Unless you get shafted by the pump that an air cooler just never introduces into the mix, especially with it being rigidly mounted with no dampening. In the past I've run a standalone pump at 5V and that went okay, but I get the feeling that if you're shooting for silence but you're not including your graphics card in the loop, a stonking huge tower cooler will serve you better. You might even run it passively, although maybe not so much with the TDP of an X99 CPU. That said, I doubt either option will be offensive enough to be heard over the Fractal's case fans*, and with most components these days not being tremendously loud (some even running at 0RPM when idle,) plus with how different the perception of noise is from person to person, I suspect OP will probably do fine either way as long as he's not trying to chase record breaking decibels. *I'm really not terribly impressed with Fractal's included fans. I don't know if the Define S comes with one of those little fan controllers, but if not, I'd want to make sure I have a way to turn them down, or just bin them and put something else in.
Was that those rainbow coloured ones we saw on the forum the other day? You'll have a set ordered from me.
Did you buy full sets of cables made up? if so that's a pretty poor show tbh. Why make something incompatible with every one else's combs? This. This is good. We need a resident cable supplier here
Alright, time for another possibly dumb question... As part of my Desk as a Peripheral concept I'm going to have the optical drive, a rack for two plug-in SATA drives (3.5" and 2.5") and a memory card reader built into the desk. I'm going to run eSATA data cables for the drives and long USB cables for the card reader, but I would rather not run power up from the case. Instead, I was thinking about some sort of solid state external power supply that runs just the drives and card reader. From what I've read, both optical and spinning rust can draw up to 30 watts at startup, and I have no idea what the card reader can draw. A worst case scenario therefore would be everything trying to spin up at once and drawing up to 100 watts. Is there such a thing as an off the shelf 100-150 watt external PSU? If not, what do you think would be the best way to build one?
I won't be buying any more of them tbh. They're not even cheap. I can get cheap cables for far less (Shakmods via Ebay) or if I want paracord ('cause Shak hates it) I would use Tothewire again. I'd never heard of him before but he made me up some banging para cables with custom 14 pin holders. I was also tremendously impressed with his service as I was a PITA. I wanted them 14 hole but I wanted four combs and not two. He charged me the flat rate for two standalone cables with no extra charge whatsoever and had them out the door within 48 hours. Some people advised me to use James (forgot his ID now) but after two emails sent I never got a reply. I figured maybe his email address was down so I shot him a PM on Oc3D which he also ignored.
I've been designing some stealth comes on solidworks that will fit the cables perfectly, no more loose combs! This is just a mock up to see how the gap between the two 8 pins is, it'll be perfected before it's finalised . Will be doing 24, 8, 6, 4, 6+6, 8+8 & 6+8 etc, basically combs to fit everything.