My guide to silent, high-performance air cooling

[Illah]

I know I'm not the only one into silent PC's what with the audio fetish, however I'm also into overclocking. For a long time 'silence' and 'overclocking' were two words that didn't go together too well. Well I got all four wisdom teeth out so I'm sitting around writing up on my new upgrade, and it had turned into quite a guide by the time I was done! Probably old news to the vets, but for newbies or anyone who's interested in silent cooling I hope it can help you out:

Illah's Guide to Silent, High-Performance Cooling

--Illah

 

[cire]

everyone should go on water

pure silence with a c/w of less than .15

 

[fewtch]

Cool (literally), thanks... gives me a bit of extra guidance, as I'm planning on putting together a new PC soon myself. No OC plans though, probably will run everything stock with the possible exception of RAM timings.

 

[cire]

don't even bother with ram timings. you'll only see a tangible difference with synthetic benchmarks

 

[fjf]

Tons of info on this matter in: http://www.silentpcreview.com/

 

[li0n]

pshhh
overclocking is sooooooooo athlon/duron days

 

[Bones13]

I use many of your features, and think that you have done a great job.

My main recommendation to others is to be careful of motherboards with loud fans on their northbridge chips. Mine is right under the video card, and I can not mount a quiet one, or passive one due to vertical size limitations.

My motherboard mounts upside down in my case, and I was unable to use of the newer heat pipe systems.

I will look into using the other SLI plug in though for my video card (I have the same zalman cooler on my card) and see if I can get some space over my motherboard chip to use a quieter cooler, as that is about the only sound my box makes now. (and it is irritating)