Hi everyone! I've decided to build a liquid-cooled that's quieter than an equivalent air-cooled PC and with some fine tuning. Powerful yet silent. I have no idea how to choose the right water cooler. Can someone offer any expertise?
You will never get perfectly silent unless you do something wacky like use a large truck radiator with no fans or bury 100 yards of tube through your back yard permafrost. -Both of those were tried and reported to work. The most reasonable solution is to use PWM fans and pump, with a lot more radiator than you need. Once you get that fairly quiet you will find the power supply is noisy. Fortunately there are some passive cooled models around. Sound absorption material can help.
The way I've done it is overkill but it's an extremely quiet system. 3 x 35X PWM pumps mounted on sound absorbing foam running at around 1500rpm, anything over 2300rpm is noticeable with your ear close to the case. There were actually 4 x 35X pumps but one failed a couple of years ago and I can't be bothered to take it out of the loop. 3 x 480 rads with 12 x Noiseblocker PL2s running around 500rpm. Again I struggle to hear anything even with my ear next to the case. 2 x 35X pumps for redundancy would have been sufficient. I have a Seasonic P1000 PSU with hybrid fan control and I haven't heard the fan switch on in the last 5 or 6 years. It's a quiet fan anyway and it's never run at full speed in 9 years. Case fans are also Noiseblocker PL2s running around 500rpm. The next most annoying noise was the hard drives which were firstly replaced with a mix of SSDs and 2.5" drives and are now a 250GB SSD with 3 x 2TB SSDs. The problem with the sound absorption materials I tried was that once fitted it was there for ever. They should have sued the same glue on the Space Shuttle tiles, they'd have never come off.
