Silent Build for a Friend

[Christicles]

So a friend of mine asked me to help him build a new PC to replace his old prefab he bought a few years ago. The requirements he wanted were it needs to be close to £700, run quiet and be suitable for gaming for the next few years. So after some tinkering around with PC Part Picker I gave a choice of 3 builds. 1 intel and 2 AMD options. The Intel build was a good bit over budget and I couldn't really get it down close enough to the £700 range  for  him to be happy with it, so after tinkering around with one of the AMD builds he finally settled on one:

 

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Christicles/saved/1So1

 

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM  Liquid CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASRock 990FX Extreme3 ATX  AM3+/AM3 Motherboard 
Memory: Kingston Beast 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory 
Storage: Crucial M4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk 
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive 
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card 
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case 
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series SP120 Quiet Edition (2-Pack) 37.9 CFM 120mm  Fans 
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series AF140 Quiet Edition 67.8 CFM 140mm  Fan 
Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply 

 

Some of the parts have arrived already, the rest are meant to arrive to his work this weekend, but he wont be able to pick them up till Monday and even then the build won't happen till the following weekend.

Expect some pictures with the next update.

[Homicidium]

If he can sqeeze out a little more money, then beQuiet's or (if he likes the color scheme) Noctuas. If not Corsair's will still be fine. 

Oh, and a FX8350 might be a better choice. 

[Coombzy]

Looks good one of those systems that will still look nice and perform well besides the price 

[delet my acc pls]

Looks good but i recvomend getting a vapor-x 7950 (XFX GPUs is voltage locked and get a air cooler like the dark rock 2 the performace will be similar but the dark rock will be cheaper and quieter (no pump)

[Christicles]

Looks good but i recvomend getting a vapor-x 7950 (XFX GPUs is voltage locked and get a air cooler like the dark rock 2 the performace will be similar but the dark rock will be cheaper and quieter (no pump)

 

Oh, I didn't realize the XFX cards were locked. I was just going by what was listed cheapest. My see if he wants to switch it to a MSI branded one. He's not really big into the enthusiast scene anyway when it comes to OCing. This is gonna be his first complete build.

 

If he can sqeeze out a little more money, then beQuiet's or (if he likes the color scheme) Noctuas. If not Corsair's will still be fine. 

Oh, and a FX8350 might be a better choice. 

Just gonna stick with the corsairs. Most fans will be controlled and set to not become plane engines at higher temps anyway. I went with the FX8320 because it was slightly cheaper and you can get the same or similar performance with some slight over clocking. It's his first build so, it's not gonna be too crazy.

[understaticpressure]

I know its not a main concern, but I would get a 2TB HDD for mass storage, especially games. And the prices they are, you can't really go wrong. Are you planning to load just the OS on the SSD, or core programs as well?

[Christicles]

I know its not a main concern, but I would get a 2TB HDD for mass storage, especially games. And the prices they are, you can't really go wrong. Are you planning to load just the OS on the SSD, or core programs as well?

Thought I responded to this the other day. The ssd is for boot and some core programs, the rest will be on the Seagate drive. Only went with 1TB to keep the budget close to the mark. He's comfortable enough installing extra things himself such as hdds and sound cards.

[Christicles]

Ok, so I got back tonight at 9 PM after spending the day helping my friend build his system. I didn't take any photos during the build to save time and phone was dead and charging, but I did get a few of the finished result.
 
Enjoy the crappy phonetography :
 
Album

 

 

[CoolBeans]

Maybe get the Direct CU II because apparently the XFX aren't that quite. 

Edit: didn't realize you got the parts

[TicTac]

Looks good to me make sure you take heeps of pictures of the build and post it here :P

[Demos]

Silent build and you went with a Closed loop cooler and a GPU with an XFX cooler? o.O

[Christicles]

Silent build and you went with a Closed loop cooler and a GPU with an XFX cooler? o.O

It's actually remarkably silent when we booted it up. Even stressed it with Kombustor for a while and there was very little change also had the fans managed with Afterburner so they weren't going full whack. He was acutally really impressed with how quiet it actually was overall compared to his old system which sounded pretty much like my 5 yr old laptop which I had on at the same time and could be heard over the new one.

[Homicidium]

Silent build and you went with a Closed loop cooler and a GPU with an XFX cooler? o.O

 

The H100i can be rediculously quiet if you're using different fans. 

[Darell3]

Good system choice!

[Demos]

It's actually remarkably silent when we booted it up. Even stressed it with Kombustor for a while and there was very little change also had the fans managed with Afterburner so they weren't going full whack. He was acutally really impressed with how quiet it actually was overall compared to his old system which sounded pretty much like my 5 yr old laptop which I had on at the same time and could be heard over the new one.

Different people, different levels of perception. I'm a silence freak. The XFX cooling solution is pretty poor and quite loud. The H100i is even worse in terms of noise levels from the pumps, and its PWM control.

 

The H100i can be rediculously quiet if you're using different fans. 

Nope. Even with NF-F12's its still louder than most air-coolers.

[Homicidium]

Nope. Even with NF-F12's its still louder than most air-coolers.

 

I think loudness is not the best benchmark to compare something as this is purely subjective and each individual will rate the loudness of something differently. 

[Demos]

I think loudness is not the best benchmark to compare something as this is purely subjective and each individual will rate the loudness of something differently. 

 

Then why do websites measure the decibel level of each cooler?

The H100i is loud. Stupidly so. I went through 3 of them before I gave up and bought a Noctua NH-U12s for half the cost and same performance.

At work we get more than 10-20 RMA's of the H100i each week. It's insane.

[Homicidium]

Then why do websites measure the decibel level of each cooler?

The H100i is loud. Stupidly so. I went through 3 of them before I gave up and bought a Noctua NH-U12s for half the cost and same performance.

 

Because people like to know, how loud a cooling solution is, me too. But what I'm saying is, that you might find 25db(A) loud and others don't. You cannot put your thumb on it and say "It's loud" or "It's silent" 

Some people react much more sensitive to noise than others. 

 

You might say, the H100i is loud, but I say that I find it to be loud. There is no right and wrong in this as I'm not saying you're wrong for finding it to be loud. As you said, you consider yourself a "Silence Freak", meaning that you're probably a lot more sensitive to noise than I am for example. 

[Christicles]

Then why do websites measure the decibel level of each cooler?

The H100i is loud. Stupidly so. I went through 3 of them before I gave up and bought a Noctua NH-U12s for half the cost and same performance.

At work we get more than 10-20 RMA's of the H100i each week. It's insane.

I think you're taking the "silent" part a bit too literally. My friends previous system was a pre-built Dell machine with 2 90mm fans and graphics card that had something that looked like the internals of a laptop cooling it (looked like an 80 mm low profile fan+closed heatsink). The main focus was to go quieter. Also most of those noise tests are done with the products running a max, which with fans isn't really need all the time.

Being a "silence freak" yourself you should know that to keep things quiet, you need to have your fans under control. I  set the case fans to 1200rmp as max  and Afterburner was using a custom fan profile for the card.