Achieving a silent build

[KingOfDog]

Budget (including currency): 3000 €

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mainly story and strategy games, video editing and rendering, coding, machine learning, streaming

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Existing parts:

• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
• Noctua NH-U12S
• Gigabyte XTREME GAMING Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
• G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32 GB
• Asus TUF B350M-Plus Gaming

I want to achieve a silent PC (when idle) which is as quiet as possible under load. Most of the time, I only use the PC for web browsing, coding, and watching videos, though I also have several computation heavy tasks such as rendering videos (and editing in 4K) and machine learning training. Mostly, I play story, indie, or strategy games, for example Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cities: Skylines, sometimes also other genres.

 

RGB is nice-to-have, though not top-priority as my PC is sitting below my desk to the left and most cases only have windows to the opposite (in my case wrong) side.

 

As before, I want to upgrade my setup continuously. I started out with a prebuilt PC which I exchanged for new parts over the last 6 years so that only the PSU and case are original. Those are on my list to swap out next as well as the graphics card.

 

I need help considering the following questions:

1. Do you recommend air cooling, AIO, or custom water cooling?
2. What case is best for achieving my goal of a silent build? My current favorite candidate is the Be Quiet! Silent Base 802/801 though I am open to different suggestions.
3. What PSU is to be recommended? I would think that a PSU with passive mode is a good fit.
4. How long do you suggest waiting until buying a new generation's graphics card? And do you anticipate the AMD or Nvidia cards to be a better combo with an Ryzen processor?

Thanks in advance for every reply.

[jaslion]

1. Modded air cooling for the gpu and just air cooling for the cpu. For example a sycthe ninja 5 is an amazing cooler (couple degrees away from a nhd15) and whisperquiet whilst being budget friendly and not ugly like the noctua. Modded gpu cooling I will link a image and some more explaining.

2. Don't get a silent case get an airflow case. I know it sounds weird but hear me out. Components get louder because they run hot and need to cool better. Which a silent case only makes worse due to poor airflow. So just getting a good airflow case and loading it up with silent fans (arctic p12 or p14's 5 for the price of 1 noctua and they perform identical in noise and cooling) will avoid temp issues thus more silence.

3. Depends on the gpu you are getting in general 850w should do the trick for anything on the market and just get a psu with hybrid mode not a passive one.

4. The moment your current gpu is giving you lackluster performance is when you may wanna upgrade. Up to you really.

 

Now for the gpu:

 

It looks odd and that is because it is but this is the best cooling you'll get without watercooling it. Basically the fans on any gpu kinda just suck and removing them + the shroud and then putting some well fitting pressure fans (again the arctic p series comes into play :p) gets your better temps and a silent gpu. With well fitting I mean the fans are the same size or a little smaller than the heatsink so they can have max pressure. Does this void your warranty? No. As long as you don't break the shroud or snip parts of the cooler :p. It's super easy to do and a massive improvement. the fans you just hook up to a fan header and set on a set rpm which you can adjust according to your liking.

 

[KingOfDog]

35 minutes ago, jaslion said:

2. Don't get a silent case get an airflow case. I know it sounds weird but hear me out. Components get louder because they run hot and need to cool better. Which a silent case only makes worse due to poor airflow. So just getting a good airflow case and loading it up with silent fans (arctic p12 or p14's 5 for the price of 1 noctua and they perform identical in noise and cooling) will avoid temp issues thus more silence.

Can you recommend any case in specific?

38 minutes ago, jaslion said:

 

It looks odd and that is because it is but this is the best cooling you'll get without watercooling it. Basically the fans on any gpu kinda just suck and removing them + the shroud and then putting some well fitting pressure fans (again the arctic p series comes into play :p) gets your better temps and a silent gpu. With well fitting I mean the fans are the same size or a little smaller than the heatsink so they can have max pressure. Does this void your warranty? No. As long as you don't break the shroud or snip parts of the cooler :p. It's super easy to do and a massive improvement. the fans you just hook up to a fan header and set on a set rpm which you can adjust according to your liking.

That's definitely something I did not think about yet. Thanks for the suggestion. Will look into it.

[suedseefrucht]

3 hours ago, KingOfDog said:

I want to achieve a silent PC (when idle) which is as quiet as possible under load

I build a pretty silent pc myself this year. You can see my build down below.

For a case I picked the fractal design define R6, which is a great compromise between airflow, noise dampening and build quality in my opinion.

CPU air coolers from noctua (like yours) or bequiet are a great choice. Like the be quiet! Dark Rock 4 as an example.

For a power supply corsair RM series support a 0 rpm fan mode under light load.

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, KingOfDog said:

Can you recommend any case in specific?

That's definitely something I did not think about yet. Thanks for the suggestion. Will look into it.

Totally depends on the asthetic you like. The silent base does come with a mesh front but that is kinda losing the point of the case + it's a really expensive case when a 50$ one would do more than fine. The phanteks p300a mesh is a nice starting case just needs some extra fans (hihi guess who's back the arctic p12 box o fans :p).

 

But really any front mesh case will do the trick.