nightmorph wrote:You're using such a huge, expensive PSU! Why not go with something much smaller, much more efficient, and cooler-running . . . like a PicoPSU and accompanying external power brick? It would free up vast amounts of interior space (possibly improving convection), and it certainly would reduce the amount of heat radiated into your other components.
You could probably run all that off a simple 80W or 90W PicoPSU, probably even just a 60W Pico. Since you don't have any regular hard drives to spin up at boot (which can each eat 25W at spin-up), and you don't have any really power-hungry parts like midrange/high-end CPUs or GPUs.
Only 2 sticks of RAM and a single SSD, plus a decently frugal chipset means you've got a great candidate for a 60W PicoPSU.
I built a similar but fan cooled system to the OP's some time ago, but have since disassembled it. I used a 450W PSU because it was the best and lowest wattage one I could find and afford. At lower loads, it does quite a reasonable job at being efficient, reaching 80% at ~70W. The system hardly ever drew more than 60W, maybe less. As I stated in this
thread, PicoPSU is quite an expensive option for me. If it were cheaper in my location, I would get one. Not for its bragging value but for its efficiency. It seems that everytime this comes up, I have to defend my choice of PSU.
On the OP's build, it is very impressive. The Orochi doesn't like to hide, does it?
But on the argument that
Zero Moving Parts therefore = Silence and
Moving Parts/Fan Cooled therefore = Quiet not Silence, I don't necessarily agree. In fact, I would counter that. Having zero moving parts doesn't mean there is no electrical noise from coils and transistors. Whether this can be obtrusive enough to annoy is questionable and also dependent on the user. A fan cooled system that is virtually inaudible for the user from reasonable working distance can be effectively considered silent. I remember MikeC writing an article in the early days saying something similar. However, with improvements in technology, this thinking needs to be reconsidered, because effective silence has stepped up to another level.
Blanket statements like
"only zero moving parts can be silent" unintentionally serve to make others feel inferior, when the level of inaudibility they have achieved is reasonable enough for them. As a result of feeling inferior, they might end up spending needless amounts of money trying to match what others are doing for little true reward other than a superficial one (from their perspective).
What the OP's system does show is that the hard work of SPCR and the silencing community over the years is being rewarded and that improvements in technology including non-moving parts storage and cooler running components that can be cooled passively have made the task of building a silent computer that much easier.
Change some of the OP's components around (higher end CPU, GPU and motherboard, more RAM and a different case) and/or put the system in a warmer ambient environment and a zero moving parts build might start choking in its own glory. I'm not dismissing nor discouraging users who build these systems. On the contrary, I think they display great attention to detail and the heart of a true silencer. But they are more relevant to specific types of builds than others. It definitely shows how far we have come when no moving parts are required.
