First off I can't buy that card in the US. A google price search including the terms "Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell" doesn't show it on any site that doesn't list the price in Euros.

If I search for the part number I get 3 US sites that don't have it in stock all of which call it "HD 5770 1GB Silent RTL" whatever RTL stands for (one of which shows a picture of a card with fan) so I'm not sure I'm getting a valid search by part number.


Second you do have to admit they really push the boundaries on that card

* replaced two DVI connectors with one DUAL link DVI connector
* Heatsink protrudes into space where the 2nd DVI connector normally would be
* Heatsink protrudes vertically keeping this card out of some smaller cases due to height.
* Heatsink protrudes length wise keeping this card out of some smaller cases due to length.

In fact in all the searches I've done I still haven't found the measurements of this card. The Gigabyte support download center doesn't have a manual for that card yet. And the specifications page has no physical dimensions.

I give up. It's a interesting paper launch or maybe an interesting Euro only option but I can't find it and I've been searching way too long.

I just notice that "We've updated all chassis fans to Scythe Slipstream 800rpm, at 5V". Does it mean that the exhaust fan is only ~400rpm? If so, it's really an aggressive setting, I never consider lowering down my case exhaust fan below 800rpm before...

Probably below 500rpm, iirc. It's not unusual in the SPCR labs...

Odd, considering it's in plentiful supply here.


Already had someone find out the hard way that it's just barely too big for the Antec Solo.


As above, whatever the length is from the rear of the Solo to the hard drive cage + 3mm. Shouldn't need to account for the power cable as it's enveloped by the heatsink.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3506/g ... ndex2.html

Looking at this vid it goes past the ATX motherboard a little, so maybe 10.5" is a fair estimate?

Yes, I remember SPCR made some extremely quiet lab build with single low speed fan only. But in those build, you generally pick up a low power CPU (<65W) and uses integrated VGA card. While for this one, it uses very hot components, that's why it makes me so surprising. Anyway, the overall cooling is just acceptable, a very impressive work

I like the concept, especially cherry picking components etc.

Not the biggest fan of the fans (pun intended), I would use 1200rpm slipstreams and a small fan controller, so that you could choose wether or not you want ultra quiet (or not) operation.

This is mostly nitpicking tho, looking into my own P182 I can't really say that I'd do a better job than they did

I just got a couple of medium-speed (1300rpm, actually closer to 1500rpm in practice) Scythe Slipstream PWM fans for my box - one for my CoolerMaster Hiper 212 Plus heatsink and one for the 120mm case fan on my Antec Mini P180.

I have both connected to my Asus P7H55-M Pro board.

The CPU fan is set on auto custom (40% minimum @ 40C, 100% maximum @ 70C). At idle it runs around 500rpm. Under PRIME95 (4 threads - I have an i3) it runs at around 800rpm, which is still pretty darn quiet. With PRIME95 + FurMark it runs at about 1000rpm, which is not particularly quiet. At that point it hardly matters because the GPU is much louder anyway.

The case fan works with the 200mm top fan on my Mini P180 (which is set on low). At idle it runs around 600rpm. I use the "performance" fan profile because the other profiles don't throttle up enough. Under PRIME95 it runs at around 800rpm (which is decently quiet). Under PRIME95 + FurMark it runs at around 1200rpm, which is pretty noisy (but still quieter than the GPU).

My GPU is an EVGA GTX 460 768MB. The fan stays at 30% at idle (which is basically silent). Under gaming load it hits ~40%, which is still decently quiet. Under FurMark it hits ~55%, which is hardly quiet.

I'm not a fan of fanless GPUS because my experience is that they tend to overheat. The EVGA GTX 460 is darn-near-noiseless at idle (30%) and it's quiet enough under gaming loads. The fan controller is smart - it has hysteresis and uses continuous speed control, so the fan speed does not change quickly and it does not wander. FurMark is a nice test but it doesn't match real-world conditions, so I don't really care if my box is loud while I'm running it.

I don't get the purpose of this pc: too much cpu power and too little vga muscle.

If you went through so much trouble replacing fans and such why not put a better video card with an Accelero S1 strapped on it and a low rpm spinning fan.

I've been seriously considering buying one of these.

I went to the configuration page and started out by setting up the same system that got reviewed.

Things I noted:
- The 875 CPU isn't an option, just an 870.
- The power supply is back down to a CP-850
- the price is $2815 so ~$120 more

Is this kind of variation in two weeks normal?

You'd have to ask Puget -- and I think you should.

Personally, I'd never spend that much on a computer. You can build the same thing yourself for less money since you're not paying for labor & overhead..

That is, if you've got the time I suppose.

And I have...

RoGuE, there is time and value.

As the owner of Puget said in the thread for the first version:


Their effort is worth something, and cherry picking parts is worth even more to me.

That said, since I've built more systems than I've bought, I do have a bit of sticker shock over this one. Not only is there a base profit built in, but every part upgrade costs a premium as well.

Like DaveLessnau did in the other thread, I've made a public wishlist on NewEgg to approximate the system. To paraphrase him: Without the "Quiet Case Fans Upgrade Kit," "AcoustiPack Acoustic Composite Sheets," and warranty/labor/odds and ends, I come up with a roll-your-own equivalent price of $1,805.88 (or $1,978.34 after tax and shipping).

In the case of the system I want, I have to decide if what they are providing is worth $1000.00 to me.

I found out the reason for the price discrepancy.

This is their quote for the system: http://www.pugetsystems.com/?u=51848.

It only has 4Gb of memory.

Bump it to 8Gb, as reviewed, and the price is $2809. (And then I threw in the Tuniq thermal compound for $6 which got me $2815.)

Between that the bigger power supply and the more expensive CPU, it looks like Mike got $200 in free upgrades. Or maybe it's just like a restaurant with pictures on the menu that always look better than the real food.

Actually, this was a simple communication issue, the deeper I look into it. The specs of the second system we sent in differed in a number of minor ways (amount of memory, size of SSD, wattage of power supply, size of secondary hard drive, and type of optical drive). It wasn't intended -- it stemmed from the fact that we were testing the most extreme configurations possible to make sure we were OK from a thermal and acoustic standpoint. I communicated to Mike that the improvements with the Serenity SPCR Edition V2 were done at no additional cost. Clearly changing the size of hard drives, amount of memory, size of power supply, etc will have an effect on the price. What I intended to communicate was that the additional acoustic improvements (the cherry picking, the new fans, the custom cover plate, and the BIOS programming) did not come with any additional cost. Really, that's what we're focused on -- the design improvements of the system, because the cost of configuration changes isn't really the point of this review -- anyone can edit the specs to the budget and performance that fits their desires.

I should have made sure our 2nd system had otherwise-identical specs to make comparison more straight forward, and I apologize for that.

The 875K is no longer an option on our configuration tool because the 870 came down in price. The 870 and 875K are the same speed, the 870 has additional virtualization options, so we moved to that. We'd be happy to quote a 875K to anyone that wants one. Overclocking and silence rarely go hand in hand though

Hi Jon,

Yes, there were various differences, between v1 and v2, but I wasn't concerned with that. As you said, it was to show what could be done with a system.

It's just that the price quoted in the review was for a 4GB system, not the 8GB reviewed. I don't know where that mis-communication slipped in.

Anyway, I've already given you my money.

I'll just have to hope the "Picked by Ear" for a random yahoo like me comes close to what you did for Mike.

--- T

I'm sure readers here will be anxious to hear your thoughts once yours arrives

It's in QC now - I think it's pretty iffy whether I'll get it by this weekend.

Anyway, to be on-topic, the "Picked by Ear" blurb on your site says:

For the Serenity SPCR Edition, we take our quest for quiet to a whole new level and actually select components by ear. We've found that even across the same model, there can be a large variation in noise level. Hard drive spindle noise, power supply fan noise and even the sound of electrical noise from the motherboard voltage regulators are evaluated by our experienced technicians. Out of all the parts in our inventory, we reserve our most quiet components for the Serenity SPCR Edition. Cherry picking parts off the shelf is a feature that is totally unique the the Serenity SCPR Edition and you can really hear the difference!

What parts does that include? Motherboard, hard drives and power supply are mentioned. What about video cards (including the fanless ones?) and optical drives? Can you give us an idea of how many parts you stock to cherry pick from? Does picked by ear only extend to specific part numbers within a category?

We didn't document those things because we want the freedom to change and adapt the specifics of implementation as we learn and go, but at the moment, this is the answer to your questions:

The parts with the biggest variation, and thus the focus of our attention, in order of importance are:

Hard drives
PSU (both for the fan, and electrical noise)
Fans

The parts that are more of a pass/fail are:

Motherboard (electrical noise)
Video card (electrical noise, since they're all fanless on Serenity SPCR Edition)

That's not to say that's all we do though. We have failed SSDs in the past, due to electrical noise. Optical drives we haven't seen a lot of variation with (seems to have much more to do with the disk than the drive), but even still, we do a second check of the finished system in our QC phase. We do it then because our QC area is where we run one system at a time, and it is in a specifically built isolated room (temperature controlled and sound dampened). Our QC staff are VERY particular, and anything that might have made it through is failed and swapped out (and testing starts over). Things we most often catch at this phase are things like PSU electrical noise, as sometimes the noise only happens under certain wattage load conditions.

We choose from inventory on hand. I'll give you a quick snapshot of current inventory of some Serenity components so you have an idea (though it changes all the time):

Motherboard: 10 units
Video card: 11 units
Hard drive (2TB green): 8 units
Scythe fans (800rpm): 46 units
Scythe fans (1300rpm PWM): 29 units
Antec CP-850: 45 units
Pioneer DVDRW: 46 units
Pioneer Blu-Ray burner: 1 unit

If we're down to a small number of parts (like with the Pioneer Blu-Ray drive today), it does not mean you'll just get the "best" of one part. If its loud, we fail it, and we wait for a new one to come in. We have supply shipments that come daily, so there is constant stock turnover. I have a LOT of trust in our guys -- our build crew, and QC staff do an excellent job, and hold a standard higher than even I ask of them. That's one of the things I love most about this company...the high standard for quality is deeply rooted in the company culture.

Hopefully that answers your questions! We do intend to continue to evolve this process as we go, so the specifics of implementation may change.

Somewhat OT, but I have a question about video card electrical noise...I own a 5870, and while under normal use I can't really hear any noise coming from the card itself, when I use H264 DXVA decoding along with soft subtitles (that is, not encoded into the video itself), a very distinct squealing noise comes from the card while subtitles are on screen. You wouldn't happen to know if this is common trait amongst ATI cards? My Google searched haven't come up with much so far.

fwiw sometime in the last few weeks that card has become common in the US and there is now a 5750 version of it as well (though that version has a VGA connector instead of the DisplayPort)

See viewtopic.php?f=19&t=58529&p=528876#p528876 for my full post on finding it and a couple of other fanless cards that I didn't find earlier in the year.

My thanks to SPCR and those people posting on this thread for the information on the Puget Serenity SPCR Edition v.2 . I've lurked around SPCR for years, including taking a pile o' information away when I scratch-built my last desktop PC as quietly as reasonably possible. SPCR has been an exceptional resource - perhaps the one truly definitive resource - for reducing noise from PCs to a tolerable level.

This time around, I decided that I might consider getting a quiet prebuilt computer based on my available time to gather the parts and construct the machine (and I'm sufficiently comfortable enough with my masculinity, and much more to the point, my techno-geek creds after thirty-five-plus years around everything from big iron to specialised chips to not get pangs at efficiently delegating this to a company that does it effectively). The write-ups on Puget Systems boded well, especially the discussions around the "binned" components, something that would promise a substantial savings in my personal time and effort were I to build the desktop myself.

I've since exchanged a fair number of e-mails with Jon Bach at PS, then some with his staff to develop a quote, and finally an order for a desktop PC. I've gone with a bit more power in an i7-950 CPU, an Asus P6X58D Premium mobo, and a 1TB HD combination. I know that this will not be as low-noise as the "stock" Serenity desktop, but I have some need for a bit more horsepower at hand, and I wanted a mobo where I could (possibly) upgrade the machine in the future with a faster/more powerful CPU. The combo that I picked was the compromise of these considerations, and also reflects discussions with Puget Systems on their experience in building such desktops.

Puget Systems certainly has the best updates for system completion of any company that I've seen in the PC marketplace over the last three decades ! Watching the order develop from the parts through thermal photographs of the system "cold" and under load is absolutely fascinating. While I might well be capable of building a similar desktop, I wouldn't have the tools at hand for testing it in the way that Puget Systems has been doing, giving me high hopes for the PC. The proof, of course, will be in the "running of the bytes" when it's delivered.

The question would be if my comments on the new machine should be placed in this thread, or a new one for a variant prebuilt system ?

Thanks again to SPCR for their exhaustive reviews, as well as the members of SPCR for thoughtful considerations of quiet computers.



John P.