mwendig

Hey everyone,

I am designing my future project. Quiet, small, capable machine. My computer now is getting kinda slow, is huge and has lots of lights and sounds like a lawnmower. So i am looking to build a system in a cube style case. But I am still going to put some pretty high end graphics / sound in it and hopefully two harddrives of pretty good size. So i have a few questions.

Best option for keeping it quiet:
Watercooling or air cooling.

If i air cool with that small of a case will it run too hot??

any advice would be great! just remember small, quiet, capable
and i don't have as much money as bill gates.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!

killnine

Well, most of those cube cases are enormous, so thats probably out. You can get a really nice quiet system but it will probably cost you.

I would have to say, though you can have very capable air cooling, it usually is louder than most decent watercooling setups. The tradeoff is the its much easier to install air cooling than water. I would say that if you are not totally hurting to put your system together right now, take you time, pick out some quality water cooling components and start there. You can get EXCELLENT cooling from a dual 120mm radiator and you can get virtually all your other parts used on forums (just be careful and deal only with trustworthy individuals).

I had a sweet air cooling setup. I had an arctic silencer and heavily modded airflow. It worked pretty well but was a little loud. I went to water cooling and ill probably never go back to air. Thats just me,though.

It looks like your new, so welcome to the forum and be sure to fill out your system profile in your control panel. hope to see you around some more!

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DrDeville

An interesting question, actually--for me anyway.

Unfortunately "small", "quiet", and "compact" are fairly incompatible. The way to silence is slow-moving air, and the way to slow moving air is lots of metal-to-air radiation surface--either a big heatsink in an air-cooled system, or a big radiator in a water-cooled setup. Also, bigger fans (120mm) are quieter than smaller fans (80mm) at the same airflow. Another tradeoff of silence for compactness.

So small cases mean low radiation area, high-airflow to compensate, smaller fans, and a lot more noise. Some of those shuttle-style cases sound like dustbusters.

If you want silence you could go with a bigger case, external radiator, or maybe a laptop cpu, which puts off less heat.

So, to paraphrase Dirty Harry, you just gotta ask yourself--what's important to me--silence, performance, or compactness? You can only have two.

I hope this helps, and am glad to discuss it further. If you decide to go with a larger case or an external rad, you can have silence and performance for relatively cheap.

Welcome, and good luck!

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"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." - W. Somerset Maugham

Goldenpi

The smallest cases are only able to take one harddrive. You could make one external on a USB2 or Firewire interface, but thats not ideal for performance (Its not bandwidth, its the driver stack.) Or you can get an external drive with a SATA interface - the PCI brackets for that are a little hard to obtain still.

Sound, even high end sound, produces little heat.

Perhaps you should make a very large but near-silent system and tuck it out the way behind the desk? Use an external adaptor for the optical drive, and you will very rarely need to do anything with the computer itsself.