Is it possible to have a quiet high end gaming PC?

I bought a barebones PC from a no name company about 5 years ago and the noise made it impossible to use the computer for anything besides gaming with the volume turned up high to block the noise.





I'm looking into getting a new PC this Christmas and want to get the new Phenom processor. One of the concerns I have is that almost every review I read of the high end gaming computers says that with the additional power comes additional heat and that they're very loud.





Would a water cooled system always be quieter than an air cooled one? How are you supposed to evaluate ahead of time how quiet a system is before you buy it?

Is it possible to have a quiet high end gaming PC?
You can make almost anything quiet if you really want to. But it is going to cost.








The noisy components are the fans. Hard drives and optical drives can be noisy, but mainly it is the fans.





Water cooling will get rid of the CPU fan, but the case fan and the power supply fan are still going to be there. There are a lot of people who swear by it, but the idea of mixing water and electronics is too high risk for my taste.





Read the specs, look for the dB ratings of the component/fan. The lower the better. If comparing two fans make sure that they are equivalent. what fan speed is the noise measurement at, how many cubic ft/min? The higher the speed the more air it will move and the cooler your PC will be. But the noisier it will be too.





Make sure that your cables do not block the airflow. Ribbon cables poorly orientated can be a big air dam. That makes the air harder to move an the temperature controlled fans will spin faster to push the air around, making more noise.





Cheap fans are noisy, quiet fans are expensive. But remember that expensive fans are not necessarily quiet.
Reply:most of the noise problems comes from the case it-self as is


supposed to block the noise from going out. but instead, some cases r poorly designed as they have noisy fans or simply don't do their major Job.





I advice u to get a case from on of these companies: Cooler Master, thermaltake, Antec, silver stone as they have extremly quite fans and acoustic design. (I already have an Antec P1 case, man it so quite eventhough I'm runny a quad CPU and two SLI


GF 8800GTS and 2 hard drives with 3x12cm fans)





by the way, if ur Power Supply is used to more than 70% of its capacity, it gonna be noisy until u will hear it 2 blocks away.





u still can install liquid cooling system, but I promise u it won't be cheape as the cheapest cost around US$150.
Reply:I don't know if you have an 80mm fan or maybe even 2 60 mm's -- those little things have to spin faster and can be pretty loud ---- I have a control nob on my 120mm so I can slow the fans down if I want -- u might want to look into that. Besides that, I don't really hear the CPU fan.





Oh yeah, and these new Video cards that are coming out can get super loud but I haven't had a problem with mine ---





AMD has cool and quiet technology and they're much faster for games ----- all depends what u use your PC for ------ if it's for games, choose AMD, if it's for multi-tasking, AMD, if it's for anything else, AMD 0------ haha
Reply:Newer PSUs and cases use 120mm fans that run slower and are quieter. You can water cool the cpu and gpu but bear in mind that some fans on water radiators are loud so you'd have to look for high quality radiators that use 120mm fans. Also realize that the cpu and gpu isn't the only thing that needs cooling so you'd have to have great air-flow thru the case to cool the motherboard too as a lot of boards bunch cans around the cpu to get cooled by the cpu fan which you wont have with water so you have to up the air flow thru the case. If you use a case with a 120mm case fan in back you can mount a 120 water radiator and fan inside the case. I use a 4 pot controller in a bay in front of case that controls my 2 front, side, 2 rear, and the massive 92mm tornado fan on my cpu that can crank the fans down to a tolerable level.
Reply:yeah you can though it costs.... good going some good stuff is available right now...
Reply:I don't have much experience with water cooling, but I can tell you that it is possible to have a high end PC that is quiet. There are a lot of steps that can be taken to quiet one down. You can buy fan silencers to quiet the fan vibration down. You can also buy foam to put inside the case to quiet it down. Check out www.mnpctech.com for some tips here and there on quietening one down.
Reply:Water cooling systems definite produce less sound than air cooled ones coz the fans produce a lotta noise


And it is definitely possible to have a quiet high end pc


mine isn't causing ne problems
Reply:get a zalman CNPS9500 AT its silent. http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view...





looks awesome too and you can get it with an led fan also