Selecting parts for fast, quiet, first build

[phocion]

First Hackintosh. I'm asking the community for any input you guys might have. My overall goal is a quiet, fast machine suitable for work and gaming, dual booting Mac and Windows. My current Mac Pro has lasted over six years thanks to upgrades, and I'd like this new machine to have plenty of room for future growth as well. As it will be a dual boot, I'd love for every component to work pretty much the same in both OSes. The vast majority of the use will be in OS X, however.

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH
• CPU: Intel Core i7 3770K
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 or Corsair H80
• GPU: GeForce GTX 670
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
• SSDs: Crucial 256 GB m4 (x2)
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6 Gb/s
• Optical Drive: Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B DVD/RW
• Power Supply: Corsair Professional Series HX650 650W
• Case: Corsair 550D
• Monitor: Crossover 27Q LED-P
• Keyboard: Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750
• Mouse: Logitech MX Revolution (already owned)

Some notes about some of the components:

Motherboard: This seems to be *the* Thunderbolt Ivy Bridge board, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Has everything I need and is as easy as they come.

CPU: I will probably attempt to overclock this chip eventually. Not at first.

Cooler: I really have no idea on this one. I just want something that's quiet and will adequately cool the CPU. For the Noctua I'm a little concerned about size, and for the Corsair I'm a little concerned about noise. Anyone with experience?

GPU: Anyone have any recommendation on a brand for the 670? Also, I heard that some folks were having problems with OpenCL in Mountain Lion on cards with over 2000MB of RAM (which includes every 670, I believe). Is there a fix good to go for that?

SSDs: One boot drive for Mountain Lion, one boot drive eventually for Windows 8.

HDD: I already own this drive. I don't recommend it to others because the model tends to suffer from loud chirps associated with increased load cycles, and which Seagate refuses to properly address. (Disabling advanced power management -- which is unsupported -- eliminates the issue.)

Power Supply: 650W should give me some room to expand, plus it's modular.

 

[Kawrider]

Watching your build

I will be closely following, as this is pretty much the build I will try (I'm new here).

Tim

 

[phocion]

It looks like Alfa147x has a new build that sheds some light on a couple of my questions.

1) There is a fix for the 2GB of RAM OpenCL problem in Mountain Lion.
2) He is using the D14 cooler and was able to get a couple sticks of 8GB Corsair low-profile RAM in there. I might just follow suit on that to avoid any hassle.

Still open to all suggestions/comments.

 

[ggeorge]

First Hackintosh. I'm asking the community for any input you guys might have. My overall goal is a quiet, fast machine suitable for work and gaming, dual booting Mac and Windows. My current Mac Pro has lasted over six years thanks to upgrades, and I'd like this new machine to have plenty of room for future growth as well. As it will be a dual boot, I'd love for every component to work pretty much the same in both OSes. The vast majority of the use will be in OS X, however.

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH
• CPU: Intel Core i7 3770K
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 or Corsair H80
• GPU: GeForce GTX 670
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
• SSDs: Crucial 256 GB m4 (x2)
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6 Gb/s
• Optical Drive: Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B DVD/RW
• Power Supply: Corsair Professional Series HX650 650W
• Case: Corsair 550D
• Monitor: Crossover 27Q LED-P
• Keyboard: Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750
• Mouse: Logitech MX Revolution (already owned)

Some notes about some of the components:

Motherboard: This seems to be *the* Thunderbolt Ivy Bridge board, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Has everything I need and is as easy as they come.

CPU: I will probably attempt to overclock this chip eventually. Not at first.

Always get the system stable and running before over clocking.

Cooler: I really have no idea on this one. I just want something that's quiet and will adequately cool the CPU. For the Noctua I'm a little concerned about size, and for the Corsair I'm a little concerned about noise. Anyone with experience?

I would go with the Noctua. The H80 is definitely on the noisy side and does not cool as well as the Noctua. The thermaltake water 2.0 models are substantially quieter if you want water cooling. The Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E (the SB-E is the one you want to look for as it's the one designed for the 2011 Chips) is another possibility. You do need lower profile ram though.

Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E CPU Cooler Review - Final Thoughts :: TweakTown USA Edition

The Ram you've selected is definitely going to cause problems with any of the large dual tower coolers as the heat sinks are stupidly tall and quite frankly they really don't help things to any significant degree at any sort of sane clockspeeds.

GPU: Anyone have any recommendation on a brand for the 670? Also, I heard that some folks were having problems with OpenCL in Mountain Lion on cards with over 2000MB of RAM (which includes every 670, I believe). Is there a fix good to go for that?

The ASUS Direct CUII TOP is the best over all 670.There's a non-TOP version, that's about $10 cheaper, if you feel like doing the manual overclocking lottery. The Zotac AMPED! is the fastest, but noisier. The Gigabyte windforce OC, is the budget choice, not quite as quiet or quite as fast, but $20-$30 cheaper.

Power Supply: 650W should give me some room to expand, plus it's modular.

Modularity is over rated. You wind up needing almost all of them anyway.

 

[phocion]

Thanks, I will definitely consider your helpful suggestions. I will probably go with the ASUS Direct CUII TOP, the Noctua cooler, and low-profile RAM (2x8GB).

 

[GabeDamien]

Wow, this is extremely similar to my planned build, even the LP RAM.

One thing, I would strongly consider the Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E, as it sacrifices 2-3°C for SIGNIFICANTLY quieter noise levels, especially at load. It's still one of the very best coolers you can possibly use, so to me it's a complete no-brainer to choose it over the Noctua for noise levels alone.

Then again, my planned build is also heavily geared towards quiet power; I'm choosing a PSU that simply doesn't have any moving parts until it gets above a certain temp, I'm replacing my case fans, using the ASUS GTX 670 for its super-low noise, etc. etc. I hate sound (but not enough to sacrifice performance)!

 

[djlild7hina]

I'm going to be following this because this is pretty much exactly my build that I was planning to build. Just debating on whether to use ntfs or hfs+ for my storage drive to share between osx and windows.

 

[sonicseamus]

I'm going to be following this because this is pretty much exactly my build that I was planning to build. Just debating on whether to use ntfs or hfs+ for my storage drive to share between osx and windows.

Use exFAT! It's fully read/write compatible between Win/OSX and it doesn't have the file size limitations of FAT32.

 

[phocion]

One thing, I would strongly consider the Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E, as it sacrifices 2-3°C for SIGNIFICANTLY quieter noise levels, especially at load. It's still one of the very best coolers you can possibly use, so to me it's a complete no-brainer to choose it over the Noctua for noise levels alone.

Then again, my planned build is also heavily geared towards quiet power; I'm choosing a PSU that simply doesn't have any moving parts until it gets above a certain temp, I'm replacing my case fans, using the ASUS GTX 670 for its super-low noise, etc. etc. I hate sound (but not enough to sacrifice performance)!

I'll have to do some more reading on the coolers before I make my purchase. I scanned through some reviews and couldn't find a consensus, and I have very little knowledge on that issue. I don't necessarily need total silence, I just didn't want to take a big step back from my stealthy Mac Pro.

A big way to make the 550D case as quiet as possible is to keep as much of it closed up as possible so that all the sound-dampening materials can do their thing. Which may render things a little cozy in there. So the balancing act between temperature and noise is perhaps heightened by this choice of case. Worse than having a noisy machine is having a noisy machine when you paid for one of the quietest cases around!

Use exFAT! It's fully read/write compatible between Win/OSX and it doesn't have the file size limitations of FAT32.

There really is no perfect file system yet. I would go exFAT if it weren't for some of that file system's limitations. Particularly bothered by the lack of support for symbolic links (which crimps my style) and the susceptibility to corruption due to the lack of journaling and the single allocation table. Luckily I rarely need access to my large media in Windows, so HFS+ is kind of a no-brainer for me.

For the chap who needs read/write access from both operating systems, the best choices are exFAT or NTFS with the appropriate OS X third-party drivers. I wouldn't use exFAT to store anything I care about without a backup somewhere else, but really you should be backing up all your files no matter what the file system anyway. Unless you need one of the features it lacks, you should probably go with exFAT, back up your files, and be aware of its limitations.

 

[Coupz]

I personally would go for a EVGA 670, unmount the cooler and put a Arctic Cooling cooler on it. Have done it on my XFX 6870 (which supposed to be one of the quietest 6870's) and I can't even hear that thing under full load and almost 20°C cooler then stock
But the 670's should all be pretty quiet


If you need Windows only for gaming, you could go with a 128GB SSD and save some money