This is why I switched to a Magahalems from my wonderful original Ninja...

Happy 10th!

I'm pleased to have been able to give back by writing the "superquiet superclocked" DIY articles based on what I learned here, and turned into a hobby. (500,000+ reads!)

I'm still running that system (upgraded a bunch of times), and it's still the quietest appliance in my house.

4 pin fans can tick too, an arctic cooling pwm I was using in my htpc did that. Now fans can tick for other reasons too, but I think it was the working frequency of the pwm circuitry that did that as the ticking went away after I plugged it on another motherboard. I should have been more specific. ...

Im especially thinking of the Noctua fans but i've heard pwm fans give a ticking motor noise from the pulses is this right? It's not that simple. There are two main kinds of fans: 3-pin and 4-pin. The 4-pin fans are generally referred to as PWM; they use the fourth pin to control the speed using a ...

If you dial back your overclock to 42x or so, you shouldn't need any extra voltage at all.

Hmm, where to start. First, replace all the stock Antec fans with quieter ones. Any of those listed above will be quieter. All are 120mm. Second, soft-mount the hard drives, preferably in the lower cage, where they will share airflow with the power supply. Third, your video card will be far and away...

The P280 is IMHO the worst choice listed. It was designed for ease-of-build, not silence. The P183 fixes many of the issues of the original P180 (especially lack of inlet cross-section) without reducing any of its sound reduction techniques.

I would say that the crossover is approximately at a system power consumption of about 350W. I was able to cool an overclocked Pentium-D system quietly with air using giant heat-pipe sinks, quiet fans, and custom ducting. Others with similar power draws also got quiet cooling with water. My system d...

It doesn't look like anyone has tried this yet, my searches didn't yield any results, at least. I bought a MSI R5770 for quite cheap. Now I know it's because the fans have a bit of bearing chatter. Last night I ordered the Accelero S1 Rev 2 and a couple 92mm nexus fans for the front intake of my An...

You didn't say so, but I'll assume you're running these fans at less than full speed. On all but a few very high-end motherboards, 3-pin fan speed control is done with PWM (pulse-width modulation, aka duty cycle) control, where the fan voltage is switched between 12V and 0V in a square wave. In gene...

It was easy with XP32, but with W7x64, not so much. Here's what I did: Run the task scheduler (use the help menu and search for "create task" to launch). Select action/create task. Select General/name speedfan, only when logged on, highest privileges. Select Trigger/at logon/any user Select Action/s...

Your title says "studio DAW". So, since this isn't a gaming system, and apparently all you're looking for is support for many screens, what's wrong with a 2+ year old design? I'd suggest looking at a pair of GT9800 cards, or even lower performance. Way more than you need for a non-gaming application...

Ninjas have been sliding downhill for a really long time. Time to move on. I'd suggest a Megahalems, which is a bit costly, but is easy to mount and works as well as the original Ninja.

Oh, boy. A bunch of things are getting mixed up here. First is the basic difference between 3-pin and 4-pin fans. 4-pin fans have a built-in circuit that controls the motor speed based on a signal carried by the fourth pin (the other three are ground, +12V, and sensor). They are generically called P...

Hmm. Sounds to me like a case that's easy to build, but has crappy sonic characteristics...

It never occurred to me that you would still have the stock covers on the intake. They have to go! Some folks like to mod them by cutting away the thin parts, but I advocate complete removal. This is easy: pop open the covers, then squeeze the top part of the hinges. You will still have filtered air...

Would a fanless HR-02, be sufficient for a 2600K(non overclocked)? This build looks susccesful with a HR-02 passively cooled 2600K. Sure, an HR-02 with a case fan nearby will cool a stock 2600K. But why would you spend so much on an unlocked CPU and not at least moderately overclock? 40-42x clockin...

That GPU is dumping almost twice as much heat into your system as the CPU, and worse, dumping it at the bottom of the system, cooking everything else. You're probably going to have to rethink the whole approach. First, your stock P180 has only one fan-sized inlet (spot 4) to deal with over 300W of h...

Lots of good choices. Depends on your needs for size and price.

If you have a big case, I like the Megahalems because of its simple and effective mounting system, paired with a quiet 120mm PWM fan.

Things changed about 5 years ago. Used to be that water cooling was the most efficient way to transfer heat from super-hot CPUs. But then good heat pipes became easy to manufacture. That led to a whole new generation of heat sinks, led by the Scythe Ninja. Later another generation of "direct touch" ...

I installed the latest version of SpeedFan (4.45), and it made no difference for this board. It still does not recognize the new controller chip.

5GHz is a dream. Give it up. Note you never see a followon posting from any of those nuts a year later, because their CPUs burn out after a few weeks, regardless of the cooling. If you really need that kind of performance, get an i7 and clock it at 4.2-4.5. Which by the way can be easily cooled with...

Wow. So much over the top advice.

A Megahelems with any slow 120mm fan will cool any i5 at any clock.

You don't need waterblocks. Modern heat pipe HSF towers perform just as well or better, without the hassle of liquids, algae, pumps, external fans, tubing, etc, etc. Several years ago, I cooled a seriously overclocked&overvolted Pentium D (at least 150W in my configuration) with a relatively slow fa...

markanini wrote:What specific Asrock board do you have? Do you use the onboard graphics in any way?

Asrock Z68 Extreme4. I use a graphics card. The CPU-based graphics are configured with Virtu, but I'm doubtful they ever actually get used.

When run with default settings, most variants of Prime95 (eg, OCCT) alternate between small and large FFTs. Small FFTs generally fit in the CPU cache and run hotter. Large FFTs thrash the cache, so the CPU cores spend more time waiting on memory fetches.

Another one is Arctic Cooling F12 PWM. Quiet at low speeds.

One to avoid is Nexus PWM, noisy at all speeds. (Opposite of its 3-pin brother)

Hmm. What you report makes me think your BIOS/UEFI settings need changing.

All the fan headers you intend to control from SpeedFan should be set to "full on" in the BIOS.

In current PCs, 2x4GB is better than 4x2GB. (I'm going to ignore the high-end 3/6 slot or super-high-end Xeon systems here) This is because the memory controller has two busses, and each buss can support one or two sticks. When you install 4 sticks, you reduce the electrical/timing margin of the sys...

I've never actually used the CPU2 header (I use the CPU1 header); I just reported what others have said about it. Apparently both CPU1 and CPU2 speeds are controlled together (CPU1 is a 4-pin PWM-only header, and CPU2 is a 3-pin [PWM not voltage] header). Speedfan can't read the RPM of the CPU2 head...