This article was published in the May 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here.
Low noise doesn't mean low joys
Length of Time: 2-4 Hours | Difficulty: Medium
The Mission
Over the last few months, in the creaking depths of the secret Maximum PC lair, we've been constructing compact PCs or just putting shiny new things together and seeing what they do. And that's usually pretty entertaining. But it occurred to us that it's been a good while since we tackled a quiet PC build. After all, as much as we like raw power, we don't want to hear that power all day long.
But that doesn't mean we need to sacrifice performance. If we create a whispery rig, we can still build it to growl and roar in its own way. And it's not as difficult as you might think. With the right case, CPU cooler, and video card, everything can fall into place. Luckily, the hardware components market is chock-full of interesting possibilities, one of which was so new that it hadn't even been reviewed as this issue went to press. We entered this undiscovered territory, and we think it was worth the journey. This build didn't turn out quite the way we expected, but a little ingenuity made it come together in the end.
Armed to the Teeth
The most important element of a quiet PC build is the case. You want to keep the racket down, and that means sound-absorbing panels. You can glue your own in, or you can buy cases with panels pre-installed. Last time, we used a Fractal Design Define R4, which is still a fine choice. But we needed something with more airflow (the R4 comes with only two fans). Enter the NZXT H440. We decided to go a step further and get the Razer edition, which is almost all black, save for a few neon-green details. It has three 120mm intake fans, a 140mm exhaust fan, and space for a large radiator up top. It fit the bill. The radiator belongs to the Corsair Hydro H110i GT. This has a 280mm rad, thick tubing, and some nice aesthetics.
The H110i will be cooling an Intel Core i7-5960X. Like we said, we're not holding back. This 8-core, 16-thread chip is a monster for things like video editing and virtual machines, and we can overclock it quite a bit with the H110i. This hefty CPU sits on an Asus X99 Pro motherboard, which is a premium, feature-packed job. Along for the ride is 32GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4, a 960GB OCZ Vector 180 SSD, a 6TB hard drive from HGST, an MSI R9 290X Lightning, and a Corsair AX1200i power supply. Ladies and gents, we do not mess around. Read on to see how this epic stack of gear comes together.
1. Power Behind the Throne
The power supply finds its cozy new home in a separate chamber at the bottom of the case, and it gets in there by sliding in gently through the back of the case, instead of coming in from the side as it usually would. To make that happen, you have to first remove this plate, which is held down by four thumbscrews. Then you slide your PSU in, put the plate back on, and screw the plate into the PSU.
If you're using a modular power supply, like we are for this month's build, you also need to hang back and attach your cables before you get going with sliding the PSU in. That's because the back of the PSU will be difficult to reach past this point. It's a bit of pain, but that's always going to be one of the drawbacks of a clean-looking case.
2. Going to Great Lengths
Interesting hurdles show up right away. We've put the mobo's I/O shield in, screwed the motherboard into the case, and installed our RAM sticks, when we notice the video card is longer than expected. Thankfully, we can remove a drive tray in the front to make room.
It's attached with two thumbscrews and slides right out. But connecting the power cables is tight, even when you use these flexible ones. That's partly because this card is also taller than usual. If it used the reference height, then regular rounded cables would probably be fine. Also note this card uses an extra 6-pin cable. Our 8-pin cables come with two detachable pins, so we took the cable with the bonus pins and tucked it out of the way. There's a side window, so we want it looking tidy.
3. Uno, Dos, Trays
There are two trays on top of the power supply compartment where we could have put our solid-state drive, but we like hiding it out of the way. You may have noticed by now that the H440 has no 5.25-inch drive bays. This cage has only 3.5-inch trays, which can also take 2.5-inch drives. After making room for the video card and the CPU cooler, we had three trays left. We took the two that were closest to each other and used them for the SSD and the HDD. That allowed us to use one SATA power cable (which also connected to the CPU cooler). The drive attaches with a set of small bundled screws.
4. Something Up Our Sleeve
Our fancy individually sleeved cables came in handy behind the motherboard, because there wasn't as much space back there as we would have liked. The sound-absorption panel takes up a few millimeters in an already-challenging space. Thankfully, there was plenty of room in front of the power supply to tuck things out of the way, and we'd removed two drive trays for some more space. Since the drive cage in the front of the case is hidden by a large metal plate, we were able to use that to our advantage and obscure most of the mess. We also made sure to install the 8-pin CPU power cable before installing the CPU cooler. Otherwise, the cooler's radiator and fans would have blocked our path. We also needed to whip out a Molex cable to power the hub that the case fans were connecting to. The fans themselves were hooked up to the hub at the factory, so that saved us some time and energy.
5. Joining the Fan Club
The H440 case can take up to two 140mm fans on top, and up to three 120mm fans. But because of the contour of the frame, you can't set the radiator right against the metal. It's too tight. You have to put the fans in between the case and the radiator, which can be pretty tricky if you haven't tried it before. Getting the screws to line up correctly with the holes in the fans and the rad is a time-consuming process.
We have the fans facing upward so that they will pull the heat rising off the rad and send it out the vent in the panel that will sit on top of the case. The fans also need to be oriented so that their cables come out at the same location. This makes cable management much cleaner once the fans are hooked up to the cooler. You just tug the cables gently back behind the motherboard until you run out of slack.
6. Two Can Play This Game
The H440 had room for pretty much everything we threw at it, but there wasn't space to add two more fans to the radiator. This is pretty normal for a mid-tower case. What we didn't expect is just how tight our fit would be. There's literally 1 to 2mm between the radiator and the mobo's rear I/O shroud. Because of this limitation, the radiator tubes had to be placed on the other end, and putting another set of fans on the cooler was out the window.
The side effect was that installing the CPU cooler with the Corsair logo right-side up was difficult to do in a way that looked natural. So we ended up with the logo upside-down. Not a big deal, and it has no impact on performance. We chalked it up to a learning experience. We've seen this case accommodate two extra radiator fans before—it's just not going to work with this particular motherboard.
Conquering the Quiet Life
As we're preparing this issue for the printers, OCZ informed us it was pushing back the release date of its Vector 180 SSD, due to unspecified technical problems brought to its attention by people it had sent these units to for review. It was too late for us to re-build, rebenchmark, and re-photograph, so you'll have to visualize your favorite SSD in there instead. The good news is that SSD selection has a negligible impact on our set of benchmarks.
Speaking of performance, we were impressed by how easily the Asus X99 Pro overclocked this CPU. An OC from 3GHz to 4GHz at 1.3 volts is nothing to sneeze at, but this board needed no tweaking beyond our initial set of adjustments, which was mostly just beefing up the power sent through the voltage regulators. Not many programs use 16 CPU threads, which is why this chip wrecked our zero-point machine's stock-clocked hexcore i7-3930K in some tests, but not in others. The 5960X got into the low 80s Celsius during our Premiere Pro bench, indicating there wasn't much wiggle room left. You'd probably need a custom water cooling loop to push performance much further.
But let's not forget why we built this system to begin with: quietude. Well, plugging the fan hub directly into the power supply will create some noise, and there's no fan speed controller. And the CPU cooler's fans are also right underneath the top panel, instead of the radiator getting sandwiched in between. So the Fractal case we mentioned earlier still has some better options for noise level, and more space behind the mobo for cable routing.
Still, the case's stock fans aren't loud, and the sound-absorbing panels do muffle some noise, though the window on the side panel has an acoustic cost as well. If low noise is really important to you, we'd recommend the Define R4, though it needs at least one more fan for good airflow. The MSI Lightning card, with its monster three-fan, triple-slot cooler, hardly rose above a mild drone throughout testing, yet it still punched above its weight in Batman: Arkham City. The 290X is a great GPU that performs within range of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, but for less money.
Overall, we enjoyed wrangling this build into shape, and we were gratified to get solid, stable overclocks without needing hours of experimenting and fine-tuning.
