Building the ultimate silent PC case

[AnonymousGuy]

Not really a build log but more of "hey here's something I made" to show off while I'm waiting for a few other parts to arrive.  The idea is that it slips over my regular Phanteks case and effectively muffles it into oblivion (coil whine....unavoidable).

 

1" thick neoprene, 2" pyramids, 1/4" fiberboard, which you can see at the bottom where it's count out for cables.  I didn't weigh it but it's probably 40 pounds with all the wood and foam. About 5 hours to construct:  a lot of measuring and cutting.

 

This is about 32" x 29" x 20"...probably double the volume of a normal case.  More like a crate at this point.   It's not going to be an HTPC that's for sure.

 

 

 

More updates to come.

[Mazdaspeeding]

Wut?  How would this not overheat with the quickness?

 

Edit:  I see, "whole house loop".  But still, lot of effort for this.  My PC is sitting 18-24 inches from my head and I can never hear it 

[AnonymousGuy]

1 minute ago, Mazdaspeeding said:

Wut?  How would this not overheat with the quickness?

External watercooling.  Along with the cables coming out of the bottom will be tubing.  Since the motherboard still needs (some) aircooling, there's a radiator mounted in the case being used to blow cold air in.  Effectively extracting heat from the air instead of from components.  The radiator that cools the loop is in another room.

[dizmo]

So you're building a throttle box? Sweet.

Seems. Excessive.

[Mazdaspeeding]

1 minute ago, AnonymousGuy said:

External watercooling.  Along with the cables coming out of the bottom will be tubing.  Since the motherboard still needs (some) aircooling, there's a radiator mounted in the case being used to blow cold air in.  Effectively extracting heat from the air instead of from components.  The radiator that cools the loop is in another room.

I mean cool engineering project but why not just move the whole pc to another room and just wire some cables through the wall?   Then you could have the heat and sound somewhere else.

[DevilsHand676]

Vary cool, I'll be interested to see when its done with your water cooling you mentioned. Make sure to update! 

[AnonymousGuy]

15 minutes ago, Mazdaspeeding said:

I mean cool engineering project but why not just move the whole pc to another room and just wire some cables through the wall?   Then you could have the heat and sound somewhere else.

Considered a Thunderbolt 3 dock but I'm driving 3 monitors off my desktop right now and I think they all cap out at 2.  And none support 4K 144Hz which is coming (for me) in the next generation of those monitors (when they hopefully don't need a cooling fan for the gsync module).  I briefly owned the PG27U? Asus one and immediately had to return it since it sounds like a laptop is running behind the screen 24x7.  

 

Also gets really expensive.  $350 dock, $550+ optical thunderbolt cable (cause copper can't drive TB3 at more than a few feet).  And those cables don't (yet) exist.  They just got announced a couple months ago.

[AnonymousGuy]

Couple more photos.  Decided on a camo wrap to kinda give it a "stealth" look...it's obviously never going to blend in the middle of my home office but kinda looks more interesing than the raw fiberboard.    First pic is halfway through.  Second pic is fully done with some handles on top to make positioning over my desktop easier.  

 

Probably not my favorite digi camo pattern but this was $28 vs. $70 for cooler ones.  Gaffer tape hides the crimes of the edges.  This part took about 2 hours.

[AnonymousGuy]

And this is what the base looks like.  Wood frame under some more fiberboard.  Pencil outline of where the desktop is supposed to sit...hopefully it's all measured and built correctly or else that'll suck.  The "front" has 3" of foam clearance + 2" of air gap so the front intake fans for the radiator can breathe.

 

Sponge gasket around the edge to fix the base of the "lid" not being absolutely flat.  

 

That's pretty much it for this build...I just have to move my desk around next week and try it out.  Total build time is probably around 8 hour or so, total cost about $150.  Most of that cost is in the foam.  

[Blue4130]

9 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

  The "front" has 3" of foam clearance + 2" of air gap so the front intake fans for the radiator can breathe.

 

Breathe what? It's a closed box. 

[cachethrash]

 I thought the camo picture was of an, unrelated, desk. It looks massive. Maybe it could be incorporated into a desk. Which reminds me of a video by DIYPerks on youtube where he builds a PC in a desk, with the main goal being silence. 

[AnonymousGuy]

1 hour ago, cachethrash said:

 I thought the camo picture was of an, unrelated, desk. It looks massive. Maybe it could be incorporated into a desk. Which reminds me of a video by DIYPerks on youtube where he builds a PC in a desk, with the main goal being silence. 

Oh yeah it's not space efficient...at all.  My home office is half of my living room though so tons of floor space for it.  I could have fit it under my desk but I wanted to put some 120mm fans on top to circulate (warmer) air from the top of the box to the front of the box which makes the height about 7" (including foam) taller than the box within.  An mATX case or less foam (the pyramid foam is probably overkill) would have drastically reduced the volume.

[Aereldor]

On 5/30/2020 at 9:24 AM, AnonymousGuy said:

External watercooling.  Along with the cables coming out of the bottom will be tubing.  Since the motherboard still needs (some) aircooling, there's a radiator mounted in the case being used to blow cold air in.  Effectively extracting heat from the air instead of from components.  The radiator that cools the loop is in another room.

If you're keeping the PC in a silent box, but you're using external watercooling, what's the point?

Also, the guy who put a Hyper 212 EVO on his GPU in 2015 and built this thing
 

 

[AnonymousGuy]

On 6/9/2020 at 12:32 AM, Aereldor said:

If you're keeping the PC in a silent box, but you're using external watercooling, what's the point?

Coil whine.  And under heavy load the VRM does need some airflow and even the quietest fans on the market are still audible when you're chasing absolute silence.  

[Blue4130]

5 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Coil whine.  And under heavy load the VRM does need some airflow and even the quietest fans on the market are still audible when you're chasing absolute silence.  

But don't the fans on the external rad sort of kill the silent aspect?

 

Is it finished and set up? I would love to see the final setup to try and wrap my head around this project.

[AnonymousGuy]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

But don't the fans on the external rad sort of kill the silent aspect?

 

Is it finished and set up? I would love to see the final setup to try and wrap my head around this project.

The external watercooling allows me to locate that radiator+fan in another part of the house, pump in another part, etc.    It's basically whole room watercooling with my desktop and 3 servers hanging off it....except done properly so it doesn't suck (@linus).   It's been running in different forms for the last 7 years.  Initially it was a 20 gallon chilled water loop, now it's a 11 gallon ambient water loop.    Ends up being about 100 feet of hose running through the house. 

 

I tell everyone that external watercooling is by far and away the best watercooling setup possible.  You don't have to worry about buying specific dimension radiators to fit a case and you can put as much radiator surface area as you want (mine is 20"x20").  And you can use a much smaller case (or any case really)when you don't need to fit a pump, reservoir, and radiators in it. 

 

I've been procrastinating for years to show it off but I'll probably do it once I finish getting the silent box set up (which depends on me moving my desk which depends on me taking everything off my desk which depends on me not having business to tend to on workdays)

[AnonymousGuy]

Deployed.  Only took me about 4 hours to move the desk and get it properly centered in the room and then another couple hours putting monitors and speakers and TV and shit on it...and we arrive at 3AM on the plot.

 

Temperatures aren't that much worse before and after.  Increase of about 3 degree C ambient.  The purple is outside the case, orange inside case.  Green line is the GPU inlet which is just after the radiator in the loop.

 

 

All the cables and tubing going in the back.