Gadgetory

can't shake the light I'll take the chance for the guys to spoil them 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 law it doesn't matter if your PC's loud just put on your headphones it to me that's about like saying it doesn't matter if your armpits stink just wear a nose plug no I'm not gonna 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 gonna 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 mod nut 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 a 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 59 60 x8 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 5820k or a 59 30 K hex core processor if you don't need the extra two cores but I wanted to validate this build concept with the hungriest version of haswell-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 pretension arms in reverse order while water coolers 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 high performance 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 of zero 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 die underneath there then put the heatsink down with the brand logo sideways for a 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 needle nose pliers tighten down these four nuts onto each of the posts until it is secure our ram choice was just about made for us this cpu supports quad channel ddr4 so we knew we'd need a kit of that and thanks to clearance challenges with the fins of our heatsinks we scrapped the original plan of using 32 gigs of Dominator platinum 26 66 megahertz ram and went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance LP X memory at 2400 megahertz pull back the tabs on the four grey 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 bass 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 too even though now it has some competition for that other title it's definitely the available in this awesome black and orange color scheme that feels very - 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 millimeter fan and replace it with a 1500 RPM silent wings - blowing into the case with the fan lead coming out this corner use the anti vibration corner pieces with the pushpins and washers to secure that in place using the same fan mounting system install another silent wings to fan in the top this time the 1000 RPM 140 millimeter 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 won't have any hard drives in our system due to noise concerns so for better air flow we're gonna remove all the three and a half inch 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 on Asus x99 lineup for this build sister all passively cooled and therefore 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'm a bit of a sucker for beautiful motherboards so there you go press firmly on the four corners of the i/o shield until they snap into place if you want to save yourself some trouble for later grab the 24 pin and eight pin motherboard connector from your power supply box plug them into your board so then feed them through these holes place the board down on the integrated standoffs and install the screws that look 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 to front audio and USB 3.0 then finally connect all of your fans with inline low noise adaptors we use knock to a ones 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 see sonic 520 FL squared because it's fully modular allowing us to keep unnecessary wires out of the way of what little airflow we have in our system and because a single GTX 980 and 59 60 X 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 grille side up for better cooling and attach it to the case using four of these screws you already ran the eight 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 this cable management hole our SSD choice was one that honestly I made to make our PC more Mac Pro like I mean SATA drives are still fine and you can mount them to the back of the motherboard train but we figured hey we're dead quiet already we might as well have lightning-fast PCI Express base storage while we're at it with no clutter due to SATA data or power cables this is the muskan scorpion a PCI Express 2.0 to NEX expansion card that boasts an onboard RAID controller to san force driven 480 gig SSDs a hundred-thousand 4k random right eye ops and sequential read and write speeds just shy of one gigabyte per second oh and all 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 PCIe slot below remember guys a 1x card can go in a 1 X 4 X 8 X 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 Strix from a soos because it features a fanless mode when running 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 CPU and video card a little bit of breathing room and the power supply to then align the card carefully with the slot push down firmly put the two thumb screws back in and plug in the PCI Express 6 pin and eight pin power connectors that we cable managed earlier which leads nice 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 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 straight up 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 inch monitor is great for productivity and a Seuss'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 saber optical RGB mouse would do just nicely our Scorpion PCIe SSD comes pre-configured in raid zero so you can skip the menu to change its settings that you would access with control-m during boot and just press Delete or f2 to get into the UEFI 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 our Ram is running at the right speed is all we're pretty much gonna 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 and video web and intel website for everything in this system now well I don't normally install these who says AI suite software utility you're gonna 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 silent we'll be using a Seuss's fan expert software to create custom fan curves and we'll be using their auto fan 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 wrap 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 afterburner 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 degrees so the card won't firm will 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 SPC our testing lab to validate how quiet our system really is so it's field trip time we're here with silent mic from silent PC review and we're inside his homemade sound chamber but first might 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 we've been 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 showing people how to make the quietest computers alright 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 super low noise it was built in about a month using pretty much homemade tools and it's got 600 pounds 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 decibels a weighted most times during the day if you wait till about 2 o'clock in the morning it might get down to about nine point five or ten 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 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 quiet enough so that it's quieter than the equipment you're trying to measure right our microphone is seven decibels a weighted that's about as quiet as you can get in a microphone it's connected up to 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 a weighted a weighted means that it's tailored to the to match the sound of your human hearing all right Mike give it to me straight how did I do well at idle it's pretty damn good alright 14 decibels 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 my that is that it's not a 400 watt Beast right but at 24 it's a little higher than what we would expect in a you know at maximum that's a little higher than our standard which is 20 decibels for silent but our general definition is that it is under 27 decibels it's pretty quiet so there you go so guys we didn't quite get the SPC our Seal of Approval but if you guys want to learn more where do they where do they find out how to build a 20 decibel or less gaming machine see 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 guys I guess you can enjoy some glam of our finished system here and as always huge thank you to the entire crew involved a big THANK YOU to Intel for sponsoring this PC build guide and we'll see you guys again next time make sure you're subscribed and all that good stuff you