This is the configuration I'm planing to purchase.

What do you guys think of the price and the wattage ?

What do you guys think of the silence it will produce ?

1x Super Flower Golden Silent / KingWin 500W SF-500P14FG (153 MagicPc)
1x Asus P8Z77-V Pro (174 pixmania)
1x Ivy Bridge i7 3770S (269 grosbill)
1x Noctua NH-U12P-SE2 (57 illoprix)
1x ASUS GeForce GTX 660 Direct Cu II 2 GB GTX660-DC2-2GD5 (207 Cdiscount)
1x Kingston HyperX GENESIS 4x2GB DDR3 2400MHz PC-19200 CAS11 Kit (KHX2400C11D3K4/8GX) (75 rue du comm)
1x Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 Black (106 MagicPC)
4x Be Quiet Shadow Wings PWM (BQT T12025-MR-PWM) (10 Amazon)
1x BeQuiet Shadow wings 140mm PWM (BQT T14025-MR-PWM) (13 Amazon)
6x Western Digital Red 3TB WD30EFRX (140 Redcoon)
1x Logitech Wireless Illuminated Keyboard K800 FR (71 Rue du commerce)
1x Lenovo LT2323z (357 DealoPro)

6 hard disks is going to make a fair bit of noise. Are you going to use the standard mounting mechanism of the Nanoxia case or try to modify it? What do you need this amount of storage for?

Components look fine. Could go with a lower power passive PSU if you want to save $ as total stressed power is under 300W.
Probably don't need 5 case fans. What apps need the i7...and if you need the power of an i7, why cripple it with the lower clocked S grade?

Thank you both for your comments. Very good questions indeed.

About the hard disks. I need the space because we are a Multimedia family. Movies and videos all over along with pictures and home videos. Not counting the flac music files.

All of this is duplicated across the drives. So basically it's 3 drives and 3 other for manual/automatic software mirroring with versioning (the kids sometimes delete files by mistake and they popup in the versioning, so I know. (Please, don't suggest raid as I have gone this road, software and hardware, and came back full of deception).

they will be all fixed to the usual rubber anti vibration tools inside the nanoxia. Are they not enough/of decent quality ? Should I invest in something more custom to fix them. the Red's from western digital have very low vibration profiles.

About the PSU : The problem with fanless PSU is that they emit a low buzzing sound that sometimes varies with the amount of electricity being consumed by the box. Seasonic is terrible for that and even if the buzzing is low, being it variable it keeps catching my attention. The super flower one is very popular for being dead silent. Also, the more you stress the components, the harder the sound and the more the temperature. So a 500W working under a 300W load is better.

About the fans, they are all PWM fans, and the asus board along with fanxpert will be able to set those babies at the lowest value possible. The lower pressure caused by the low rpm won't move much air, so you need a lot of the fans at different places in the box. I might remove one and keep just 4.

I do not use a lot of cpu itensive tasks. But I play the occasional cpu intensive game like civ5 and I want to be able to play it in full. there is also a lot of raring unraring. And basically system response. I took the low powered version because the pc will serve as a nas and I want it to consume little power when not needed. Hence the S. also, I might go the route of virtual ESX and having both the server and the main rig on different virtual machines so that when i reboot or turn off one, the nas will be still going strong.

Please don't hesitate to poke holes in the strategy or to suggest better alternatives.

Cheers

CPU - Comparing the i5-3570 to the i7-3770S: Most games (including Civ5) don't make use of the i7's hyperthreading. You do take a hit on frame rates dropping the clock speed to the S part. If your RAR utility makes use of hyperthreading, then the i7 is faster. You won't see lower power at idle or low CPU utilization with the S part. Here's Anand's bench comparison of the i5-3570K to the i7-3770K. Lower the i7's performance by ~10% for the high intensity tasks and you'll be close to the i7-3770S' performance. Intel ARK comparison.

What do you mean I'll take a hit with my i7 S ?

that's what's speedstep is supposed to come in.

what about the virtualization ?

and about the other points I made ? You agree ?

Not talking about Speedstep. Look at the Techspot link for Civ V. Faster base speed quad core means faster frame rates. Turbo doesn't come into it as you are using all four cores.

I'm not a virtualization expert. So, no advice other than saying all thee cpu's listed in the ARK link have VT-x. For VT-d, you need the S part or some other i5/i7 that supports it.

Not that i know much about NAS, and i guess you have already considered using one instead of having 6 HDD.
Though i would be interested in your opinion on why not NAS as I'm looking into them myself ATM.

Also i highly recommend some kind of SSD, best upgrade ive made this year.

Heh - I missed that. Good catch. Get a 128GB SSD for OS/apps/games.

I share the same view as CA_Steve and Spoon Boy: Definitely get an SSD. I recommend any Intel SSD, Crucial m4 and the Samsung 830 or the new 840 for their reliability.

Sorry about that... Of course there is a SSD. Intel 520 240 gigs.

Forgot to put it in because i already have it.

So, i'm left with the i7 i5 mess.

i7 S or K or T or i5 ?

hyperthreading or not ?

how does this total Wattage thing work ?

TDP - Thermal Design Power. CPU power is proportional to the core voltage squared multiplied by the clock frequency. Intel uses TDP as an umbrella - all the desktop IVB quad cores (i5/i7) fit under the 77W umbrella - no matter what the base clock speed. So, a 3.1GHz i5 will have the same TDP as a 3.5GHz i7, even though at full load, one may use more power than the other. To differentiate the products for different markets, Intel then adds a lower TDP at 65W with the S parts. All they are doing is lowering the max clock rate and lowering the core voltage a bit. For the 45W TDP parts, they extend this further. Here's a great SPCR article on the Sandybridge S and T parts.

Basically, you get no power savings benefit at idle for S and T parts and there's minimal savings at light load. At heavy load, you trade off time vs load power. Just to spin you up a little more, your motherboard selection can have a bigger impact on your power bill.

Yes, For the motherboard, I already knew that... But unfortunately, I want PWM, lots of them, and fanxpert, so it's a no brainer. Asus and nothing else.

For the processor, what i want is a cool processor at idle, the coolest possible. and a speedy fast one under load, but very efficient so I don't have to cool it with sound.

It's not power i'm worried about, it's the heat and the noise. I don't mind it sucking watts as long as it's silent.

And I also need some virtualization technologies.

So do you think the i7s or i7t will fit the bill or is it just market hype ? I mean, if the maximum wattage bill of the s will be less than the normal i7, then it will heat much less.

true ?

RAID is for uptime. It allows you to keep your system up 24/24. Other than that, it's just problems and false sens of security. Besides, it's not backup, so it's wasted space.

Research : Silent data corruption, smart Soho don't do raid, Percentage of failures in a raid5 reconstruction.
Also, it doesn't allow versioning and you can't pull the drive and read it in any generic enclosure.