EPTComputer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 147
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skyR
Canada13817 Posts
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AmericanNightmare
United States98 Posts
On December 11 2013 05:06 Myrmidon wrote: Upgrading parts or just cooling? What do you currently have? (CPU, graphics card(s), power supply, case, etc.) How much are you willing to spend? Are you talking about custom loops or not? (Custom loops cost hundreds of dollars and require maintenance and time to set up.) Depending on the configuration, using watercooling won't necessarily even lower noise levels. This is especially true for the easy-to-set-up closed-loop cooler sets. In any case, this isn't boding well because a radiator obviously doesn't make sound. The fans and pumps (okay, and coolant moving around...) make noise. How's a block of metal make noise? Also, things like fan and pump speed are tunable parameters. The noise increases as you increase the speeds and cooling effectiveness. Before you jump into some resources, let's rethink this and take it through from the top. If your goal is to reduce noise levels, we need to know what it is you're dealing with and how much time and money you can spend on the issue. Is it possible for the radiator in a liquid cooled computer to effectively do the job itself without a fan? Seems to me like it would get pretty hot. Let me apologize for not spelling everything out exactly. Radiator PLUS fan. I've looked around and haven't seen a single kit sold with a radiator with no fan, but if you could provide me information on it that would be lovely since you say a radiator doesn't make any noise. + Show Spoiler + On December 11 2013 05:13 Ropid wrote: @AmericanNightmare: There's http://www.silentpcreview.com/ and their forums, but that site is not about liquid cooling. You might have some misconceptions about water cooling and air cooling. You can get things to run exceptionally quiet with air cooling. Water cooling will add the sound of a pump. If you are worried about your room heating up and being uncomfortable, water cooling will not help you at all with that. The amount of heat being put into the room by the PC stays the same. All costs you have with very quiet air cooling, buying a lot of expensive fans and stuff, you will also have to buy those for your quiet water cooling endeavors. There's aftermarket air coolers for the graphics card if it is too loud. To muffle the HDD's 7200RPM noise, you can put some sort of dampening material around it. Professional solutions for that, I know of "Scythe Quiet Drive" and "Grow Up Japan Smart Drive", both hard to find or very expensive. After you've gotten your PC's parts to run quiet, you can add a dampened PC case on top of that and you'll end up with a system that a lot of people would call "silent". Like I said before, I don't want to change the enviroment of the room. The computer I have now will make your balls drip sweat. The aftermarket helped slightly with heat/noise but not where I want it. I've been around multiple LC comps and they were all almost silent. I also noticed they kept the computers at constant temps. I plan on running 3D, having two or three monitors, and adding a third GTX 680s (unless I can buy a couple 780 Ti). I have $3k to drop into it reasonably. As I said before, this is the room me and my wife spend lots of downtime in. I don't want her to have anything to complain about. My mind is set on LC because from the extremely small time I've been around them I've been amazed. Ropid, Incognito, and iTzSnypah.. Thanks for the links. I'll begin to look through them. | ||
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Ropid
Germany3557 Posts
On December 11 2013 07:45 nosliw wrote: SSD and HDD both uses SATA 6gb connection right? so if my mobo only has 1 sata 6gb connection, that means I can only get 1 internal storage correct? SATA3 = 6 gigabit/sec SATA2 = 3 gigabit/sec First of all, those SATA2 and SATA3 connections, you can plug any device into any of those. You can use a drive that can do SATA3 in a SATA2 port of the board, and you can do the reverse. Everything is compatible with each other and the physical shape of the connectors is the same and can plug into anything SATA. I can't believe your board only has a single SATA3 header. You probably have two SATA3 headers and four SATA2 headers on the board. All current SSD and HDD drives you buy will be able to use SATA3. You should try to plug SSDs into the two SATA3 headers of the board to get the most out of them, and you can plug HDDs (because they are rather slow) into the SATA2 ports of the board. | ||
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iTzSnypah
United States1738 Posts
On December 11 2013 07:57 AmericanNightmare wrote: Like I said before, I don't want to change the enviroment of the room. The computer I have now will make your balls drip sweat. The aftermarket helped slightly with heat/noise but not where I want it. I've been around multiple LC comps and they were all almost silent. I also noticed they kept the computers at constant temps. Temperature =/= Heat. Your computer will output the same amount of heat regardless of cooling method. | ||
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Ropid
Germany3557 Posts
There was this: http://content.hwigroup.net/images/products/xl/002114/zalman_reserator_1_plus.jpg But I don't think anything like this exists anymore. Very slow running fans can be very quiet. If you look around for water cooling stuff, you'll see there's differently designed radiators. What you want is something that has large gaps between the fins to make the fan's job easier. If you use a radiator like that, you can run your fans on a very slow speed. For performance, there's radiators with fins densely arranged. Those radiators are intended to get a lot out of fast running fans. Those are the radiators you should avoid. The thickness of the radiator is also something to look out for. I'd guess what you want is something thick. There's pretty ridiculously sized air coolers for the CPU that can keep it cool just by using the case fans, but there's nothing like that for powerful graphics cards (unless I missed this). If you need water cooling anyways for the GPUs, I guess you can also buy a CPU water block and some more tubing.  Still... take a good look at aftermarket GPU air coolers like what you can get from Prolimatech. Their GPU coolers can take 2x140mm fans. I fear air cooling is too thick for using in a SLI configuration, but if the coolers can work for you, they are a lot more simple to use. You'll just have to buy the most quiet fans you can find or something, then strap something monstrous like the passive Thermalright HR-22 onto the CPU, and your PC will be very quiet. | ||
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Myrmidon
United States9452 Posts
On December 11 2013 08:00 Ropid wrote: I can't believe your board only has a single SATA3 header. B65 and B75 only offer a single SATA3 through the chipset, and he indeed has a low-end B75 board with no 3rd-party chip for additional SATA3. On December 11 2013 07:57 AmericanNightmare wrote: + Show Spoiler + On December 11 2013 05:06 Myrmidon wrote: Upgrading parts or just cooling? What do you currently have? (CPU, graphics card(s), power supply, case, etc.) How much are you willing to spend? Are you talking about custom loops or not? (Custom loops cost hundreds of dollars and require maintenance and time to set up.) Depending on the configuration, using watercooling won't necessarily even lower noise levels. This is especially true for the easy-to-set-up closed-loop cooler sets. In any case, this isn't boding well because a radiator obviously doesn't make sound. The fans and pumps (okay, and coolant moving around...) make noise. How's a block of metal make noise? Also, things like fan and pump speed are tunable parameters. The noise increases as you increase the speeds and cooling effectiveness. Before you jump into some resources, let's rethink this and take it through from the top. If your goal is to reduce noise levels, we need to know what it is you're dealing with and how much time and money you can spend on the issue. Is it possible for the radiator in a liquid cooled computer to effectively do the job itself without a fan? Seems to me like it would get pretty hot. Let me apologize for not spelling everything out exactly. Radiator PLUS fan. I've looked around and haven't seen a single kit sold with a radiator with no fan, but if you could provide me information on it that would be lovely since you say a radiator doesn't make any noise. As noted above, heat output into the room is the same regardless of cooling method. Also, there are plenty of radiators sold without fans. The idea is that you are supplying the fans yourself with a separate purchase. And in this situation, the noise of the system would depend on which fans you're buying, at which speeds you're running them, the layout of the case and fans with respect to radiators, and noise from other components. In other words, not so much on which radiator you get. A thicker or superior radiator with respect to surface area or materials or tubing or whatnot may result in lower temperatures, but the fan noise depends on the fans... e.g. http://www.swiftech.com/mcr-x20.aspx ; http://www.ekwb.com/products/radiators/ However, all the so-called closed-loop prefilled coolers that Corsair, Antec, Thermaltake, Cooler Master, etc. sell do come with fans. But you can always use your own fans. e.g. http://www.corsair.com/us/cpu-cooling-kits/hydro-series-water-cooling-cpu-cooler.html If you had low enough power consumption and enough radiator space, you could run without fans, but that's kind of pointless because you'd still need the pump running. Or... okay, there are some LC systems that don't actually use pumps, but those are rare and challenged. Since you have multiple graphics cards, water cooling could make more sense. On single-GPU systems, often you can just use NH-D14 or similar on the CPU, Accelero Xtreme III or similar on the GPU, some good fans running at fined-tuned speeds, sound-damping case, accommodations for hard drive noise, etc., and get lower noise levels than you can with liquid cooling setups. edit: on second thought, with the right motherboard and two cards, you could get some fat aftermarket air coolers and have that work. Again, there's too much guessing on our parts. Why not list your system specs. With $3k I'd think about getting two GTX 780s or 780 Tis (or R9 290 / 290X, which should be fine if using aftermarket cooling) rather than a third GTX 680. | ||
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AmericanNightmare
United States98 Posts
On December 11 2013 08:02 iTzSnypah wrote: Temperature =/= Heat. Your computer will output the same amount of heat regardless of cooling method. If I play a game that isn't graphically intense my nuts are fine. Play a game that uses that 2nd card and my thighs are drenched. Before I put other fans in my computer would shut down because of heat. I contantly hear the fans turning on or changing speeds. The computers I've been around that were liquid cooled didn't do this. Whether I was playing solitaire or battlefield, those computers didn't change a bit. That constant temp is what I want. I'd rather it put out a constant number than flutuate. Thanks again for the link. EDIT: Myrmidon, Do you want the current specs of my computer? If so no problem, I'll PM them to you when I get home because I'm not into my computer enough yet to remember what it's got correctly. I honestly don't think I'm keeping much other than the graphics cards. My processor is like a 2 core or something not much better. I know my power supply is barely enough for what I have. Yeah.. give me a couple hour to get out of work and get home and I'll send the specs. | ||
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Myrmidon
United States9452 Posts
Liquid cooling won't make your nuts fine because heat output won't change with liquid cooling (ahem, appreciably... okay, if you run the same workloads on the same parts but reduce operating temperatures, power consumption comes down some but not a whole lot). But that depends on the temperatures, not liquid vs. non-liquid. Regardless of cooling method and temperatures, you'll have pretty much the same power consumption and thus waste heat dumped somewhere. Now, if you had some strong, noisy pumps, you could set up some oldschool external radiator config and have the radiators set up far away from your nuts. But how about just moving where the computer case is? Liquid cooling will also not keep components at a constant temperature. They'll go up under load regardless, just maybe not as high depending on cooling ability. Yeah, I mean current specs of computer, thanks. | ||
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Craton
United States17278 Posts
Yeah, you can cool your parts a bit better to push your OC a little more, and yeah, it looks cooler, but it's just so much time/money/effort for so little gain. Btw, for a very high end dual card setup with iirc 3x140 and 1x140 (I don't remember if 120s or 140s tbh), I was looking at $600-700. Waterblocks are crazy expensive -- about $100 a piece and only work on one model of card. The more generic blocks work on more models, but don't necessarily cover all areas of the card / will work with future models (YMMV). Then you've got the price of all your fittings, your tubing, your pump, your reservoir, your radiators (which are also very expensive). Once you actually have a WC setup all you really replace from build to build are the water blocks and the tubing (which is relatively cheap) -- the rads and fittings are reusable if you maintain them, so that cuts future upgrades down to maybe $100-200. Anyway, I'd say just go for air. Instead of spending all that money on watercooling, buy a portable AC unit for the room (best decision I made when I was still living at home during summertime). | ||
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nosliw
United States2716 Posts
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Myrmidon
United States9452 Posts
btw, no-maintenance lower-performing WC setup for dual cards: 2x this (there used to be homebrew versions) and 2x this (or similar; e-tailer pricing is more like $110 for something similar) in a case with two 280mm radiator spots, say on front and top. Slow the pump and fans down, and I think it should still work. On December 11 2013 09:21 nosliw wrote: Ya I have a B75 board with 1 sata6 and 2 sata3. It looks like I'll be saving up for a average SSD and just use my existing external backup drives for extra capacity. Can I install software on external drive? Yes, but why don't you just put the drive inside the case and use SATA2 (3 Gbps)? You can remove the casing and put it in like another drive. You just need a SATA data cable. | ||
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nosliw
United States2716 Posts
On December 11 2013 09:21 nosliw wrote: Ya I have a B75 board with 1 sata6 and 2 sata3. It looks like I'll be saving up for a average SSD and just use my existing external backup drives for extra capacity. Can I install software on external drive? Yes, but why don't you just put the drive inside the case and use SATA2 (3 Gbps)? You can remove the casing and put it in like another drive. You just need a SATA data cable. Wait, you mean I can turn my external drive into an internal drive? Never thought of that! | ||
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AmericanNightmare
United States98 Posts
Processor : AMD Phenom II X4 840 Motherboard : MSI 970A-G46 (I think. It says it on the board, but mine doesn't look like the one on newegg.) RAM: I honestly have no idea. Diagnostic only tells me I have 8k MB free. Graphics card: Two GTX 680s, but I think one is 4GB and the other is 2.. I'm not sure, but I know one is better. Power supply: Thermaltake 650w Storage: I don't know. What's the best way to find this out? Heatsink: Rocketfish What is your monitor's native resolution? 1920x1080 60Hz ViewSonic. Why do you want to upgrade? What do you want to achieve with the upgrade? Because I'm spending much more time on my computer. I want to achieve a liquid cooled rig I am happy with. I admit I'll also need to upgrade my understanding of the machine, but I'm willing. What is your budget? $3k What country will you be buying your parts in? USA | ||
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iTzSnypah
United States1738 Posts
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IdiotSavant
United States88 Posts
On December 11 2013 12:07 AmericanNightmare wrote: What is your current build? Processor : AMD Phenom II X4 840 Motherboard : MSI 970A-G46 (I think. It says it on the board, but mine doesn't look like the one on newegg.) RAM: I honestly have no idea. Diagnostic only tells me I have 8k MB free. Graphics card: Two GTX 680s, but I think one is 4GB and the other is 2.. I'm not sure, but I know one is better. Power supply: Thermaltake 650w Storage: I don't know. What's the best way to find this out? Heatsink: Rocketfish What is your monitor's native resolution? 1920x1080 60Hz ViewSonic. Why do you want to upgrade? What do you want to achieve with the upgrade? Because I'm spending much more time on my computer. I want to achieve a liquid cooled rig I am happy with. I admit I'll also need to upgrade my understanding of the machine, but I'm willing. What is your budget? $3k What country will you be buying your parts in? USA 1 way to find out the info is just go to Control panel and look at systems. it'll bring up a window with the info. can't think of a super easy way to find out the mobo if you don't have the box lying around. SO I guess opening your case and having a look around would do it. you can also check storage by opening My computer and seeing the amount you have. it won't tell you which HDD/SSD you have though...if brand matters also why do you want liquid cooling? | ||
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BadWithNames
United States441 Posts
Tl;dr: Would a couple of you guys mind throwing some dream rigs up. Price to performance welcome but not ultimate consideration. | ||
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Incognoto
France10239 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i5-4670k-4670-4570-4430_7.html#sect0 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/06/12/intel-core-i5-4670k-haswell-cpu-review/6 Honestly if your budget is really $3k, you could probably build a new computer from scratch with noise in mind, instead of investing into water cooling. For example, get an i5 4670k, GA-Z87X-D3H (should allow you to keep your 680s). I think that that set up will dissipate less heat than your current rig. With that get a high end air cooler. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6830/cpu-air-cooler-roundup-six-coolers-from-noctua-silverstone-and-cooler-master/5 ^I'm not saying get one of those heatsinks, it's really just to compare a few different ones. I think Noctua's stuff is probably your best bet when it comes to low noise levels. Also throw everything into a case that goes from silence, I'm thinking something like the Fractal Design R4: http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-series/define-r4-black-pearl-window All of that should get you a quiet(er) system with good performance, it's probably a better deal to go with this than to go try to set up a custom, expensive water loop. I think water cooling is more for running high overclocks on both your CPU and GPU, not sure if it's actually that silent since you still have fans for the radiators (+ pump apparently). It's cooler than air and that's more relevant to an enthuisast getting every last Hz out of his system than it is to someone looking for something cool and quiet. Edit: Eh, if you want a dream PC then at least go with 780 Ti. I think they broke a world record recently, though that was on nitrogen cooling I think. LOL. Still, get one of those if you can. ^^ | ||
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wptlzkwjd
Canada1240 Posts
On December 11 2013 15:19 BadWithNames wrote: So a friend of mine has come into a great deal of money to the point he wants to build a rig you see in magazines. Hes asking me for help and so far Ive pointed him to the intel 4690x, ASRock extreme 11 board, paired witb 4 gtx 690s. Hes looking to build a 10k rig and Ive been out of the hardware circuit since my I5-750 build years ago and I want to make sure he gets something without hidden bottlenecks and as much "future proofing" as possible, which he knows isnt 100% possible. Were thinking solid state RAID, water cool or possible machine oil build as well as hes gonna OC the hell out of all of it. Tl;dr: Would a couple of you guys mind throwing some dream rigs up. Price to performance welcome but not ultimate consideration. Here's a computer called the Dream Machine. http://secure.us.ncix.com/ncixpc/ncixpc.cfm?uuid=ED7F679B-5431-4BBC-88CA404FB0232B72-5494938 $1200 i7 4960X CPU $450 Asus Rampage Motherboard 2X GTX 780s although you can probably change it to 4X 780Ti I wouldn't buy GPUs like GTX 690 or GTX Titans as they are $300 more expensive than 780Ti and have worse performance in gaming. 690s and Titans are pretty much over-priced and outdated at this point. | ||
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Incognoto
France10239 Posts
Mah if I had a lot of money I would get a normal i7 4770k, maybe x2 GTX 780 Ti and throw a custom water loop on that. Money after that should be used to get good monitors and perhaps peripherals. 16 Gb of RAM max. One, maybe two SSDs and a big HDD. A nice case and PSU to go with that. Overclock that set up nicely, do you really need anything more than that? It should be a great rig that will last for years. | ||
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IMKR
United States378 Posts
I got all my parts except for the GPU and OS. i got this question answered + Show Spoiler + On December 07 2013 17:38 IMKR wrote: I have all my parts coming by next week, except the GPU. after i come back from winter break, i plan on putting in the gpu, (assuming i dont get a gpu in time b4 i head back home for break) so i want to build my pc to make sure everything else is working. if i make my PC w/o the GPU, what steps differ? (other than the obv not puting in GPU) and later on, when i add in the GPU, how would i do that? but, the problem is with the OS. i was ganna get a free copy of windows 7 from my school, but my schools contract ended so they are renegotiating the contract with Microsoft. meaning, i have to wait until the contract is back up, so it could be couple weeks. (maybe next semester) so my question is, can i build my pc w/o the OS? (i know i cant run it or anythign) but i just want to put it together and try booting up to make sure my parts are all working. is this still okay? and if it is, do i just shut off the pc after i turn it on to make sure its working? | ||
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