 I live it out like I'll never die I lose my head in the starry skies Can't change it down, I feel so alive Back down, only one Today's PC build guide theme is one that I've wanted to do for quiet some time. And while we've all heard the arguments against silent computing, lol, it doesn't matter if your PC is loud, just put on your headphones. To me, that's about like saying, it doesn't matter if your armpits stink, just wear a nose plug. No, I'm not gonna wear protective ear coverings to use my computer, that's ridiculous. Especially given that modern hardware, if configured correctly, can achieve near silence without compromising performance. And that is what we're gonna show you today. Welcome to the near silent gaming PC build guide. Start by preparing your workspace, a safe, uncluttered, static free workstation is a must. I use a mod mat and an anti-static ankle strap. Now the only tool we really need for assembly is a multi-bit screwdriver, but a magnetic parts tray, a pair of side cutters, and a pair of needle nose pliers are all nice to have. Now before you actually start putting stuff into the case, I recommend verifying that the system posts or powers on and outputs to the display. You can use your motherboard box as a free non-conductive test bench. Our CPU choice was all about pushing the limits of silent computing, and the Core i7-5960X 8-core Extreme Edition processor from Intel is the best of the best of any enthusiast grade chip available today. You could substitute it for a 5820K or a 5930K hex core processor if you don't need the extra two cores, but I wanted to validate this build concept with the hungriest version of Haswell E that we could get, and this is it. Hold your CPU by the edges and identify the corner with the gold triangle. Align that with the corner of the motherboard socket that has a triangle as well. Lift up the first retention arm on this side, then the second one on the other side. Lift up the socket cover, place the CPU in with no force, lower the cover, and fasten both retention arms in reverse order. While water coolers can be quiet, and I normally use them for these guides, for a computer to be truly silent, it needs to eliminate as many moving parts as possible, and all high-performance CPU water coolers will have at least three of them, a motor in the pump and two more motors, one in each fan. So I went instead with a massive Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 and removed its cooling fans outright for a total of zero moving parts. Screw the four posts that look like this into the four little sockets around the CPU. Apply a thicker than normal line of thermal compound to the processor, there's a big die underneath there, then put the heatsink down with the brand logo sideways for slightly better cooling or right side up if you've got a touch of the OCD like I do. Using the included wrench or a pair of needle-nose pliers, tighten down these four nuts onto each of the posts until it is secure. Our RAM choice was just about made for us. This CPU supports Quad Channel DDR4, so we knew we'd need a kit of that, and thanks to clearance challenges with the fins of our heatsinks, we scrapped the original plan of using 32 gigs of Dominator Platinum 2666 MHz RAM and went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance LPX memory at 2400 MHz. Pull back the tabs on the four gray RAM slots, then starting with the innermost on each side, position each dim so the notch in the bottom lines up with the notch in the socket, then press firmly on both ends until the tabs snap back into place on their own. There are actually a few great choices out there when it comes to quiet cases, but I went with the Be Quiet Silent Base 800 for a couple of reasons. One, when I was planning this video, it was definitely the newest and most exciting silent case on the market with included noise dampening material, high quality included fans, and a solid internal layout. And two, even though now it has some competition for that other title, it's definitely the only one available in this awesome black and orange color scheme that feels very Linus Tech Tipsy. So put both side panels in the box where they'll be safe, and use your magnetic tray if you have one to keep all the included screws in one place. Take off the rear 120 millimeter fan and replace it with a 1500 RPM Silent Wings 2 blowing into the case with the fan lead coming out this corner. Use the anti-vibration corner pieces with the push pins and washers to secure that in place. Using the same fan mounting system, install another Silent Wings 2 fan in the top, this time the 1000 RPM 140 millimeter variety. Simply pull the top bezel off using the three tabs on either side, I recommend starting at the back and moving forward, then stab that fan and pop the bezel back into place. We won't have any hard drives in our system due to noise concerns, so for better airflow, we're going to remove all the three and a half inch drive cages by pulling out the thumb screws on the right and left and sliding them out. Also watch out for those screws that go into those long standoffs at the back. Keep these cages somewhere safe though, so you'll have the option to put one or both back in the future. Now arguably we could have chosen any motherboard in ASUS's X99 lineup for this build, since they're all passively cooled and therefore silent, but I went with the WS board because the quality and efficiency of the components is second to none, which is very important if you plan from the start to not cool your system properly. Most motherboards, even if they don't have any fans of their own, will be designed with the expectation that there will be some airflow provided by the system fans or the CPU fan, but we won't really have any unless the going gets tough. Oh, and yeah, did I also mention that it looks amazing? Even when there's no side panel window, I'm a bit of a sucker for beautiful motherboards, so there you go. Press firmly on the four corners of the I.O. shield until they snap into place. If you want to save yourself some trouble for later, grab the 24-pin and 8-pin motherboard connectors from your power supply box, plug them into your board like so, then feed them through these holes. Place the board down on the integrated standoffs and install the screws that look like this into the eight positions around the perimeter of the board. The middle one can be left blank, this is just a post to hold the board in place while you secure it. While you have easy access to the board, plug in the front power and reset switches, as well as the power and drive activity LEDs. Follow up with the block style connectors for USB 2, front audio, and USB 3.0, then finally connect all of your fans with inline low noise adapters. We used Noctua ones, but anything will work. Our top fan will use the connector at the very top right, our rear fan will use the CPU connector, and our front fans will use the one that's middle of the board on the right hand edge and the one that's at the bottom right. I struggled a lot with the power supply choice for this rig, a lot. The main options are always on active cooling, low door temperature activated fan cooling with a silent mode, and fully passive. As it is, I settled on a fully passive Seasonic 520 FL Squared because it's fully modular, allowing us to keep unnecessary wires out of the way of what little airflow we have in our system, and because a single GTX 980 and 5960X is well within its comfort zone. If you decided to add a second graphics card to your build though, you may want to consider going with a hybrid fan model, so you keep that silence when the system is idling, and the fan only kicks in when the power supply is working hard. Slide the power supply in, grill side up for better cooling, and attach it to the case using four of these screws. You already ran the 8-pin and 24-pin power connectors, so just plug those into the modular interface on the power supply. If you have SATA drives in your system, you can attach the wire harnesses for those now, and then finally, plug in the PCI Express power connectors that we need for the graphics card and route them through this cable management hole. Our SSD choice was one that, honestly, I made to make our PC more Mac Pro-like. I mean, SATA drives are still fine, and you can mount them to the back of the motherboard tray, but we figured, hey, we're dead quiet already, we might as well have lightning fast PCI Express-based storage while we're at it with no clutter due to SATA data or power cables. This is the Mushkin Scorpion, a PCI Express 2.0 2.0x expansion card that boasts an onboard RAID controller, two San Force-driven 480-gig SSDs, 100,000 4K random write IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds just shy of 1 gigabyte per second. Oh, and all of this comes in at a price that's less than a dollar per gig. It's also brain-dead simple to install. Find a PCI Express slot that you don't need for the graphics card later, take the thumb screw and slot cover off, align the card carefully with the PCIe slot below. Remember, guys, a 1x card can go in a 1x, 4x, 8x, or 16x slot. Press firmly down on the card and put the thumb screw back in. The GPU for this build guide, since it's more of a how-to-buy-a-silent-yet-extremely-powerful PC rather than being strictly about gaming type of video, is kind of up to you. But I chose a single GTX 980 Strix from ASUS because it features a fanless mode when running 2D applications at the desktop, and the fan only kicks in when the graphics card is working hard, just like the case fans that are plugged into the motherboard. With an alternative graphics card, you can still build a very quiet computer, but if the goal is near-silence at idle, a hybrid fanless card like the Strix series is the way to go. To install our card, simply remove the two thumb screws holding in these two PCIe covers. We're using this 16x slot to give our CPU and video card a little bit of breathing room and the power supply, too. Then align the card carefully with the slot, push down firmly, put the two thumb screws back in, and plug in the PCI Express 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors that we cable managed earlier, which leads nicely into cable management and finishing touches. At the back, you can see we've run so few cables for this system that it's almost laughable how little there is to clean up back here. Just use the zip ties included with the case and the power supply to route the front fan connectors up so we can't see them. Bundle together the motherboard connectors behind the tray. Don't worry about making them perfect. There's tons of room for cable management back here in this case. And then our cherry on top is a Silverstone magnetic fan filter to put over that rear fan that we're using as an intake. Maintaining positive air pressure with only filtered intakes will keep our system nice and clean for a long time with minimal maintenance required. Now, sometimes we include monitor and peripheral recommendations, but because there isn't really a straight-up intended purpose for this machine, all I can really do is point you in the direction of some solid premium stuff we've checked out recently. LG's 34UC97 curved 34-inch monitor is great for productivity, and ASUS' ROG Swift G-SYNC monitor is great for gaming. And to match the black and orange theme, some RGB peripherals like a K70 RGB keyboard and Saber Optical RGB mouse would do just nicely. Our Scorpion PCIe SSD comes pre-configured in RAID 0, so you can skip the menu to change its settings that you would access with CTRL-M during boot, and just press Delete or F2 to get into the UEFI BIOS for the X79EWS motherboard. Once we're in here, everything we need for this system is in easy mode. Fan RPM monitoring, boot priority configuration, and XMP configuration, which we need to change to Profile 1 to ensure our RAM is running at the right speed, is all we're pretty much going to do. We won't be doing any overclocking on this system because of all the cooling fans that we've removed for silence. To install your Windows operating system, create a bootable USB drive and then reboot the system while mashing F8 immediately to get to the boot device selection menu, where you'll pick your USB drive. Once the setup process has begun, it's basically a matter of clicking Next until you land on the Windows desktop. Once there, drivers can be found on the ASUS website, NVIDIA website, and Intel website for everything in this system. Now, while I don't normally install ASUS's AI Suite software utility, you're going to want to download that and install at least FanExpert for the next step. And now it's time to take our system from very quiet to near silent. We'll be using ASUS's FanExpert software to create custom fan curves, and we'll be using their Auto Fan Stop feature to turn all the system fans except the CPU fan completely off. When our CPU temperature is low enough, and then we'll ramp the other fan speeds up slowly once the system is under load and starts to heat up. The other piece of software we need is MSI Afterburner. Our video card's fans already turn off when the system is idling, but we can fine tune things quite a bit with a custom fan curve in here. I'm also going to tweak the temperature limit to 85 degrees so the card won't thermal throttle as aggressively as if we left it at the default setting. Now, the exact positions for all the dials in these applications that are right for you will depend on the ambient temperature and your personal comfort zone with respect to temperatures. But with some fiddling and load testing with the software that you typically use, this config can be set up to be not only silent at idle, but very, very quiet even under gaming load. But of course, don't take our word for it. We're on our way to the SPCR testing lab to validate how quiet our system really is. So it's field trip time. We're here with Silent Mike from Silent PC Review and we're inside his homemade sound chamber. But first, Mike, tell us about Silent PC Review. How long you've been doing this? What's the objective? Well, Silent PC Review is 12 years old now and we've been focused entirely on the noise aspects of computers for all this time. So what we do is we're looking for the quietest gear and showing people how to make the quietest computers. All right. But you need some pretty specialized equipment in order to even validate how quiet something is. Tell me about this room that you built. Well, this is what it's all about is this room is all about super low noise. It was built in about a month using pretty much homemade tools and it's got 600 pounds of what is called blue fill, which is a fiberglass substitute and that lines the entire interior of the room. And that gives us a total sound level of 11 decibels a weighted most times during the day. If you wait till about two o'clock in the morning, it might get down to about nine point five or ten. But nobody wants to be up that late doing this stuff. So obviously it's not enough just to build a special room. You have to have some kind of methodology for testing this stuff, right? Like, how do you do it? Well, first of all, you need to measure at the standard distance, which is one meter. And you need a microphone that's quiet enough so that it's quieter than the equipment you're trying to measure. Right. Our microphone is seven decibels a weighted. That's about as quiet as you can get in a microphone. It's connected up to a sound card and a computer on the outside, which is able to take the signal without adding any more noise of its own and then give me a calibrated decibel reading. And it's a weighted. A weighted means that it's tailored to the to match the sound of your human hearing. All right, Mike, give it to me straight. How did I do? Well, at idle, it's pretty damn good. All right. Fourteen decibels at idle is about as good as you can get. We have one machine that does better, but, you know, it's not one of these. Right. My dad is that it's not a 400 watt beast. Right. But at 24, it's a little higher than what we would expect in a, you know, at maximum load that's a little higher than our standard, which is 20 decibels for silent. But our general definition is that if it's under 27 decibels, it's pretty quiet. So there you go. So, guys, we didn't quite get the SPCR seal of approval. But if you guys want to learn more, where do they where do they find out how to build a 20 decibel or less gaming machine review dot com? That's where you come to. All right. So there you go, guys. Thank you so much for watching our our ultimate. I guess I have to call it ultimate very quiet PC build guide now that I've got the real skinny on how well we did. Guys, I guess you can enjoy some glam of our finished system here. And as always, huge thank you to the entire crew involved. Big thank you to Intel for sponsoring this PC build guide. And we'll see you guys again next time. Make sure you're subscribed and all that good stuff.