Interesting article.
I have built a similar system with a I5 750 system and a GTX460 video card
However I used the Lian-Li PC-Q08
This is a general purpose desktop including Gaming.
Although the machine is subjectively 'quiet' it will not be as quiet as yours.



System-Windows 7
CPU Core I5 750
Ram 4gig
CPU Cooler Thermalright AXP-140-RT CPU Cooler (fits perfectly as long as you do not use backing plate -I used fibre washers on bolts at back of MB)
CPU Cooling fan Noctua NF-P14 FLX 140mm Fan -air flow away from MB towards Power supply.
MB Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3
Video Card EVGA GTX460
Main Hard Drive OCZ Vertex 2 60GB E Series SSD
Secondary hard drives-2x Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT 750GB (laptop drives in a hard drive rack)
Power Supply Silverstone Strider Plus 600W ST60F-P -Fan opening inside case removing air from CPU heat sink.

I blocked all air vents on case so that only the front fan (replaced by Noctua NF-P14 FLX 140mm ) and the top 120 mm fan operates.

I used sound(Vibration) deadener on all the insides of the case.
In most cases Combination Butyl/Foam Super Sound Deadener
http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.as ... rm=KEYWORD
but under motherboard
Butyl Based Sound Deadening Material
http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.as ... rm=KEYWORD

This stops any vibration noise form the aluminium case itself.

Temperatures in case-ambient 25C
CPU 55C under load, 23C idle -Prime95
GPU 75 under load 35C idle-Furmark

A hacksaw would have taken care of the cooling plate incompatibility. The cooling plate is a lot better than the small heatsinks since it covers a much bigger area, and the thermal tape usually used with the small heatsinks tends to be bad - they fall off easily if not applied correctly and it's not that good at transporting heat. Personally I've had to resort to heatsink compound and glue to get them to stick. There's also thermal glue you can use, but that's what I had lying around and I didn't feel like buying it.

Great guide, thanks !!

You probably noticed coil whine from the video card while playing the intro and menus of Crysis because, by default, Crysis does no v-sync and does not frame limit while playing movies. If you turn on an FPS measuring program, such as Fraps, you'll see your framerate head north of 300. This causes immense strain and leads to the coil whine you heard, and is a completely abnormal situation in PC gaming. Turning on any form of v-sync (double or triple buffering) will fix the whine.

Great article, thanks for posting it. Gives me many ideas for my planned Sandy Bridge build.

Interesting. I had absolutely no idea that turning on v-sync fixes coil whine. Where did you find this information?

That's not what I said - I said it will fix the coil whine during the intro movies and menus of Crysis, as they put undue stress on the graphics card due to no framerate limitations. The evidence is purely anecdotal. I had a GTX 260 that would exhibit severe coil whine (completely drowning out all other sources of noise) during the intros and menus of Crysis. Once in-game, despite having its hands full with the actual game itself, the coil whine would become barely audible.

i can't hear any coil whine on the gtx460's that i'm running, fwiw, and i play a lot of crysis.

that was a tremendous article, lawrence, complete with all of the testing and tune-up info needed to mix silence with performance... but it could have been made even quieter, with a higher fps rate.

i have one of those little scythe 2,000 rpm fans that was used on the gpu cooler, it puts out a lot of air when cranked up, but it's way too noisy... one alternative would be to mount a couple of real fans on the gpu cooler, then use a die grinder to neatly cut a hole in the case, that would allow the thicker fans to stick out from the side of the case... screw the chopped-out section of grill onto the fans, and you are good to go.

or you perhaps could have used the gelid cooling solution, in the same manner... then start overclocking

you have one big advantage, in that the fan on your video card is muffled inside the case... a different gpu cooler, and replace the 140mm fan with a thermalright ty-140, i bet that you could be very competitive to what spcr did... albeit in what looks to be a bigger case, tho... that spcr rig is really portable.

nice build.

It's like power supplies. Some do it, some don't.

I approached this build with broad general appeal in mind. I wanted it to be put together with only off-the-shelf hardware without major modifications - something a joe-shmoe who has never even heard of a die grinder could assemble.

And many people prefer to keep everything as stock as possible, for warranty purposes, to preserve resale value, and/or to maintain aesthetics. It also would've been a PITA from to cut a hole in thing as we wouldn't be able to use it for anything else after that.

Out of curiosity at this stage...would you expect a Thermalright ty-140 to be much quieter than a Noctua NF-P14 FLX 140mm Fan?

As for the case, the Lian-li has specs of 230mm(W) x 285mm (H) x 350mm(D) vs 222mm(W) x 190mm (H) x 350mm (D) for the Silverstone Sugo SG07 so 95 mm taller (about 4 inches) so yes the Silverstone is slightly more portable.

It just depends of your needs:





(use as a relative, not absolute, scale)

I happened to think this was an outstanding build, so no outrage or insults here. Most sites, even those aimed at enthusiasts and gamers, refuse to do anything more with a MITX board then set it up as an HTPC. The only thing I would bump up would be an i7-870 and the AXP-140 in the hopes that it would be quieter and faster, but it probably wouldn't be that much of a difference in practice.

Also, I'm glad to see something gaming oriented here. When I first started following SPCR, anyone with a discreet videocard where treated like they had some incurable disease.

Nice this is my setup:

Intel i5 750 @ 3Ghz 1v cooled by Nexus LOW-7000
Gigabyte H55N-USB3
4GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600MHz C7
Sapphire 4670 512MB GDDR3 + Accelero S1 Rev. 2
Intel Postville 80GB SSD
500GB Western Digital Green
Nexus NX-5000
Lian Li PC-Q08

Fans:

Scythe Slip Stream SY1225SL12LM-P - CPU (600RPM)
Scythe Slip Stream SY1225SL12SL - Top casefan (500RPm)
Scythe Slip Stream 140mm - Front casefan (500RPM)

Temps:

CPU Idle : 35 degrees
CPU Load: 55 degrees
GPU idle: 35 degrees
GPU load: 55 degrees

I dare to say this setup is more quiet than the silentpcreview's SFF game build but the spcreview build has a better GPU

hey mudkip, what case is that in? you guys are throwing down the gauntlet in this spcr gaming rig thread!

i just noticed that the sg07 is a $200 case :-0 at that price, even i would be thinking twice about hacking into it... the Lian-Li PC-Q08 would probably be a better option for me, in part because you aren't forced to buy a power supply... 4" difference in height isn't much.

i've been lucky when it comes to coil whine, i've seen a lot threads about it, i don't know what you have to watch out for, to avoid it, but thanks for the tip on the v-sync.

Thanks for the reply.....something to consider. I used the Noctua fans because they were lying around in my fan collection. Not too bad as far as noise goes as long as they are operating at no more than 900 rpm. The case fan is doing so but the CPU one does run faster when the CPU is working hard.

As for modding the case, would you get (even) better temps if reversing the air flow? I.e. flipping the top case fan, and modding the GPU cooler to blow out.

That way the CPU/MB would get cooler air - only seems the GPU is running hot as it is, having fresh air intake and all. I was thinking of a similar air flow pattern as josephclemente did here: Blow hole-cooled HD5850.

/ d

It's a similar price as the PC-Q08 if you consider the power supply is worth about $80.



We may try this when we update/revise this build.

I have a SG06 and a non ref. 5770 on GA-H55N-USB3 and am looking for a cooler for it. Do you think since the SG07 is almost the same size would the Musashi fit in my SG06?

Doubtful. The SG06 is shallower by 64 mm and 10 mm of that is in the front bezel.

I note that you suggest that 8GB RAM would likely be a waste for a gaming system.

You might want to look at this little trick for using the extra 4GB as a RAM drive to contain the swapfile (even in 32-bit XP), which reduces drive usage and gives benefits in game loading times and a smoother gameplay experience (subjective impression of the reviewer, I haven't tried this myself as I only have 4GB at the moment).

How-To: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ram-memor ... 053-4.html
Benchmarks http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ram-memor ... 053-5.html

This page also shows how, in 64-bit Win7, the graphics card will grab more system memory if it's available, which apparently improves gameplay:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ram-memor ... 053-6.html

Cool article. I've always been interested in compact/powerful rigs..wish i read an article like this before building the one in my signature and moving in and out of 4 apartments in college. God that thing is a bitch to move..

Great article. After doing tons of research cross-referencing reviews from performance oriented sites with articles here, the system I'm planning on building is pretty close to this.

Did you go with a mini-ITX platform purely for the portability? I ask because the system I'm going to build will be on the P55 platform in an Antec Sonata Elite case. I don't need the portability and I would think that this combination could save some money on the case, offer better cooling, quieter operation, and give you more flexibility for other components. I'm curious how losing the need for portability would affect your choice of components.

This is only the first of several quiet PC build guides we're working on. This one was aimed specifically at the LAN party user, though it could just as well be a general purpose SFF PC capable of gaming.

A bigger case could allow cheaper components -- matx or atx boards are cheaper than mini-itx when you look at value products, and you can run a hotter/faster/cheaper CPU with higher thermal limits in a bigger case. Ditto the GPU -- could be hotter/more powerful -- and a bigger heatsink could be used with both CPU & GPU, with 120mm fans only. All in all, ity could be several dBA quieter if using the same or similar primary components, or substantially more powerful if you shoot for the same noise level as this SFF.

I've often wondered..how would high end $2000+ "gaming" laptops compete with this performance if heat is such an issue with even this SFF case which is so much more spacious and breathable than a laptop. Are the gaming laptops just REALLY loud?? Sacrificing low noise for better convection over the compact hot components? I guess what I'm confused about is, after seeing the challenges even this SFF case presented to you, how on earth do they make laptops with serious gaming power not blow up? All I can think of is really. fast. fans. Also, is it safe to say that this build would blow pretty much any laptop out of the water in terms of gaming performance?

I have to admit, I haven't been keeping up with the latest in laptops since I'm not particularly keen on them to begin with..

RoGuE -- afaik, gaming notebooks ARE very noisy -- I'd guess easily double the noise of our rig -- and run HOT. I have no idea how they compare performance-wise.

They're much slower. A mobile HD5870 is based on the desktop HD5770. Also, CPUs run at slower frequencies and rely on Turbo Boost to get decent speed, so when everything heats up there's no boost at all and they're stuck at less than 2 GHz.

I don't want to be rude but somebody really needs to work on their cable management skills.

I build a test system for work about a month and half ago with almost the same spec as the one in the review. After testing we never put it into production but the test box was still laying around, so I grabbed a few shots of the cable management with my cellphone camera.

Specs of system:

Intel Core i7 760 Processor.
Scythe Shuriken Rev.B low Profile CPU Cooler.
Gigabyte H55N-USB3 mITX Motherboard.
OCZ Intel Extreme XMP 4GB DDR3-1600 Kit.
OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SATA2 SSD.
Western Digital 1TB WD10EARS Hard Drive.
Panasonic UJ880A Slim SATA DVD Writier.
GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GTX460 Graphics card.
SILVERSTONE SG07 Mini-ITX case w/ 600W PSU.
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM.

Anyway on to the pictures:





Yes the CPU Heatsink is extremely close to the back of the graphics card, the gap is about 1mm, I insulated the side of the heatsink with tape to prevent a short.











Like I said it was a test machine, the sharp eyed will have notice that power isn't connected to the Hard Drive, this is easy fixed by taking the power connect form the SSD and pluggin it into the Hard Drive, and pull through some cable slack from under the DVD Drive to plug the power connect in the top left corner of the image into the SSD.

Good cable management only happens if it's taken into consideration throughout the build from start to finish. The PC in the article looks like a classic case of: Ok I got everything in the case and connected, now where do I hide all these cables.

(note: While the system pictured was build on company time, All opinions expressed here are mine, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)

Hi,

Great article. It has given me ideas for the basis for my next machine

A couple of variations that may be worth investigating or if someone is building this can report back.

I notice in your original article for the Scythe Samurai ZZ http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1049-page7.html
that it performed better with the Nexus fan. This option was not investigated in the article.

You said that the top system fan was making the most noise. Is there a replacement fan that could be dropped in? And you said you might try the option of blowing up.

I don't supppose a good system fan would do away with a cpu fan? Would some simple ducting from the system fan to cpu heatsink work or even remove the need for a cpu fan?

Keep up the good work.

Best regards
Alan