Building a silent box

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lelliott731

[H]ard DCOTM April 2017
Joined
Mar 15, 2002
Messages
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I'm looking to see how quiet and small I can build for WCG crunching, possibly adding a passive GT 730 if that would do anything for f@h as well. Could use some advice. Thinking Mini-ITX, trying to sell the Mrs on using two or more as heaters in our bedroom ;)
 
Excellent strategy on using the cruncher as a heater. I could have used one when my home's HVAC unit failed and had to be replaced last week.
 
No reason to go water or an "Eco" PSU -- there are completely passive options out there, and if you don't care if it downclocks a bit from time to time to keep temps in line, you're fine staying completely passive. Putting a couple big Noctua or similar fans in there to keep some air movement, and it probably won't even downclock. Silverstone and NOFAN both offer fanless PSUs, and there are lots of big radiator/heatpipe style CPU heatsinks that will work passively.
 
Ok, thanks for all the advice guys!

Was thinking a passive GPU, not sure what I'm thinking for CPU cooler.

I was hoping to keep the CPU less then $100, so I was looking at AMD A8-7600 or Intel Pentium G4500. Which would you guys think would be best?
 
Using a silent case will help a lot. I've got a 970 GTX rocking in an Fractal Define R5 and it's pretty quite compared to the other 970s I've got running. I can hardly hear it and that's with a dual fan setup on the 970 running 100%.
 
lelliott731 said:
I'm looking to see how quiet and small I can build for WCG crunching, possibly adding a passive GT 730 if that would do anything for f@h as well. Could use some advice. Thinking Mini-ITX, trying to sell the Mrs on using two or more as heaters in our bedroom ;)
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The Nofan CR-95 is your choice as long as you're not overclocking. You can fit one in a Coolermaster Elite 110.
 
MSI sea hawk gtx980ti's are essentially silent. Kyle or one of his reviewers crammed one into a corsair mini chassis.
 
silent-circuit said:
Sadly, there's no way to get a dedicated GPU in there, since the heatsink completely covers the PCIe slot, and that case is too small to relocate a card with a ribbon cable. Too bad, as I love the idea otherwise.
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This case here Fractal Design Define R5 is seriously super quiet. Before I put the Zotac 970 inside it I couldn't tell if the PC was on or off without opening the side panel and seeing if the CPU fan was spinning. Since I run it headless as a NAS build with 7 HDDs in it. :D

Even with the Zotac running 100% fan speed it's still really quiet. Figure out a quite GPU solution and I doubt you'll have any issues with using this case as a space heater in your bedroom at night. ;)
 
thanks skillz, just the info I need to convince the Mrs. This might be a happy Christmas for me :D
 
I think Skillz suggestion is bang on, I've done some builds with Fractal cases and can confirm they are *incredibly* quiet to the point of being inaudible.

A little note (not to take away from Skillz's suggestion), I am in a similar boat but in my case the wife doesn't want to see -or- hear them, so I've been relegated to using super small form factor OEM boxes that I can hide under a table in the backroom (see my related post here with pics)

...If you happen to go that route be warned the Dell offerings are way too noisy without turning down the clock speed and then forcing the fan to a lower RPM. The Lenovo minis are nice and quiet though (though I have to disable turbo boost as at the turbo clocks the fans get fast enough to make some noise, still way quieter fans than the Dells though)..
 
Ok thanks, I'll check that out. Yeah I don't think the Mrs is interested in seeing them either :)
 
Back when I cared about silent PC's, I did a lot of reading at Silent PC Review. These guys did a ton of reviews of case fans, power supplies, etc. with the whole idea of getting the quietest PC possible.

The main thing you want to know is that a large fan running slowly can move a lot more air than a little 40mm fan running fast (and loud). Mini ITX is great for size but not necessarily for cooling. If I were building something today, I'd want big, slow 140mm or larger fans in my silent build. Also, study the difference between CFM and static pressure. When you buy fans for water cooling trying to pull/push air over a radiator, you want higher static pressure to force the air through the rad. For general cooling, you don't need as much static pressure.
 
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