Water vs air | fractal r5 vs Silverstone ft02 vs nanoxia ds6

[MySeLf.PT]

Hello dear silencers.

First of all great site, great forum. Keep up with the good work. I wish there were more reviews and sites like this. I've been carefully reading your articles for years and now I need your opinions.

I always valued performance and silence equally and I've done my fair share of builds over the years but never accomplished anything that I would call "silent".

Currently I use a cooler master stacker (the original old ones) with 5 WD greens in elastic suspension. A thick (40mm) 360 radiator at the bottom of the case and 7 120mm noise blockers. The front fans are also suspended. All of them controlled by a rehobus fan controller.

I have foam padded side panels, the water pump is supposed to be quiet (aquastream ultra xt @ 60hz) and is decoupled using the official shoggy sandwich.

My hardware:
4790k @ 4.8 ghz @ 1.3v
16gb RAM gskill Trident Z
Z97 Asus hero
500gb Samsung evo 850
Asus strix 980 x1
Creative Sound blaster Z
Seasonic x750
2x 4TB raid-0 WD green storage
2x 2 TB raid-0 WD green games
1x 2 TB backup

Only the CPU is in the loop.

I run everything @ the bare minimum and my temperatures are great. I can even game passively without the CPU reaching 70°C. GPU is silent, PSU is too.

The problem is: the pump drives me crazy because of airborn noise and mainly vibration. I've tried everything from getting it suspended with elastic (got a lot worse) to muffling it with foam all arround (zero effect).

To get the problem even worse I have a lot of HDDs. All WD greens suspended. Suspending them helped A LOT with vibrations and seek noises but the "metalic" constant idling sound profile is.. Well... Not nice.

So I'm thinking I'm gonna go back to the drawing board to silence my hardware. Money is not a problem. I'm gonna change whatever is needed. The only problem being the HDDs because I can't justify 16tb in SSDs money and I don't really like the performance of a NAS (110 MB/s best case scenario). I know I might have to sacrifice on that but first I must try to pull it all together inside a single case.

Sooo... I've been contemplating changing to air cooling because from what I can see it evolved a lot in the last few years and its now more silent then a custom loop.

On the other hand I have been thinking that maybe the problem is my pump and nowadays a PWM D5 Vario would help me with my problem (I've never heard one so I don't know if it it's quieter then mine).

Also the HDDs must be suspended and nowadays there aren't many silebt cases with 5 5.25" bays. I'm also considering using HDD enclosures to muffle them and reduce noise / vibration.

So the question is. With that in mind... If it were your project what would you do?

Water cooling everything (gpu included) in a big silent case (nanoxia deep silence 6) with the hard drives suspended.

OR

Giving up on WC and buying a Silverstone FT02 / fractal R5 with a big heatsink thermalright le grand macho with 2 phanteks 140mm?

Silverstone ft02 or fractal r5?

Gaming noise is not a problem because I use headphones. Idling noise is what drives me crazy when I'm working.

Please share your thoughts and thank you for your patience for reading sucha a long post.

Thanks in advance,
MySeLf

[CA_Steve]

Welcome to SPCR.

Case: I can't speak to the DS6. If it's between the FT02 and the R5, the FT02 will run cooler, the R5 will run quieter. With your components, the sheer number of hard drives may well overpower the difference in fan noise of the two cases.

Cooler: No reason to liquid cool the gpu as it's silent for non-3D use and you wear headphones while gaming. As for the CPU, an OC'ed i7 can run hot. But, top end air coolers can handle it without subjecting you to pump noise.

Hard drives: Without knowing more about what's on your gaming drives and storage drives, I'm not sure I understand the benefit of Raid 0 versus other means. Maybe buy one 500GB class SSD for current games, etc and keep the rest on a large HDD. Use the other large HDD as external backup drive.

[quest_for_silence]

The problem is: the pump drives me crazy because of airborn noise and mainly vibration. I've tried everything from getting it suspended with elastic (got a lot worse) to muffling it with foam all arround (zero effect).

Is it louder than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQLQgTqAtk0 ??

[baii]

pump noise, try slow it down, if that doesn't work, then air ~

Nas performance, if money no objective, simple, 10gb lan.

[Fire-Flare]

If you decide to change the pump, I'm very satisfied with my Swiftech MCP35X.

Mine is hard-mounted in an open-air chassis and it's inaudible to me at 20% PWM.

[Abula]

Money is not a problem. I'm gonna change whatever is needed. The only problem being the HDDs because I can't justify 16tb in SSDs money and I don't really like the performance of a NAS (110 MB/s best case scenario).

I agree with baii, try to build a 10GBE network and server, its expensive, but will allow you to place it where you cant hear it and end up with a quiet setup, check the following hardware,
NETGEAR ProSAFE XS708E 8-Port 10G Ethernet Switch (XS708E-100NES)
Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540T1

Check the following videos for some ideas,
10 Gigabit Networking - I wanna go fast. Really, really fast.
100TB at over 1GB/s - The "Storinator" is back!