitoring boot priority configuration and XMP
configuration which we need to change to profile one to ensure RAM is running at
the right speed is all we're pretty much going to do we won't be doing any
overclocking on this system because of all the cooling fans that we've removed
for silence to install your Windows operating system create a bootable USB
drive and then reboot the system while mashing f8 immediately to get to the
boot device selection menu where you'll pick your USB drive once the setup
process has begun it's basically a matter of clicking next until you land
on the Windows desktop once there drivers can be found on the ASUS website
NVIDIA website and Intel website for everything in this system now while I
don't normally install ASUS's AI Suite software utility you're going to want to
download that and install at least fan
expert for the next step and now it's
time to take our system from very quiet to near silent we'll be using ASUS's fan
expert software to create custom fan curves and we'll be using their autofan
stop feature to turn all the system fans except the CPU fan completely off when
our CPU temperature is low enough and
then we'll ramp the other fan speeds up slowly once the system is under load and
starts to heat up the other piece of software we need is MSI After Burner our
video cards fans already turn off when the system is idling but we can
fine-tune things quite a bit with a custom fan curve in here I'm also going
to tweak the temperature limit to 85 5°
so that the card won't thermal throttle as aggressively as if we left it at the
default setting now the exact positions
for all the dials in these applications that are right for you will depend on
the ambient temperature and your personal comfort zone with respect to
temperatures but with some fiddling and load testing with the software that you
typically use this config can be set up
to be not only silent at idle but very very quiet even under gaming load but of
course don't take our word for it we're on our way to the spcr testing lab to
validate how quiet our system really is
so it's field trip time we're here with silent Mike from Silent PC review and
we're inside his homemade Sound Chamber
but first Mike tell us about silent PC review how long you've been doing this
what's the objective well silent PC review is 12 years old now and uh we've
been uh focused entirely on the noise
aspects of computers for all this time so what we do is we're looking for the
quietest gear and uh showing people how
to make the quietest computers all right but you need some
pretty specialized equipment in order to even validate how quiet something is
tell me about this room that you built well this is this is what it's all about
is this room is all about uh super low
noise um it was built in about a month
using pretty much homemade tools and uh
it's got 600 lb of what is called Blue fill which is a fiberglass substitute
and that lines the entire interior of the room and that gives us a total sound
level of 11 DB aweighted most times
during the day if you wait till about 2:00 in the morning it might get down to
about 9.5 or 10 but nobody wants to be
up that late doing this stuff so obviously it's not enough just to build
a special room you have to have have some kind of methodology for testing
this stuff right like how do you do it well first of all you need to measure at
the standard distance which is one meter okay and you need a microphone that's uh
quiet enough so that it's quieter than the equipment you're trying to measure
right um our microphone is 7 DB aeed
that's about as quiet as you can get in a microphone it's connected up to uh
sound card and a computer on the outside which is able to take the signal without
adding any more noise of its own and then give me a calibrated decibel
reading and it's aeed aeed means that
it's tailored to the to match the sound of your uh human hearing all right Mike
give it to me straight how did I do well
at idle it's pretty damn good all right 14 DB at idle is about as good as you
can get we have one machine that does better but you know it's not one of
these right that is that it's not a 400
watt Beast right um but at 24 it's a
little higher than what we would expect in a in a you know a maximum uh load
that's a little higher than our standard which is 20 DB for silence but our
general definition is that if it's under 27 DB it's pretty quiet so there you go
so guys we didn't quite get the spcr
seal of approval but if you guys want to learn more where do they where do they
find out how to build a 20 deel or less
gaming machine PC review.com that's where you come to all right so there you
go guys thank you so much for watching our our ultimate I guess I have to call
it ultimate very quiet PC build guide now that I've got the real skinny on how
well we did um guys I guess you can enjoy some Glam of our finished system
here and uh as always huge thank you to the entire crew involved big thank you
to Intel for sponsoring this PC build guide and uh we'll see you guys again
next time make sure you're subscribed and all that good
stuff