Feronix
New member
In today's Buyer's Guide I'm going to give advice about a silent PC. There are multiple configurations possible, with CPUs from all different performance- and price ranges, and the choice of a dedicated GPU. Ultimately, it comes down to a few core components that tend to be the noisy ones in traditional computers.
This computer will run you anywhere between £450 for a regular desktop-type of set up that will be blazing fast, and a full on £900 workstation. You can obviously build computers with the same specifications for a lot cheaper, although this will be 100% quiet with no moving components at all.
Because there are no moving components such as fans or mechanical hard drives, the computer should, in theory be 100% silent. It may however occur that one of your components has coil whine and you'll hear a high-pitched whine coming from the system. Coil whine counts as a 'broken' component and you should be able to RMA it for this reason. None of the items in this listing are known to have frequent coil whine issues.
What would you need a computer like this for, and why would you spend more money on quietness when the same performance can be achieved for less money? Well, there are a few reasons, such as wanting to use the PC for audio recordings in a home studio or wanting to have your PC on day and night in your bedroom.
Also, for a living room PC you don't want to hear constant buzzing so a silent system is nice to have. If you're looking for an HTPC however, take a look at the smaller and still 100% silent HTPC Buyer's Guide.
Let's get started then.
First off, we need a case with roomy internals and lots of airflow, even if there won't be any. Airflow optimized cases contain a lot of mesh and therefore allow the air to move around freely, even when there are no fans to push it around. For this system, you won't want a quiet case, as these are usually more closed off and contain sound isolating materials to keep the noise from the components inside. In our case (no pun intended) however, there will be no noisy components, so we want all the airflow we can get.
A case that provides us with these features is the Corsair Carbide Air 540. The PSU goes into a separate compartment, so it will not heat up the other components as warm air rises and the PSU is usually located in the bottom of the case. Other than that there is a massive amount mesh on the front and top and the back panel is very open. The case's width also helps when we want to install a big CPU cooler, which we do. To top it all off there's a nice big window to show off your quiet PC, even if it's not colour co-ordinated.
Alternatives:
- Fractal Design Arc Midi R2
If you want a slightly more standard looking case and lay-out (or maybe you have space constrictions), the Arc Midi R2 is a very solid, and compact mid tower. The only thing you might want to do when you get this is remove the dust filters from the mesh to allow for better air pass-through.
- Cooler Master Lab Test
This is more of a test bench than a case, but this does mean that it is completely open! This might become a problem with dust, and you'll definitely not want to keep it in an area where you might toss things across the room or spill your drink, but it might make for a nice conversation starter when people see your open computer that's dead quiet too.
----------------------
Next up we need something to power the system. There are plenty of units out there nowadays with a zero RPM feature, such as the Corsair RM series. If you have a more traditional case such as the Arc Midi R2, this might be a nice system saver even, as the fan will spin up when the unit gets too warm, and will probably draw some air from the GPU area as well.
I have however chosen to go fully quiet, with a completely passively cooled PSU. At £100 for a 400 Watt unit these things are far from cheap, but the Seasonic SS-400FL2 has Platinum efficiency, is fully modular and most important of all, has no moving parts. A very solid quality unit from Seasonic.
Alternative:
- Corsair RM450
This unit is still fully modular and has an 80+ Gold rating but it is £20 cheaper than the Seasonic unit. It also has a fan with Zero RPM mode, so it won't kick in until it's absolutely necessary.
----------------------
For the CPU there are a lot of different choices and I'm not going to tell you what to do. It is recommended to stick to Intel in this case, as they tend to have much lower TDP/Performance. The cooler is plenty for an FM2+ APU though, but if you're buying one of those, you probably don't want to spend all that extra money on a quiet system when you could also be getting a lot more performance.
For this Buyer's Guide I have chosen for the Intel Core i7 4790s, just to show how high-end you can go. It's a Hyperthreaded quad core at 3.2GHz, with turbo-boost up to 4GHz. It is based off the Haswell Refresh architecture, has HD4600 graphics on board in case you don't want or need a graphics card and has a TDP of 65 Watts, nicely within the limits of our CPU cooler.
Alternatives:
- Pentium G3258
This anniversary edition Pentium will offer plenty horsepower for a lot of people, even in gaming it will stand its ground. This is also the only one of the chips that you can have some fun with overclocking it, and it will still stay within the limits of the CPU cooler.
- Core i3 4160
The i3 is probably the go-to chip for a mid-range home system. It offers two Hyperthreaded cores and has Intel HD4400 graphics on-board. Plenty for most people.
- Core i5 4690s
This is the first true quad core chip in the list of alternatives. If you want gaming, or do enjoy slightly heavier tasks such as PhotoShop, this will be a good CPU for you. For a gaming rig you should really consider going for a 'quiet' system rather than a 'silent' one though, as the GPU offerings are very minimal.
----------------------
The CPU cooler is one of the main considerations of this build. It has no fans, so needs to have quite an open design. Yet it still needs to provide enough cooling so it would have to be really big. This means we need a roomy case, low-profile RAM and also keep an eye on the TDP of the processor that we pick.
For this purpose, there is only really one go-to company and that is Nofan, previously known as Nofen. Their CR-80EH is a very good cooler for us, costing £36 pounds, or half the money of their other CPU cooler. It is a bit smaller than the CR-95C but still supports processors with a TDP up to 80 Watt and also fits in a LOT more cases.
Alternative:
- Nofan CR-95C
This cooler will cost twice as much, as is also compatible with a lot less case/motherboard combinations. It will however cool better if you feel you really need it. Also, if you for instance already have an 84 Watt TDP CPU and want to turn your existing rig quiet, this cooler is probably the better choice.
----------------------
As for the motherboard you can really pick most things. With a Gigabyte motherboard you can probably turn it into a nice silent Hackintosh project, which is nice if you do intend to use the system for audio recording with all the software available for OS X.
The case also supports up to ATX sized motherboard, so again it really is up to you. I have chosen to go with the MSI H97 PC-Mate which is a solid mid-range motherboard with some nice features for really attractive pricing. As you cannot overclock most CPUs anyway, and you really shouldn't want to with passive cooling, it is okay to pick up a board with the H97 or B85 chipsets, for example.
The main things that make this motherboard attractive for this build is the fact that it has both front and rear USB3, supports all the video outs in case you want to use an on-board graphics chip and has a nice PCI slot layout. Another thing that I did make sure it had is a semi-beefy heatsink on the power delivery. As motherboards generally rely on airflow in the case to cool themselves some cheaper motherboards don't even have heatsinks. We have no airflow at all though, so a nice heatsink like on this board might help us with system stability.
-Alternatives:
You can really pick whatever motherboard you want to be honest, just make sure it's got a heatsink on the VRMs and the CPU socket isn't too close to the PCI slots. For instance with many ITX boards, the PCI-E slot would become unusable in combination with the big CPU cooler.
----------------------
One of the last core components that we need to make the system run is RAM. As with the motherboard you are free to pick whatever kit, at whatever speeds you want. Just keep in mind that RAM too relies on case airflow to cool itself which there isn't, but due to the big CPU cooler you also cannot buy RAM with tall heatspreaders, it has to be low-profile.
I have decided to aim for mid-range and pick up a kit of 2x4GB Corsair Vengeace LP 1600MHz RAM. It comes in the colours black, red, blue, green and white and I still stand by the fact that for day-to-day usage and gaming rigs, 8GB of RAM at 1600MHz is still the sweet spot.
----------------------
Next to the CPU cooler, there is generally one other component that tends to make a lot of noise, which are mechanical hard drives. Yet most of us still keep a few in our system as they are so much cheaper than SSDs and generally fast enough for most tasks like streaming movies and gaming.
To achieve the goal of 100% silence we have to scrap them. As SSDs are expensive, we will only get 500GBs of storage on the £900 version of this rig and 250GB on the £450 version. Alternatively, you can get a NAS and hook it up in another room, so that the noise of that will not bother you. If you need high capacity storage in your rig, I suggest picking up a few WD Caviar Greens, but this will completely destroy the point of this guide.
Crucial is one of my personal favourite SSD brands on the market now as they offer performance and stability that is up there with the top-dogs, at very affordable prices that are down there with the budget segment. Their new BX100 line-up is one of their more budget friendly series, but still blazing fast. So for this rig, we're going with a Crucial BX100 500GB for only £150.
Alternatives:
Again, you can basically pick up any SSD of your choice as all SSDs are based on flash-storage and will therefore be absolutely quiet. Do keep in mind that they are expensive and you will need to stick to SSDs only so cheaper is probably better, but not always reliable.
----------------------
Finally, we have not chosen a graphics card yet. This is not necessary if you're okay with the on-board graphics on any of the suggested CPUs, but if you want to do some GPU rendering or light gaming, a small graphics card will be nice.
As it has to be passively cooled you cannot pick up a very high-end card. Luckily, for 1080p gaming a nice 750 Ti will do for pretty much any game, albeit on low settings for some recent triple A titles. The Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX Silent 2GB will serve this rig nicely - and quietly. As a bonus it supports CUDA and is built on the Maxwell architecture, making it very energy efficient and thus give it low heat-output. Lastly, Maxwell is also supported by OS X.
Alternative:
There are also a few graphics cards around at the moment with semi-passive designs like the Corsair PSU that we talked about earlier. An example is the Asus Strix series that is passively cooled in idle, but the fans will spin up under load. If you, for instance only want dead silence when the GPU is in idle (for instance sound recording) and then want a more powerful GPU like a GTX970 for gaming, this is definitely a better option.
----------------------
Total cost:
Between £450 and £900 depending on your configuration.
Additional components
TP-Link WDN-4800 WiFi card. While WiFi really isn't recommended for most uses, if you HAVE to use it, you might as well get a really good one. The WDN4800 is that card and will fit in any PCI-E 1x slot or greater.
Accessories
Focusrite Scarlett Solo
This USB audio interface costs around £80 and will provide you with a DAC and headphone amp, but also audio inputs for recording. There's an XLR jack with built-in Phantom Power and Scarlett pre-amp to plug in basically any microphone. There's also a 6.3mm instrument/line-in input so you can plug in a guitar or other instruments and use your PC as an amp or for recording.
Lastly, it has a large volume knob, 6.3mm headphone jack which you can either use to listen to sound from your PC, or as direct monitor for any of the input jacks.
Nexus SM-9000/ SM-5000
Nexus are a company that specialize in silent computing, and they've got some pretty awesome stuff. One of those things are their mice, with patented switches that don't click. Perfect for silent areas like home studios.
www.nexustek.us
Tips & Tricks
Install Windows from a USB
This is much faster than from any disc. You can find a guide here.
Start8
Start8 will add the regular old start button and -menu from Windows 7 back into Windows 8 and 8.1. You'll also be able to boot straight to the desktop, completely avoiding the entire Metro interface. Download here
Ninite.com
www.ninite.com lets you select all the software the (free) software that you like to install and download it as a single installer package. This way you'll only have to download and install one file, rather than many seperate ones.
SSD maintenance
Please have a look at our thread on SSD maintenance by member Wraithguard:
http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=67884
This computer will run you anywhere between £450 for a regular desktop-type of set up that will be blazing fast, and a full on £900 workstation. You can obviously build computers with the same specifications for a lot cheaper, although this will be 100% quiet with no moving components at all.
Because there are no moving components such as fans or mechanical hard drives, the computer should, in theory be 100% silent. It may however occur that one of your components has coil whine and you'll hear a high-pitched whine coming from the system. Coil whine counts as a 'broken' component and you should be able to RMA it for this reason. None of the items in this listing are known to have frequent coil whine issues.
What would you need a computer like this for, and why would you spend more money on quietness when the same performance can be achieved for less money? Well, there are a few reasons, such as wanting to use the PC for audio recordings in a home studio or wanting to have your PC on day and night in your bedroom.
Also, for a living room PC you don't want to hear constant buzzing so a silent system is nice to have. If you're looking for an HTPC however, take a look at the smaller and still 100% silent HTPC Buyer's Guide.
Let's get started then.
First off, we need a case with roomy internals and lots of airflow, even if there won't be any. Airflow optimized cases contain a lot of mesh and therefore allow the air to move around freely, even when there are no fans to push it around. For this system, you won't want a quiet case, as these are usually more closed off and contain sound isolating materials to keep the noise from the components inside. In our case (no pun intended) however, there will be no noisy components, so we want all the airflow we can get.
A case that provides us with these features is the Corsair Carbide Air 540. The PSU goes into a separate compartment, so it will not heat up the other components as warm air rises and the PSU is usually located in the bottom of the case. Other than that there is a massive amount mesh on the front and top and the back panel is very open. The case's width also helps when we want to install a big CPU cooler, which we do. To top it all off there's a nice big window to show off your quiet PC, even if it's not colour co-ordinated.
Alternatives:
- Fractal Design Arc Midi R2
If you want a slightly more standard looking case and lay-out (or maybe you have space constrictions), the Arc Midi R2 is a very solid, and compact mid tower. The only thing you might want to do when you get this is remove the dust filters from the mesh to allow for better air pass-through.
- Cooler Master Lab Test
This is more of a test bench than a case, but this does mean that it is completely open! This might become a problem with dust, and you'll definitely not want to keep it in an area where you might toss things across the room or spill your drink, but it might make for a nice conversation starter when people see your open computer that's dead quiet too.
----------------------
Next up we need something to power the system. There are plenty of units out there nowadays with a zero RPM feature, such as the Corsair RM series. If you have a more traditional case such as the Arc Midi R2, this might be a nice system saver even, as the fan will spin up when the unit gets too warm, and will probably draw some air from the GPU area as well.
I have however chosen to go fully quiet, with a completely passively cooled PSU. At £100 for a 400 Watt unit these things are far from cheap, but the Seasonic SS-400FL2 has Platinum efficiency, is fully modular and most important of all, has no moving parts. A very solid quality unit from Seasonic.
Alternative:
- Corsair RM450
This unit is still fully modular and has an 80+ Gold rating but it is £20 cheaper than the Seasonic unit. It also has a fan with Zero RPM mode, so it won't kick in until it's absolutely necessary.
----------------------
For the CPU there are a lot of different choices and I'm not going to tell you what to do. It is recommended to stick to Intel in this case, as they tend to have much lower TDP/Performance. The cooler is plenty for an FM2+ APU though, but if you're buying one of those, you probably don't want to spend all that extra money on a quiet system when you could also be getting a lot more performance.
For this Buyer's Guide I have chosen for the Intel Core i7 4790s, just to show how high-end you can go. It's a Hyperthreaded quad core at 3.2GHz, with turbo-boost up to 4GHz. It is based off the Haswell Refresh architecture, has HD4600 graphics on board in case you don't want or need a graphics card and has a TDP of 65 Watts, nicely within the limits of our CPU cooler.
Alternatives:
- Pentium G3258
This anniversary edition Pentium will offer plenty horsepower for a lot of people, even in gaming it will stand its ground. This is also the only one of the chips that you can have some fun with overclocking it, and it will still stay within the limits of the CPU cooler.
- Core i3 4160
The i3 is probably the go-to chip for a mid-range home system. It offers two Hyperthreaded cores and has Intel HD4400 graphics on-board. Plenty for most people.
- Core i5 4690s
This is the first true quad core chip in the list of alternatives. If you want gaming, or do enjoy slightly heavier tasks such as PhotoShop, this will be a good CPU for you. For a gaming rig you should really consider going for a 'quiet' system rather than a 'silent' one though, as the GPU offerings are very minimal.
----------------------
The CPU cooler is one of the main considerations of this build. It has no fans, so needs to have quite an open design. Yet it still needs to provide enough cooling so it would have to be really big. This means we need a roomy case, low-profile RAM and also keep an eye on the TDP of the processor that we pick.
For this purpose, there is only really one go-to company and that is Nofan, previously known as Nofen. Their CR-80EH is a very good cooler for us, costing £36 pounds, or half the money of their other CPU cooler. It is a bit smaller than the CR-95C but still supports processors with a TDP up to 80 Watt and also fits in a LOT more cases.
Alternative:
- Nofan CR-95C
This cooler will cost twice as much, as is also compatible with a lot less case/motherboard combinations. It will however cool better if you feel you really need it. Also, if you for instance already have an 84 Watt TDP CPU and want to turn your existing rig quiet, this cooler is probably the better choice.
----------------------
As for the motherboard you can really pick most things. With a Gigabyte motherboard you can probably turn it into a nice silent Hackintosh project, which is nice if you do intend to use the system for audio recording with all the software available for OS X.
The case also supports up to ATX sized motherboard, so again it really is up to you. I have chosen to go with the MSI H97 PC-Mate which is a solid mid-range motherboard with some nice features for really attractive pricing. As you cannot overclock most CPUs anyway, and you really shouldn't want to with passive cooling, it is okay to pick up a board with the H97 or B85 chipsets, for example.
The main things that make this motherboard attractive for this build is the fact that it has both front and rear USB3, supports all the video outs in case you want to use an on-board graphics chip and has a nice PCI slot layout. Another thing that I did make sure it had is a semi-beefy heatsink on the power delivery. As motherboards generally rely on airflow in the case to cool themselves some cheaper motherboards don't even have heatsinks. We have no airflow at all though, so a nice heatsink like on this board might help us with system stability.
-Alternatives:
You can really pick whatever motherboard you want to be honest, just make sure it's got a heatsink on the VRMs and the CPU socket isn't too close to the PCI slots. For instance with many ITX boards, the PCI-E slot would become unusable in combination with the big CPU cooler.
----------------------
One of the last core components that we need to make the system run is RAM. As with the motherboard you are free to pick whatever kit, at whatever speeds you want. Just keep in mind that RAM too relies on case airflow to cool itself which there isn't, but due to the big CPU cooler you also cannot buy RAM with tall heatspreaders, it has to be low-profile.
I have decided to aim for mid-range and pick up a kit of 2x4GB Corsair Vengeace LP 1600MHz RAM. It comes in the colours black, red, blue, green and white and I still stand by the fact that for day-to-day usage and gaming rigs, 8GB of RAM at 1600MHz is still the sweet spot.
----------------------
Next to the CPU cooler, there is generally one other component that tends to make a lot of noise, which are mechanical hard drives. Yet most of us still keep a few in our system as they are so much cheaper than SSDs and generally fast enough for most tasks like streaming movies and gaming.
To achieve the goal of 100% silence we have to scrap them. As SSDs are expensive, we will only get 500GBs of storage on the £900 version of this rig and 250GB on the £450 version. Alternatively, you can get a NAS and hook it up in another room, so that the noise of that will not bother you. If you need high capacity storage in your rig, I suggest picking up a few WD Caviar Greens, but this will completely destroy the point of this guide.
Crucial is one of my personal favourite SSD brands on the market now as they offer performance and stability that is up there with the top-dogs, at very affordable prices that are down there with the budget segment. Their new BX100 line-up is one of their more budget friendly series, but still blazing fast. So for this rig, we're going with a Crucial BX100 500GB for only £150.
Alternatives:
Again, you can basically pick up any SSD of your choice as all SSDs are based on flash-storage and will therefore be absolutely quiet. Do keep in mind that they are expensive and you will need to stick to SSDs only so cheaper is probably better, but not always reliable.
----------------------
Finally, we have not chosen a graphics card yet. This is not necessary if you're okay with the on-board graphics on any of the suggested CPUs, but if you want to do some GPU rendering or light gaming, a small graphics card will be nice.
As it has to be passively cooled you cannot pick up a very high-end card. Luckily, for 1080p gaming a nice 750 Ti will do for pretty much any game, albeit on low settings for some recent triple A titles. The Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX Silent 2GB will serve this rig nicely - and quietly. As a bonus it supports CUDA and is built on the Maxwell architecture, making it very energy efficient and thus give it low heat-output. Lastly, Maxwell is also supported by OS X.
Alternative:
There are also a few graphics cards around at the moment with semi-passive designs like the Corsair PSU that we talked about earlier. An example is the Asus Strix series that is passively cooled in idle, but the fans will spin up under load. If you, for instance only want dead silence when the GPU is in idle (for instance sound recording) and then want a more powerful GPU like a GTX970 for gaming, this is definitely a better option.
----------------------
Total cost:
Between £450 and £900 depending on your configuration.
Additional components
TP-Link WDN-4800 WiFi card. While WiFi really isn't recommended for most uses, if you HAVE to use it, you might as well get a really good one. The WDN4800 is that card and will fit in any PCI-E 1x slot or greater.
Accessories
Focusrite Scarlett Solo
This USB audio interface costs around £80 and will provide you with a DAC and headphone amp, but also audio inputs for recording. There's an XLR jack with built-in Phantom Power and Scarlett pre-amp to plug in basically any microphone. There's also a 6.3mm instrument/line-in input so you can plug in a guitar or other instruments and use your PC as an amp or for recording.
Lastly, it has a large volume knob, 6.3mm headphone jack which you can either use to listen to sound from your PC, or as direct monitor for any of the input jacks.
Nexus SM-9000/ SM-5000
Nexus are a company that specialize in silent computing, and they've got some pretty awesome stuff. One of those things are their mice, with patented switches that don't click. Perfect for silent areas like home studios.
www.nexustek.us
Tips & Tricks
Install Windows from a USB
This is much faster than from any disc. You can find a guide here.
Start8
Start8 will add the regular old start button and -menu from Windows 7 back into Windows 8 and 8.1. You'll also be able to boot straight to the desktop, completely avoiding the entire Metro interface. Download here
Ninite.com
www.ninite.com lets you select all the software the (free) software that you like to install and download it as a single installer package. This way you'll only have to download and install one file, rather than many seperate ones.
SSD maintenance
Please have a look at our thread on SSD maintenance by member Wraithguard:
http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=67884
