Building a Silent/Quite "Workstation"

Mr-S · July 31, 2021

Budget (including currency): 800 - 1200 EUR

Country: Netherlands

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Office and Web Development ( Net Core / Angular / etc .. ), playing older AAA titles ( usually I am 3-5 years behind ), it is just for some fun after hours of programming.

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: couple of SSD's and a AMD MSI RX 570 OC 4GB GPU

OS: Linux

Current setup:

DELL T3610 / E5-1620 v2 CPU / 16 GB Ram / MSI Armor RX 570 OC 4GB GPU / 2x 256GB SSD / No RAID / 1x 34'' Ultra Wide Monitor (2k) / 2 x 27'' Monitor (2k)

Reason for new Build:

Well, the old DELL lady is still rocking fine, but some parts ( like fans ) are starting to show signs of age/defects. Since it is a DELL , pretty much every part is OEM, except for RAM and GPU.

The part which is the most annoying to me is the noise level. Although the DELL is not exactly a very noisy machine I want to take it to a higher level of noise reduction.

My requirements:

- Beat current performance ( I guess that is not going to be a challenge :) )

- Very quite operation

- Descent game capabilities ( 2k on older titles should be possible, but is not required )

- A "great value" build. No need to go all premium.

I came up with this baseline:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zcydLP

PC-art picker price: $700, in my country EUR 600.

CPU: Ryzen 5 2600 ( has all the power to do my daily tasks, and is very reasonable priced )

CPU cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition ( very quiet and good cooling performance for the 2600 )

Motherboard: MSI B450 Mortar MAX ( got all the IO I need, good power delivery, descent temps )

PSU: Seasonic GX-550 , full modular ( trusted and very quiet, power is enough to drive the system with ease )

Case: Be Quite 500DX ( according my research a very quite/silent case, although I also have my eyes on the Be Quite 802 / Fractile Design R7 / Define C )

Memory; G-Skill Ripjaws V series ( 16 Gig is totally fine )

Storage: Kingsston A2000 5000 GB M2 ( the amount of storage capacity is all I need + I have still some additional SSD's around)

Current GPU: MSI Armor Rx 570 OC 4 GB ( very quite when not under load )

Wanted upgrade for GPU: AMD 5700 Series ( but prices are now a bit out of proportion, so I wait )

So, what do you think about the chosen parts?