How to Build the ULTIMATE Silent Gaming or Workstation PC
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
3,334 words · ~16 min read
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a close your
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eyes seek
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Paradise won't change your
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mind can't shake the light I'll take the
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chance and throw the dice I want it all
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just for the night I live it out like I'll never die I lose
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my head in the
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St today's PC build guide theme is one
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that I've wanted to do for quiet some
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time and while we've all heard the arguments against silent Computing LOL
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it doesn't matter if your PC is loud just put on your headphones to me that's
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about like saying it doesn't matter if your armpits stink just wear a nose plug
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no I'm not going to wear protective ear coverings to use my computer that's
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ridiculous especially given that Modern
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Hardware if configured correctly can achieve near silence without
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compromising performance and that is what we're going to show you today
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welcome to the near silent gaming PC build guide start by preparing your
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workspace a safe uncluttered static free
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Workstation is a must I use a modmat and
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an anti-static ankle strap now the only tool we really need for assembly is a
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multi-bit screwdriver but a magnetic Parts tray a pair of side Cutters and a
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pair of needle-nose pliers are all nice to have now before you actually start
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putting stuff into the case I recommend
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verifying that the system posts or powers on and outputs to the display you
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can use your motherboard box as a free non-conductive test bench our CPU Choice
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was all about pushing the limits of Silent Computing and the core i7 5960x 8
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Core Extreme Edition processor from Intel is the best of the best of any
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Enthusiast grade chip available today you could substitute it for a 582k or a
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5930k hex core processor if you don't
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need the extra two cores but I wanted to
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validate this build concept with the hunger EST version of hasell e that we
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could get and this is it hold your CPU
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by the edges and identify the corner with the gold triangle align that with
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the corner of the motherboard socket that has a triangle as well lift up the
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first retention ARM on this side then the second one on the other side lift up
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the socket cover place the CPU in with no Force lower the cover and fasten both
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retention arms in reverse order while water cooler can be quiet! and I normally
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use them for these guides for a computer to be truly silent it needs to eliminate
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as many moving Parts as possible and all
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highperformance CPU water coolers will have at least three of them a motor in
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the pump and two more Motors one in each fan so I went instead with a massive be
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quiet dark Rock Pro 3 and removed its cooling fans outright for a total of0
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moving Parts screw the four posts that look like this into the four little
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sockets around the CPU apply a thicker
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than normal line of thermal compound to the processor there's a big D underneath
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there then put the heat sink down with the brand logo sideways for slightly
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better cooling or right side up if you've got a touch of the OCD like I do
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using the included wrench or a pair of needlenose pliers tighten down these
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four nuts onto each of the posts on
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until it is secure our RAM Choice was
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just about made for us this CPU supports
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Squad channel ddr4 so we knew we'd need a kit of that and thanks to clearance
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challenges with the fins of our heat sinks we scrapped the original plan of
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using 32 gigs of Dominator Platinum 2666
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MHz RAM and went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx memory at 2400 MHz pull
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back the tabs on the four Gray RAM slots
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then starting with the innermost on each side position each dim so the notch in
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the bottom lines up with the notch in the socket then press firmly on both
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ends until the tabs snap back into place on their own there are actually a few
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great choices out there when it comes to quiet cases but I went with the be quiet!
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silent base 800 for a couple of reasons one when I was planning this video it
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was definitely the newest and most exciting silent case on the market with
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included noise dampening material high quality included fans and a solid
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internal layout and two even though now it has some competition for that other
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title it's definitely the only one available in this awesome black and
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orange color scheme that feels very Linus Tech tipsy so put both side panels
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in the box where they'll be safe and use your magnetic tray if you have one to
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keep all the included screws in one place take off the rear 120 mm fan and
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replace it with a 1500 RPM silent Wings
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2 blowing into the case with the fan
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lead coming out this corner use the anti
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vibration corner pieces with the push pins and washers to secure that in place
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using the same fan mounting system install another silent Wings 2 fan in
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the top this time the 1000 RPM 140 mm
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variety simply pull the top bezel off using the three tabs on either side I
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recommend starting at the back and moving forward then stab that fan and
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pop the bezel back into place we w won't have any hard drives in our system due
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to noise concerns so for better airflow we're going to remove all the 3 and 1/2
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in Drive cages by pulling out the thumb screws on the right and left and sliding
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them out also watch out for those screws that go into those long standoffs at the
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back keep these cages somewhere safe though so you'll have the option to put
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one or both back in the future now arguably we could have chosen any
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motherboard and ASUS's x99 lineup for this build since they're all passively
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cooled and therefore for silent but I went with the Ws board because the
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quality and efficiency of the components is second to none which is very
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important if you plan from the start to not cool your system properly I mean
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most motherboards even if they don't have any fans of their own will be
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designed with the expectation that there will be some airflow provided by the
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system fans or the CPU fan but we won't really have any unless the going gets
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tough oh and yeah did I also mention that it looks amazing even when there's
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no side panel window I a bit of a sucker for beautiful motherboards so there you
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go press firmly on the four corners of
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the io Shield until they snap into place if you want to save yourself some
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trouble for later grab the 24 pin and 8
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Pin motherboard connectors from your power supply box plug them into your
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board like so then feed them through these holes place the board down on the
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integrated standoffs and install the screws that look like like this into the
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eight positions around the perimeter of the board the middle one can be left
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blank this is just a post to hold the board in place while you secure it while
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you have easy access to the board plug in the front power and reset switches as
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well as the power and drive activity LEDs follow up with the block style
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connectors for USB 2 front audio and USB
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3.0 then finally connect all of your
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fans with inline low noise adapters with
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we used KN 21's but anything will work our top fan will use the connector at
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the very top right our rear fan will use the CPU connector and our front fans
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will use the one that's middle of the board on the right hand Edge and the one
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that's at the bottom right I struggled a lot with the power supply choice for
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this rig a lot the main options are
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always on active cooling load or temperature activated fan cooling with a
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silent mode and fully passive as it is I
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settled on a fully passive seic 520 FL
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squar because it's fully modular allowing us to keep unnecessary wires
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out of the way of what little air flow we have in our system and because a
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single GTX 980 and 596x is well within its comfort zone if
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you decided to add a second graphics card to your build though you may want
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to consider going with a hybrid fan model so you keep that silence when the
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system is idling and the fan only kicks in when the power supply is working hard
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Slide the power supply in Grill Side Up For Better Cooling and attach it to the
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case using four of these screws you already ran the 8 Pin and 24 pin power
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connectors so just plug those into the modular interface on the power supply if
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you have SATA drives in your system you can attach the wire harnesses for those
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now and then finally plug in the PCI Express power connectors that we need
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for the graphics card and Route them through through this Cable Management
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hole our SSD Choice was one that
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honestly I made to make our PC more Mac
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Pro Lake I mean SATA drives are still fine and you can mount them to the back
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of the motherboard tray but we figured hey we're dead quiet already we might as
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well have lightning fast PCI Express based storage while we're at it with no
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clutter due to SATA data or power cables this is the mushkin Scorpion a PCI
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Express 2.0 2x expend iion card that
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boasts an onboard RAID controller two sand Force driven 480 gig ssds 100,000
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4K random right iops and sequential reading WR speeds just shy of 1 Gigabyte
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per second oh and all of this comes in at a price that's less than a dollar per
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gig it's also brain dead simple to install find a PCI Express slot that you
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don't need for the graphics card later take the thumb screw and Slot cover off
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align the card carefully with the PCI slot below remember guys a 1x card can
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go in a 1x 4X 8X or 16x slot press
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firmly down on the card and put the thumb screw back in the GPU for this
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build guide since it's more of a how to buy a silent yet extremely powerful PC
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rather than being strictly about gaming type of video is kind of up to you but I
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chose a single GTX 980 stricks from ASUS
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because it features a fanless mode when running two 2D applications at the
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desktop and the fan only kicks in when the graphics card is working hard just
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like the case fans that are plugged into the motherboard with an alternative
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graphics card you can still build a very quiet computer but if the goal is near
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silence at idle a hybrid fanless card like the strict series is the way to go
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to install our card simply remove the two thumb screws holding in these two
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PCI covers we're using this 16x slot to
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give our c CPU and video card a little bit of breathing room and the power
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supply too then align the card carefully
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with the slot push down firmly put the two thumb screws back in and plug in the
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PCI Express six pin and 8 Pin power connectors that we cable managed earlier
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which leads nicely into cable management and finishing touches at the back you
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can see we've run so few cables for this system that it's almost laughable how
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little there is to clean up back here uh just use the zip ties included with the
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case and the power supply to Route the front fan connectors up so we can't see
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them bundle together the motherboard connectors behind the tray don't worry
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about making them perfect there's tons of room for cable management back here
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in this case and then our cherry on top is a Silverstone magnetic fan filter to
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put over that rear fan that we're using as an intake maintaining positive air
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pressure with only filtered intakes will keep our system nice and clean for a
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long time with minimal maintenance required now sometimes we include
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Monitor and peripheral recommendations but because there isn't really a
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straightup intended purpose for this
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machine all I can really do is point you in the direction of Some solid premium
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stuff we've checked out recently LG's 34 UC 97 curved 34-in monitor is great for
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productivity And ausa's Rog Swift g-sync
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monitor is great for gaming and to match the black and orange theme some RGB
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peripherals like a k70 RGB keyboard and SA Optical RGB Mouse would do just
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nicely our scorpion pcid comes
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preconfigured in rate zero so you can skip the menu to change its settings
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that you would access with contrl M during Boot and just press delete or F2
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to get into the ufi BIOS for the x79 ews
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motherboard once we're in here everything we need for this system is in
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Easy Mode fan RPM monitoring boot priority configuration and XMP
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configuration which we need to change to profile one to ensure RAM is running at
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the right speed is all we're pretty much going to do we won't be doing any
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overclocking on this system because of all the cooling fans that we've removed
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for silence to install your Windows operating system create a bootable USB
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drive and then reboot the system while mashing f8 immediately to get to the
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boot device selection menu where you'll pick your USB drive once the setup
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process has begun it's basically a matter of clicking next until you land
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on the Windows desktop once there drivers can be found on the ASUS website
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NVIDIA website and Intel website for everything in this system now while I
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don't normally install ASUS's AI Suite software utility you're going to want to
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download that and install at least fan
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expert for the next step and now it's
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time to take our system from very quiet to near silent we'll be using ASUS's fan
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expert software to create custom fan curves and we'll be using their autofan
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stop feature to turn all the system fans except the CPU fan completely off when
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our CPU temperature is low enough and
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then we'll ramp the other fan speeds up slowly once the system is under load and
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starts to heat up the other piece of software we need is MSI After Burner our
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video cards fans already turn off when the system is idling but we can
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fine-tune things quite a bit with a custom fan curve in here I'm also going
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to tweak the temperature limit to 85 5°
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so that the card won't thermal throttle as aggressively as if we left it at the
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default setting now the exact positions
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for all the dials in these applications that are right for you will depend on
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the ambient temperature and your personal comfort zone with respect to
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temperatures but with some fiddling and load testing with the software that you
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typically use this config can be set up
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to be not only silent at idle but very very quiet even under gaming load but of
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course don't take our word for it we're on our way to the spcr testing lab to
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validate how quiet our system really is
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so it's field trip time we're here with silent Mike from Silent PC review and
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we're inside his homemade Sound Chamber
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but first Mike tell us about silent PC review how long you've been doing this
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what's the objective well silent PC review is 12 years old now and uh we've
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been uh focused entirely on the noise
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aspects of computers for all this time so what we do is we're looking for the
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quietest gear and uh showing people how
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to make the quietest computers all right but you need some
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pretty specialized equipment in order to even validate how quiet something is
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tell me about this room that you built well this is this is what it's all about
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is this room is all about uh super low
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noise um it was built in about a month
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using pretty much homemade tools and uh
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it's got 600 lb of what is called Blue fill which is a fiberglass substitute
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and that lines the entire interior of the room and that gives us a total sound
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level of 11 DB aweighted most times
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during the day if you wait till about 2:00 in the morning it might get down to
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about 9.5 or 10 but nobody wants to be
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up that late doing this stuff so obviously it's not enough just to build
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a special room you have to have have some kind of methodology for testing
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this stuff right like how do you do it well first of all you need to measure at
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the standard distance which is one meter okay and you need a microphone that's uh
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quiet enough so that it's quieter than the equipment you're trying to measure
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right um our microphone is 7 DB aeed
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that's about as quiet as you can get in a microphone it's connected up to uh
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sound card and a computer on the outside which is able to take the signal without
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adding any more noise of its own and then give me a calibrated decibel
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reading and it's aeed aeed means that
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it's tailored to the to match the sound of your uh human hearing all right Mike
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give it to me straight how did I do well
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at idle it's pretty damn good all right 14 DB at idle is about as good as you
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can get we have one machine that does better but you know it's not one of
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these right that is that it's not a 400
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watt Beast right um but at 24 it's a
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little higher than what we would expect in a in a you know a maximum uh load
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that's a little higher than our standard which is 20 DB for silence but our
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general definition is that if it's under 27 DB it's pretty quiet so there you go
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so guys we didn't quite get the spcr
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seal of approval but if you guys want to learn more where do they where do they
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find out how to build a 20 deel or less
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gaming machine PC review.com that's where you come to all right so there you
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go guys thank you so much for watching our our ultimate I guess I have to call
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it ultimate very quiet PC build guide now that I've got the real skinny on how
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well we did um guys I guess you can enjoy some Glam of our finished system
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here and uh as always huge thank you to the entire crew involved big thank you
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to Intel for sponsoring this PC build guide and uh we'll see you guys again
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next time make sure you're subscribed and all that good
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stuff