How quiet is quiet?

[emiahn]

Hi, everyone,

Im buying a new system
Here are the components im looking at

Antec p183
Corsair HX 850 W 80+
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UDR3
i7 950 3,06 ghz
2x gtx 460 1 gb sli
Corsair 8gb (4x2048) 1600MHz xms3

If i decide to run this system on aircooling, ill probably buy a Noctua NH-D14 cooler for the cpu, go with the cyclone versions of the 460s, as well as replacing the cases stockfans with four noctua nf-s12b and either run speedfan or put money on a fan controller.

I am looking for a powerful, yet silent build (or close to). I think I can control most of the components with fans, but the gpus apparently sound like a beast similar to a gtx 480 during load.

Is this right? Can anything be done?

[GZ]

If you want a silent build you will need to taylor everything to quiet.

Your case needs to be free flowing of air to keep case temperatures down.

Any fans need to be low-rpm/high airflow.

There are a few "passive" heatsinks that do a fair job cooling, but the internal case temps must be kept down, and any fan induced airflow must work with them...

Your GPU could also benefit from an aftermarket cooling solution to drop the volume and increase the cooling. The problem with this is you will lose expansion slots.

I can throw together a bunch of suggestions, but... The product lines have been updated since I last researched them... I will start looking into it.

[Tyree]

1 GPU would certainly be quieter than two and you save money, power, generate less heat (other fans don't work as hard making them quieter) and you give up a very small percentage of performance.

[GZ]

Tyree is absolutely correct. I missed that little tidbit of information when I first read the thread.