Silent mATX Fanless CPU Cooler

[sats87]

Hello everybody

I have built my sister a PC last weekend, and would like to have some feedback and advice. The goal of the build was powerful and silent pc on a budget. Will be used for light video and photo editing (Premiere Pro, Lightroom 6), ocassional gaming and lots of web browsing.

So the PC turned out really quiet except for some rumble from HDD sometimes, I connected both fans to the cpu header as Arctic allows to daisy chain PWM signal with their PST technology fans, because when I tried to connect Fan to motherboard fan header the minimum speed it allowed me to set was 50% and the fan was then spinning at 1300RPM and was quite audible, now both fans spin at 565 RPM and are inaudible, PSU fan never spins up as the loads are not high.

CPU temps: idle around 29°C and 59°C max under load in benchmarks, I set the case fans to spin up when the  CPU reaches 60°C so basically they never do spin up and keep quiet.

 

So what do you think of this build? Any advice how to quiet down the HDD?

 

Part list: PcPartPicker

CPU: i5-4590 (197€)

MoBo: MSI B85M-P33 (55€)

RAM: 2x4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport 1600Mhz CL9 (55€)

SSD: 128GB Transcend SSD370 (58€)

HDD: 1TB Seagate Barracuda (56€)

PSU: Corsair VS450 (40€)

Case: Deepcool Smarter mATX (19€)

Cooling: CPU Zalman FX70 (35€)

              Case 2x Arctic F12PWM (9€)

Additional: WiFi PCIe card D-Link DWA-548 (13€)

                 Internal Flash Card Reader 4World 24 in 1 3.5" USB 2.0 (3€)

                 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse set Logitech MK220 (23€)

Monitor: 24" Samsung S24D590PL (155€)

Total: 540€ (no monitor and keyboard)

 

[Stefan1024]

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For a 84 watt CPU there are quite good temperatures for a (semi)passive cooling.

 

For gaming you may need a dedicated GPU.

 

You can use some rubber washers ore something like this to mount the HDD. It only get's loud when the vibrations get's coupled to the case.

 

Do you have a picture of the finished PC?

[sats87]

For a 84 watt CPU there are quite good temperatures for a (semi)passive cooling.

 

For gaming you may need a dedicated GPU.

 

You can use some rubber washers ore something like this to mount the HDD. It only get's loud when the vibrations get's coupled to the case.

 

Do you have a picture of the finished PC?

Temps are really good, I'm surprised that zalman worked so well, but as you can see the fan is really close to it, so you could say it's more than semi passive, but it's silent and that's cool. Yeah just uploaded some pictures, it's already in my sisters place so that's all she sent me Didn't think to take any pics during the build =]

How effective are the ruber washers? And also those rubber fan mounts? It's the first time I could hear the hdd spining i i listen carefuly enough in a quiet room, I guess it's just the way it is with this case.

[Stefan1024]

Temps are really good, I'm surprised that zalman worked so well, but as you can see the fan is really close to it, so you could say it's more than semi passive, but it's silent and that's cool. Yeah just uploaded some pictures, it's already in my sisters place so that's all she sent me Didn't think to take any pics during the build =]

How effective are the ruber washers? And also those rubber fan mounts? It's the first time I could hear the hdd spining i i listen carefuly enough in a quiet room, I guess it's just the way it is with this case.

Better HDD mounting can help a lot. You can't get rid of the cicking when the read / write arm moves, but the spinning from the platten can be reduced. Just put anything soft between the HDD and it's mounting bracket. Or you DIY something like this:

 

 

As for the fans: It migth help, but I'm running totally fanless (look in my signature) I have no idea how much it helps. The speed is much more important than the mounting I think.