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Chasing a Dead Silent Gaming PC. Is it possible?

2016-12-11
RGB and UV on the same strip introducing the RGB UV hybrid LED strips from cable mod click on the link of the description for more info please use responsibly supe gas so on Christmas Eve last year I put together the electrically festive silent night build a mid-range gaming PC optimized for the stealthiest of acoustic profiles featuring the be quiet silent bass 600 a passively cooled macho's itaú CPU cooler from thermal write and an enter max digit fan list power supply only a poorly timed racist joke preferably at a Funeral could make the room quieter but what if there was still room for improvement how much fan noise could we remove from the equation without setting our system ablaze and finally would it be possible to make this Mary Machine silent to the human ear while it slaved away drying frames in the unit in heaven-- 4.0 benchmark perhaps I'd have a better guess if I weren't distracted by that subpar video card so the initial card that I put in this system was the MSI gaming 4 gig GTX 960 and it's about a year old now it's it's not the worst card ever but it's definitely a little bit dated so what we're gonna be doing is swapping that out as you can see it I mean I don't know if you can tell from here but it's actually having a hard time it's chugging along in Unigine Heaven 4.0 but anyway what we're going to be doing is swapping that card out giving it a big upgrade to this bad boy right here this is the gtx 1070 extreme gaming from gigabyte and it's obviously a faster more powerful card which i think is going to introduce a bit more heat into our system no doubt however I think it's also a bit more realistic of a test for anyone who's building a gaming PC in 2016 especially towards the end of the year we do have a couple things going for us here with this card the first of which is that it's going to be running its stock frequency that is out of the box I should say because of this factory overclocked we're just going to leave it at that it doesn't have much ceiling room so we're just going to leave it as is and that'll help us keep thermals down a little bit additionally it's also just got a pretty beefy cooler on it you can see it's it's a rather thick card it's still a a dual slot GPU however it is pretty sizable and it does have three decently sized fans the only issue that I'm seeing here is that it's an open-air shroud which most aftermarket cards are and that'll eject all the hot air or at least a good portion of it into the case and potentially heat up the rest of our components the one I'm most concerned about being our CPU there like our video card we have also swapped CPUs for this build except we're going in the opposite direction kind of scaling down instead of up we actually went from the 6600 K that was initially in here to a core i5 6500 so lock skew still a core i5 quad core chip on the skylight platform however we are no longer overclocked we cannot we're locked at the the turbo frequency which is 3.6 gigahertz that actually will help our temperatures of anything because we're going to be running at a slower frequency now if I had the option I would not have made that CPU change because I feel like the 6600 K is probably more akin to what most high-end gaming PC's would have however that chip is currently in use and I was unable to actually get it in for this test so we're gonna have to deal with the 6500 for today as you can see the memory has also changed what used to be tried at Z is now ripped just for both kits of which are from g.skill this is a 16 gig kit just like the original running at 26 66 megahertz and I did have to use that older Ram kit for something else for a different build actually was in the giveaway PC that I that is in my car right now waiting to be shipped out I should probably not leave that in my car actually I'll be right back and the last thing that's changed about this PC are the fan so initially we had some peer rings to in here get some pure rings to action which are the original fans that came with the case with the silent bass 600 those have been replaced with some silent wings 3 also from the same manufacturer there's one 120 in the front and another 120 at the rear so those should be a little bit quieter maybe a little bit more effective at delivering airflow than the pure wings - I can't imagine there's a massive difference but if anything we are scaling up to a newer set of fans with newer bearing design and all that sort of thing so I think on that note what we need to do here is run a baseline test with the current setup that we have as is that'll give us a basis of comparison for any of the following tests so I think what we're going to do here is probably run 15 to 20 minutes of Unigine heaven 4.0 at 1440p and I'm going to document the frame rates and the scores that it spits out and that'll be the level basis of comparison for everything else that follows we're going to use that same test again and again for any kind of little tweaks that we make to the system to make it quieter on that note let's go ahead and fire this bad boy up and see how she does you you for our initial run the CPU stayed at a comfortable 41 degrees Celsius on the hottest core our GPU meanwhile maintained a core clock speed of 2000 megahertz while hitting a respectable max temp of 67 C if we plan to reduce fan speeds in hopes of achieving silent operation we'll have to brace ourselves for higher temps than these but considering the maximum operating temperature for the gtx 1070 is a blistering 94 degrees celsius that gives us plenty of thermal headroom to work with still I dare not travel too close to the Sun so I'm setting a personal cutoff limit at 81 degrees Celsius we'll also have to keep a close eye on how NVIDIA GPU boost response to all of this as our GPU temp Rises the core clock speed may be reduced with the potential of affecting our precious frame rates speaking of which this initial run saw 60 7.2 FPS on average with a minimum frame rate of 27 and a score of 1694 certainly some impressive numbers to boast about and yet our tiny little system remains humbly quiet for the average user this rig is acoustically adequate to say the least but rarely ever these kinds of experiments so easily satisfied while the silent Winx fans have earned their name and reputation for good reason they're the only source of noise from within the chassis apart from the graphics card so what happens when we turn them off so it's not too surprising how much quieter the system got when we removed all the case fans in fact at that point the only fans running in the system are the GPU fans which is which is pretty insane of course something is going to suffer because of that and that thing is temperatures so what do we get here basically on the CPU we went from 41 to 63 degrees Celsius almost a 20 degree hike however still very much within safe operating temperatures actually the GPU did great as well even better than the CPU believe it or not went from 67 degrees Celsius to 73 so only saw a 6 degree bump however GPU boost was like whoa hey you can't go that fast at that temperature so I'm gonna scale you back a bit on the megahertz so actually the GPU core clock went down it went from 2,000 flat to 1974 now I don't know if that megahertz or if it's not a big deal at all sorry for that awful pun but it really just depends on if it affects gaming performance or not so I did run the heaven benchmark of course and we saw an average frame rate of 66.7 that's half a frame lower than than the baseline test that's nothing at all that could be margin of error the minimum 27 exactly the same and a score of yeah 8 points lower barely a dip so I think what we should do at this point is start turning down the GPU fans start lowering that rpm bit by bit until we hit my cutoff that I had mentioned before 81 degrees Celsius on the GPU and we'll see if it's quiet enough to be completely silent from a foot and a half away under look do you think we can do it we might do this batch I honestly have no idea but let's go ahead and run that test now all right so as they say in the limbo how low did we go in terms of you know the GPU fan RPMs we actually got it down to 50% that's when we hit 81 degrees Celsius is at 50% fan speed the big question here is was that still audible the answer yes I don't know if you guys can hear it on your end through the sound test but it definitely picked up for me I can hear it it is not 100% silence so that's quite a bummer but it is still one of the quietest gaming experiences I've ever had on a high end desktop system which is pretty pretty damn impressive actually as far as the GPU clock how much thermal regulation did GPU boost actually exhibit upon this spike in temperatures we actually saw a dip to nineteen hundred and forty nine megahertz remember the last test was 1974 the one before that with all the case fans going and stuff was a flat 2000 megahertz so we just dipped about 50 megahertz overall from our baseline what kind of gaming experience or what kind of performance hit did we actually incur in core that's when someone hands you a Coors Light you havin incurred that course what are we talking about so looking at the benchmarks we actually saw the exact same frame rates across the board as we did in the last test which was sixty six point seven on average and a minimum of 27 not too bad at all the only thing that really dipped here was a minus one point on the overall score 1686 to 1685 which is really nothing now it wasn't all rainbows and kisses for everyone all right there was one victim in all of this with this final test and that was the CPU our core i5 6500 actually got only 78 degrees Celsius on the hottest core which isn't too bad but it did spike up to 88 degrees Celsius on the package which is you know the package the overall temperature of the CPU as a whole was a little bit too hot in my opinion now of course everyone has their own thermal threshold limits like for me the GPU like I like to keep it 81 degrees and below even like any even like high seventy is like oh that's that's too warm CPUs I'm about the same like keep it under 80 yo some people are cool totally different yeah let it fly for you know 89 degrees Celsius for like five hours who cares it's not shutting down there's no you know failsafe F ticking in so we're good to go but bear in mind that additional heat will always decrease the longevity of your hardware not to mention that heat is gonna get transfer to other components in your system so bear that in mind if you're going to take your CPU to that degree no pun intended so in the end our attempt to run a virtually silent gaming PC was a failure but we did get surprisingly close with the help of a well designed GPU cooler it also seems that while the core clock took a dive when the GPU was at its hottest this had more of an impact on my ambient temp than it did our gaming performance and for every part that I am disappointed that we didn't get the silent rig I was hoping for I'm two parts thoroughly impressed that the system was able to operate under load with zero case fans well under its thermal limits now of course he will always pose a threat to a components lifespan but it's hard to feel too concerned when I've seen higher temperatures in typical chasse EES where the case fans are typically spinning now that's not to say that I recommend you go unplug all your case fans immediately but it does make me ponder the possibilities of a fully fanless system although I've since recommissioned my silent wings threes as they're gentle worrying bothers me no large amount it's fun to imagine future hardware being so power ficient that fans are simply no longer needed for even the most powerful gaming pcs at that point we'll just need to replace them with something else to give our systems that touch a flare but that is gonna do it for now guys so let me know what you think of these results in the comments and don't forget to toss me a look on this video if you enjoyed it also for the first time ever you can now buy mugs and glasses on my store there's also new shirts and hoodies and if you spend over 50 bucks you get 10% off 20% off if you spend over a hundred would thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see you all in the next video
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