Custom built desktop pc - low power, quiet yet powerful

baby_frogmella

Thinking of finally upgrading my desktop pc (which sounds like its about to give birth after being switched on for 10 mins) so want to go down the custom built route. I want it to be low power, as quiet as possible yet reasonably powerful for general home use...it won't be used for gaming or watching TV so don't think I need a dedicated graphics card. These are the components i'm thinking of buying, would appreciate your feedback:

CASE
Antec P183 Advanced Super Mid Tower with acousting dampening

MOTHERBOARD
Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3, Intel H55, 1156, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), DDR3 1600/1800/2200, SATA 3Gb/s, mATX

CPU
Intel Core i3 530 2.93GHz - Dual Core with Hyper threading and
Integrated Graphics

CPU Cooler
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2

MEMORY
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600)

GRAPHICS CARD
None - Use Intel Onboard Graphics

PSU
330W Seasonic S12II-330 Bronze PSU, 82+% Eff', 20/24 pin, 120mm Fan

HARD DISK
1TB Western Digital WD10EARS Caviar Green, SATA 3Gb/s, 5400+rpm, 64MB Cache, 8ms

OPTICAL DRIVE 1
Pioneer DVR-S18LBK - DVDRW

OPTICAL DRIVE 2
Pioneer DVR-S18LBK - DVDRW

CARD READER/WRITER
Akasa AK-ICR-07S 3.5" Internal Multi Mem. Card Reader Incl. M2, Micro SD & USB port

SOUND CARD
Sound Card Not Required Use On Board Sound

WIRELESS ADAPTOR
Edimax 300Mbps 11n Wireless PCI Adapter

OPERATING SYSTEM
Win7 Home Premium

Cheers

Spank

To save some energy, look for a fanless CPU cooler

tomsolomon

That CPU cooler is not what I would call quiet.
If you want quiet, go with passive cooling as Spank suggested, or get a cooler with a 120mm fan.
120mm fan pushes more air, spins slower, much quieter.
As for the HDD's, is it realy worth the performance hit just to get your system power down a few watts.
It's not neccessary to have two optical drives, I would drop one in favour of a decent HDD....

banger9365

first off i would go to the next psu up from the 330watt ,say 400watts ,they only us what the system needs any way,
aand Caviar Green hdds are fine for storage ,thir a little slow for the operating system (5200rpm),get a Caviar Black for that and has tomsolomon says bin one dvdr,
and if you want it cool and quiet get a corsair H50 cooler

baby_frogmella

Thanks for your replies.

Should i buy this CPU cooler instead? I presume its compatible with the motherboard since its says LGA1156?

As for the hard disk disk, my main reason for choosing the WD Green Power was that they are extremely quiet. I already have one in my SKY HD box (consumer electronics version) and you can't hear it at all. Another reason for choosing the WD10EARS was that it uses 4KB sectors instead of the traditional 512 byte sectors and according to this article it creates better format efficiency and more reliable disks:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888/1

Or should i just forget the 4KB sector malarkey and go for the 1TB WD Black Caviar?

banger9365

forget the 4KB sector malarkey and go for the 1TB WD Black Caviar

JasX

I've been very impressed with a feature of bundled with my ASUS board called EPU6, basically it measures CPU load and turns the fans right down/puts compatible components into a powersaving mode, when i finally got round to turning it on my beast of a machine went from sounding like an air conditioning plant to virtually silent on fans alone and it even tracks the power saved.

Other manufacturers may do something equivilent but if going for an ASUS mobo with that feature would fit the bill quite nicely...

http://event.asus.com/mb/6engine/index.htm

and a little video of it in action hooked up to a power meter...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPZkdbjn9RQ

tomsolomon

If you want an ultra quiet, ultra low powered, super efficient HDD.
Why don't you go solid state????

weegie.geek

Spank wrote: »

To save some energy, look for a fanless CPU cooler

For all the energy a fan uses, this would be practically pointless. A passive cooler won't cool nearly as well as one with a fan either.

Snooze

tomsolomon wrote: »

If you want an ultra quiet, ultra low powered, super efficient HDD.
Why don't you go solid state????

If you need/want 1TB of storage then that gets real expensive real quick!

tomsolomon

Snooze wrote: »

If you need/want 1TB of storage then that gets real expensive real quick!

Nah..
You get a Small SSD drive in your PC then buy a 1Tb NAS box and stick it in the kitchen cuppboard out the way...
Now thats what I call quiet storage....;)