Water or air cooling research, please give me your experience!

[Kafke]

Guys,

I've been researching cooling for a few months now and I get different answers from different people and it drives me nuts.
Right now I have a Noctua D15 (the huge beast) on my i7 6700k at 4,4 Ghz. During the rendering or editing in Premiere or After Effects, say, when the load is 100%, I still hear noise coming from the cooling system. Things have improved drasticly when I ditched the DL9 for the D15, but I'm still not happy. The noise makes me nervous, it is not relaxed to work this way, so I'm thinking of water cooling it.

My questions:
- Is a water cooling like the NXZT X62 much quieter than an air cooled system (like my Noctua D15)?
- is water cooling just as 'nervous' as an air cooled system? Does it make as much noise right away on full load, or does the temperature and cooling rise slower and will it give me a quieter system overall?

 

[arehep]

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...esearch-please-give-me-your-experience.222051



I would stay with the Nocua D15 with a max level of 24,6 db
The NZXT is 38db
http://noctua.at/en/nh-d15/specification
https://www.nzxt.com/products/kraken-x62
I´m using Noctua D14 and it is by far the best CPU cooler I ever owned
Under full load I don´t think that any cooler is non audible
but also consider that the NZXT must be mounted on top or front of your case closer to you ears.
Noctua in the middle

 

[zipb]

Are you sure it's the D15 you're hearing and not the GPU? Also, the hot air coming off your D15 and 980 has to be blown out by your case fans. Are these as silent as the D15? You have proper airflow front to back/up/down or vice versa? Is your case silent? I have a dampened Fractal Design R5.
Silence is important for me because I will sometimes record quiet acoustic instruments right next to my hack. When I looked into silent cooling, the D15 was one of the quietest solutions.
The only time I hear a bit of noise is when importing lots of raw pictures in Lightroom(this really taxes the CPU)

 

[arehep]

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...esearch-please-give-me-your-experience.222051



My case it the littlebrother Fractal Design R4
I´ve build a hack to one of my friends who´s a professional musician similar to my Rocket#2
He´s using Pro Tools
He solved the problem by drilling holes in the wall and placed the hack in the room next to his studio.
No serius recording ingeneer have the comp. in the same room where they do the recording.
I don´t think you can build a powerfull system quiet enough for that
Maybe except for death metal

 

[Kafke]

Are you sure it's the D15 you're hearing and not the GPU? Also, the hot air coming off your D15 and 980 has to be blown out by your case fans. Are these as silent as the D15? You have proper airflow front to back/up/down or vice versa? Is your case silent? I have a dampened Fractal Design R5.
Silence is important for me because I will sometimes record quiet acoustic instruments right next to my hack. When I looked into silent cooling, the D15 was one of the quietest solutions.
The only time I hear a bit of noise is when importing lots of raw pictures in Lightroom(this really taxes the CPU)

Thanks for the reply man! Decided to do another good test if it might be the case fans too. GPU is totally quiet while rendering.
On the intel gadget it is clearly visible that when CPU had full load the fan noise is clearly audible. Thanks so far.

 

[arehep]

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...esearch-please-give-me-your-experience.222051


Kafke
In your Bios isn´t there an option to use a silent profile for casefans attached to your MB ?

 

[Kafke]

Thanks for the reply man! Decided to do another good test if it might be the case fans too. GPU is totally quiet while rendering.
On the intel gadget it is clearly visible that when CPU had full load the fan noise is clearly audible. Thanks so far.

Case fans of the Corsair 570X are not PWM as I had expected. The whole lighting thing was a mistake, but they also they really add some noise! Replacing them with Noctua's should do the trick. I'm also trying some BIOS settings.

 

[Kafke]

Kafke
In your Bios isn´t there an option to use a silent profile for casefans attached to your MB ?

I just checked this and yes! But the fans are just not as good as I'd like. Might replace them in a while. Thanks!

 

[arehep]

I just checked this and yes! But the fans are just not as good as I'd like. Might replace them in a while. Thanks!

Ok good luck
And if new fans dosn´t solve the problem i can recommend the very quite Fractal Design R5 as zipb is using.

Never those a case with windows on the side panels or even worse all the way arround like yours
if you want silence.
Remember Noctua`s case fans are not cheap so maybe try to sell your case
(Gamers would love it) and buy the Fractal case that won't let you down.
In Denmark where I live it´s aprox. 85 usd cheaper than your case.