Antec P183 or P193 for dual passive 4850?

Vinz · Post by **Vinz** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:06 pm

Hello everyone,

I'm going to build a new PC in a couple of weeks. It's meant to be a quiet (not silent) gaming (MMO's mostly) rig. Since I dislike voiding warranties and cutting/dremeling/etc stuff to make it fit I thought I'd go for two Gigabyte passive 4850 video cards, since that seems to be the best stock passive set-up you can buy today. I'll need them to drive a 1920x1200 and a 1280x1024 at the same time, with 2 games running on different monitors.

Obviously the passive 4850's need decent case airflow to keep them cool. I was thinking of using either an Antec P183 or a P193. Does anyone have an idea if the P183 will be cool enough if I put in an intake fan like this guy did? I guess if that works it'd be quieter than a P193, which is why I prefer it. Although if some fans need to spin faster to keep up a P193 might be quieter if it can keep all the fans at low speeds. I'm perfectly OK with a bit of moving air whooshing sound, but I really hate high-pitched whining fans.

Other hardware that will go in this box:
i7 860
a middle-of-the-road ATX P55 motherboard (not sure which one yet)
Intel X25-M SSD (no old-fashioned HDD's to keep it quieter and faster)
Optical drive that won't be used a lot.
And I'd prefer to use Antec's CP-850 PSU since it's quiet, efficient, relatively cheap and it should last me a lifetime.

So most of the noise will come from the case fans. Not sure if I'll replace Antec's stock fans with quieter ones, I'll decide that after I've heard how loud they actually are for myself. And I'm not sure about decent CPU coolers either for the new 1156 socket, which also depends on the case since the P193 can't fit very high coolers.

If people think I'm barking up the wrong tree and should use an entirely different case feel free to point me in the right direction!

nikarul · Post by **nikarul** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:10 am

I recently built a quiet gaming PC with a P183 (with the CP-850 power supply). I didn't go the fanless GPU route, but I did install three Scythe Slipstream 1200s and a Zalman MFC1 fan controller. I had the top two set up much as in the link you gave, and the bottom one for the hard drive intake. It's been a good setup, and with the fan controller its easy to tune noise/cooling power at run time. The fans are very good, they're quieter at full power than P183 stock case fans are at medium.

RBBOT · Post by **RBBOT** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:36 am

Hang on - 2 games at the same time?

Vinz · Post by **Vinz** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 1:46 am

nikarul: Thanks, I didn't realise other fans could make that much difference.

RBBOT: Yeah, in certain MMO's (EVE Online in this case) it's quite normal to play with multiple accounts at the same time, to assist yourself so to speak.

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 3:49 am

You need to make sure the 4850's get enough airflow, or else youre gonna be in trouble.

I'm running 4 EVE accounts off one GTS250 card with two monitors, it runs reasonably fine, the main problem is really system ram (im limited to 3.2GB because of winxp32bit). If youre gonna run two monitors and four eve clients off the rig you mentioned in the first post, you can probably downclock the 4850's and still get good performance in EVE.