My quiet Maingear SHIFT

Show off your quiet rig.

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widdlecat
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My quiet Maingear SHIFT

Post by widdlecat » Wed May 19, 2010 2:21 pm

Hey everybody! I've been spending some time playing various games on my new PC and am very happy with how quiet it is. I know it's not silent, but I'd have to do some mods to make it any quieter. The people at Maingear listened to my needs and worked hard to provide me with a good system. The SHIFT chassis is basically a Silverstone RV-01 inside with a heavy duty aluminum exterior. My AMD Phenom II x4 965BE is passively cooled by at Thermalright HR-01 plus. I have 2 Powercolor Radeon HD 5750 PCS passive cooled graphics cards running in CrossfireX. They replaced the top exhaust fan with a 120mm Noctua S12B ULN fan.

As far as the noise output of my PC, aside from the optical drive, which is quite a bit louder than anything else, all I can hear is the cavity noise from the air resonance of the case. When the HDD spins up, however, the noise level is about twice normal, but still benign and easily lost in the background noise of the room.

In the future I may suspend my HDD to make things nice an peaceful. I'm not sure if the cavity resonance can be changed due to the top of the chassis being pretty much wide open.


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kopilu
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Post by kopilu » Fri May 21, 2010 8:58 am

really nice system and specs.two things if you please:more pictures & temps

widdlecat
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Post by widdlecat » Fri May 21, 2010 5:21 pm

With an ambient temperature of 75* F, my CPU idles at 37*C and GPU core runs at 50*C. My HDD stays between 27*C and 28*C even while I'm gaming. While gaming for hours, with everything maxed, incl. AA, the GPUs can hit peaks of 105*C without any artifacts nor other gaming issues. The rear bottom intake fan has an adjustable speed control where I can drop the temps to 95*C if I choose to. Furmark will also cause a similar peak temp. The hottest my CPU has hit while in this configuration has been 49*C.

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Hangfire
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Post by Hangfire » Fri Jun 25, 2010 8:12 pm

widdlecat wrote:With an ambient temperature of 75* F, my CPU idles at 37*C and GPU core runs at 50*C. My HDD stays between 27*C and 28*C even while I'm gaming. While gaming for hours, with everything maxed, incl. AA, the GPUs can hit peaks of 105*C without any artifacts nor other gaming issues. The rear bottom intake fan has an adjustable speed control where I can drop the temps to 95*C if I choose to. Furmark will also cause a similar peak temp. The hottest my CPU has hit while in this configuration has been 49*C.
Your CPU temps are OK, I'd be concerned about those GPU temps. Also without much airflow over the motherboard and video cards, you have to be thinking about VRM and Power MOSFET lifetime too.

I'm not sure what/where the "rear bottom" into fan is. Some low speed 120mm fans right on the video cards would do them some good without raising noise levels. If your Power Supply is the only exhaust, you might consider another exhaust, maybe at the top? I'm not familiar with your case or its possibilities...

widdlecat
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Post by widdlecat » Sat Jun 26, 2010 10:07 am

The airflow is from bottom to top. There is a 180mm variable Silverstone intake fan under the GPUs and a reg 180mm Silverstone intake under the CPU. The mobo temps remain good, but the best I can achieve for my GPUs is 95* C when playing Assassin's Creed while the rear fan is spinning at 1200 rpm. I want to try suspending a 120mm fan under the heatsinks of my graphics cards to see how much of an effect that will have. Unfortunately, I don't have a quiet 120mm fan, but running the big 180mm fan at 1200 rpm is pretty noisy too. LOL!

bonestonne
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Post by bonestonne » Sat Jun 26, 2010 3:34 pm

I'd say the biggest problem is that there isn't much space between those graphics cards.

I don't know what motherboard that is, but a lot have 3-4 PCI-Express x16 slots that run at full speed, if you put more space between those 5750's, they'd cool down a lot by themselves.

Also, if you have 180mm fans in the bottom blowing air up, clearly, they're being obstructed by too much to get the air to the cards. Rather than swapping out fans, I'd say despite it looking less than pretty, using some good rigid plastics, you could construct a pair of "wind tunnels" that surround the CPU cooler and the graphics cards, which ensure that air goes where it's needed.

I'm not really a big fan of that case, but the build looks relatively clean, it's just the placement of the power supply, and positioning of the motherboard which causes problems, the power supply where it is just gives off heat which rises straight into the 5750's. I wouldn't be surprised if one or both starts to artifact within a year because of the heat. I've seen 4xxx series cards less than a year old start to artifact because there's simply too much heat around them, with stock or passive coolers.

widdlecat
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Post by widdlecat » Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:31 am

Thanks very much for your reply! I still need to look into possibly suspending a 120mm fan under the graphics cards (I can always pull one from another case and try it out) and I need to look at my mobo's manual, but I don't think I have any other card placement options.

PartEleven
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Post by PartEleven » Sat Jul 03, 2010 10:10 am

+1 for adding a fan to those graphics cards.

If you're going for total silence you can still undervolt the fan so that it is inaudible. Even a little airflow goes a long way toward cooling over none. I used to use an Accelero S1 completely passive, but adding a fan improved temperatures significantly with little affect on noise.

widdlecat
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Post by widdlecat » Sun Jul 04, 2010 11:23 pm

Well I've suspended a 700 rpm 120mm fan about 10mm beneath the graphics card coolers and have the adjustable speed 180mm fan spinning at 900 rpm with a resultant peak temp of 91* C. That's a delta T of 14* C versus doing without the 120mm fan. Most of the time while I play Assassin's Creed, the temps run at 86* C.

I tried running the 180mm fan at 1300 rpm with the 120mm suspended fan, and the graphics cards never broke 85* C, but it was definitely audible.

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