Cooling my system and keeping it quiet - thoughts please!

[drive27]

Hey guys,

get the feeling that I am pretty low intensity usage on my new pc (AMD Ryzen on MSI motherboard), no gaming, just work, but wanting to make the machine as quiet as possible.

In the BIOS I have it set so that the CPU fan is at about 984 rpm and the fans effectively don't switch on until it maybe hits 55c/131f. Is that ok? Here are my settings

Also, my CPU fan is PWM, but my system fans are DC - DC seems to be quieter when I change that setting on CPU - any major difference?

Final question is about further settings for making things quieter - I have a Nvidia GTX1050 2GB GPU - any way I can play around and make that a little quieter?

thanks for any help

 

[Darkbreeze]

What brand of GPU card do you have? Nvidia is not the brand, UNLESS you have a founders edition OEM card that is made and sold by Nvidia. Otherwise it will be ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.

What brand and model is your CPU cooler? Are you using the wraith cooler? If so, that's a 92mm cooler and it's not likely to ever be quieter under high demand conditions unless you lower the fan curve to the point where the cooling is unsafe.

I'd recommend getting an aftermarket cooler. Either a 120mm or preferably a 140mm cooler would allow superior cooling at much lower fan RPM levels. Something like the Cryorig H7 or even a Deepcool Gammaxx 400 would be a major improvement. The wraith coolers are good for a stock cooler, but not good in terms of "good coolers".

At 55°C you want your fans at about 50-60% RPM, minimum.

What are your full system specs including case model?

 

[drive27]

Thanks for your response. Also may be important to note that my system is running at about 38 c when idle

Specs are as follows:

- Gigabyte PCIe Wireless 802.11AC 1733Mbps Dual Band Wi-Fi / Bluetooth 5

- Contour 400W High Efficiency ATX PSU

- AMD Wraith CPU Cooler

- 1TB Seagate BarraCuda 7200RPM 3.5″ Hard Drive

- 240GB ADATA XPG SX8200 M.2 NVMe (3200MB/R, 1100MB/W) – 6x faster than SATA SSD

- 16GB DDR4 3000MHz ADATA XPG Flame Memory (2x8GB)

- NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 2GB GPU

- MSI B350M PRO-VDH Ryzen Motherboard

- AMD Ryzen 5 – 1600 3.2Ghz 6 Core CPU

- PT1203 mATX Black Chassis

 

[Darkbreeze]

Power supply must be EXTREMELY bad, as even VERY bad units generally have at least a few google results, yours has none. Replace it if you value your hardware. I'm going to assume it is in line with, or worse than, units made by companies like CIT, Circle, Rocketfish, Ultra, Zebronics, Sharkoon, Raidmax, Logisys and Apex(Supercase/Allied), all of which are BAD.

Like, destroy your motherboard and potentially catch on fire bad. And all of those units have at least some kind of visible presence in the market, even if it is a bad one. That contour, might even be worse. Or, you wrote the wrong name and it's simply a mistake. Perhaps you can post a picture of the label on the side of the unit or provide the model number as listed on there.

So, a couple of things if you want a truly quiet PC.


1. Replace the CPU cooler with a better model. A heatsink fan assembly with more surface area and a larger fan, will instantly make the build quieter.
Don't think that going with a liquid cooling solution will make it quieter, it won't. It will make it louder.

2. Replace your mechanical hard drive with a SATA SSD.

Your case model does not come up either. What brand is it? Are you sure that's the model number?

You don't list any fan models, so I'm assuming you just have what came with the case or possibly just some random, cheap fans. Replacing those with some high quality fans would make a big difference as well. Noctua, Corsair, BeQuiet, Thermalright and Blacknoise all make some great, and some still good but not really great, PC fans. A few other brands with some good models as well, although not ALL of them are going to be good models, are NZXT, Phanteks, Fractal design, Swiftec, Cougar, Scythe and Cryorig.

Personally, I only run Noctua. IMO they are the best, hands down, and also the quietest at any level of performance, while also having very high levels of performance when necessary but perhaps even more importantly, they are very high quality and tend to last a long time.

Let me know a bit more on your PSU and Case models, and we can talk specifics. It's pointless without knowing those two things.

 

[Karadjgne]

It's all about workload vrs wattage. The stock wraith cooler can handle upto @180w or so. The closer the workload comes to that maximum number, the harder the cooler has to work, faster the fan spins, more noise it creates. That's the fan curve, rpm vrs wattage. To combat that, you raise the ability of the cooler. Something like a Noctua NH-D15S or a 240/280mm aio has 250w+ capability. Since your cpu is not going to demand that kind of wattage, even under heavy cpu workloads like encoding or compiling or rendering, the fans will still be far down on the curve, so spin much slower, make far less noise.

My i7-3770K is sitting at 4.6GHz currently, on a 280mm aio. Even pushing gaming loads it only sees 55°C at most, the fans don't go beyond 600rpm, basically dead silent more than 1foot from the pc. At idle, the only way I got around my wife pushing the power button, was to make her look for the leds. It's that silent.

Overcool the cpu.
Good large case fans, as many as will effectively work.
Higher efficiency, better quality psu.
Ssd for as much as possible, hdd only for long term storage, used as little as possible.
Good quality case, or add sound baffling to volitile areas such as panel sides that are subject to sound vibration and/or harmonics.
Gpu far beyond the demands placed on it.

There are ways to make a pc silent that don't include punishing the owner by lack of performance, or punishing the equipment by short-changing power/thermal needs.