Building my new PC
My PC and my Macbook are the center of my digital-life (besides the mobile phone I use as my daily driver). I use my PC mainly for Android development, a bit of Unity development, gaming, photo-video editing and a lot of other smaller tasks. My previous PC managed to last 10 years after several minor upgrades to memory, adding SSD and GPU upgrades. However, it was time to move forward. From all the tasks mentioned, it may surprise you that building on Android Studio is one of the heaviest! It requires a lot of memory and a really fast CPU.
So, my goal was to create a powerful and future-proof computer to handle all these tasks. I also wanted the system to be deadly silent at idle and as silent as possible under heavy load. Also, since we live in 2018 I couldn’t avoid a bit of RGB lighting in the build, but I think it’s subtle the way I have set it up. So, without further ado, and after a lot of research, reading benchmarks, reviews, reading long forum threads, here are the components I chose.
The components
CPU
Even though I wanted to “tap” AMD in the back for their amazing return, I chose team blue, because of the higher single-core performance. You can’t go wrong with i7 8700K anyway.
CPU Cooler
I didn’t choose an AIO liquid cooler because of the pump noise at idle. After doing my research, Thermalright’s TRUE Spirit 140 Power appeared as one of the most silent solutions out there. In case you don’t know, silent pc review is perhaps the best place for this stuff. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since they made a review, but their forums as still helpful.
The PWM 140 fan, TY 147 A, at 350 RPM is inaudible. Above 700 RPM a slight drone noise starts to appear, but it can’t be easily heard when the case is closed.
I used Thermal Grizzly’s Kryonaut between that and the CPU, because according to multiple benchmarks it results to 2 degrees colder CPU when compared to the best thermal pastes out there.
Memory
32 GB 3200 MHz CAS 14 with RGB lighting. After studying some benchmarks, it seems that the performance of Intel CPUs does not depend too much on memory speed and timings as it does on Ryzen ones. Even so, I wanted to pick one of the best memory modules out there.
Storage
1 Tb NVMe is one of the best options available right now. I chose Samsung 960 Pro, instead of 960 Evo, because of the longer warranty.
I also used the storage from my old computer, a Western Digital Blue 2 TB and a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB.
GPU
Palit GTX 1080 GameRock Premium has probably the best and most silent cooling solution out there.
As most cards these days, the fans don’t spin at idle.
PSU
be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 650W is indeed truly inaudible both in idle and under load.
Case
I wanted a case that is high quality and beautiful. Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATG Tempered Glass is easily one of the best options out there. I read some reviews that mentioned its restrictive airflow, so I was a bit worried. Turns out that the case, especially the top part, may not be the best case for attaching radiatrors. However, on an air-cooled system like this, the airflow was more than enough.
The case uses true aluminum on top and the front and tempered glass sides (not plastic). Every part of the case is really high quality and is gorgeous to look at. The right side panel is dimmed glass, so the cables are not easily seen. That said, the case is very easy to work with and results to a very clean, cable-wise, look. The left side panel is less dimmed and makes the internal of the case, as well as any internal LEDs, appear less bright and more impressive.
Fan controller
The case also has a fan controller that accepts a PWM signal from the motherboard and converts it to DC signal to drive up to 5 fans. A problem that I faced with this controller and my motherboard’s PWM signal is that the RPM do not increase linearly. For example, a 8% PWM value results to 50% of the maximum RPM. I didn’t face that issue with Thermalright’s PWM fan, so I guess that the problem lies in Phantek’s controller.
One downside of the case is that it’s not targeting silence. The 3 case fans, PH-F140SP, are considered silent but not one of the best options out there. The fans are silent at lowest RPM but not inaudible. Even worse, their noise was enhanced when I attached the side glass panels. I’ll probably change them with be Quiet’s Silent Wings 3 140.
Acoustics
Another issue that I faced with a Wester Digital Blue 2 TB is how noisy it sounded in this case. The case has 2 options to mount a 3.5 inch drive and both have some sort of dumpening material, but it didn’t help with the vibration or the spinning noise. What I ended up doing is remove the drive cage at the front of the shroud, and sound-proof that part of the shroud using acoustic foam. The front 140 fan was still able to cool the hard disk and the noise was considerably reduced.
RGB LED controller
Last but not least, the case has RBB LEDs at the power button and at the front. You can also attach led strips to light up the interior if you want. The case has an embedded LED controller that cycles between different colors, or dims or uses static color. You can adjust that using something that looks like a reset button.
Motherboard
I left the motherboard at the end since it’s the component that brings all the previous components together and I wanted to go deeper on that part.
I chose Asus Z370-E because it’s one of the best high-end motherboards without breaking the bank.
UEFI was very easy to use and it’s really easy to overclock with it.
Fan control
You can also define fan curves for all the fans and choose between PWM and DC operation. Asus provides a thermistor cable which I attached between the graphic card cooler’s fins. I then set its temperature to drive my case fans according to a user defined curve I made. Essentially, when the GPU’s temperature approaches 65 ℃, I increase the case fans speed in order to exhaust the heat generated by the GPU’s cooler.
You can also adjust the fan speed using Asus fan expert, which come bundled in AI Suite III, but I prefer a UEFI solution to a Windows one.
Asus Aura
The motherboard supports Asus Aura. This means that using Asus software I can control the motherboard’s lighting and anything that is compatible. In this build, I can control the memory sticks and the case lighting (but this requires an extra cable). The software is limited in options and I preferred the memory’s default color cycling. So, I just set the motherboard colors to some fixed gradient values and let the memory and case do their own thing. I disabled Asus’s lighting service from starting when Windows starts.
Temperature and Noise
I sat the multiplier to 47x for all cores under load. Speed-step is enabled, and Windows use the “Balanced” power plan. So, when the CPU is not performing heavy work, it can get as low as 8x.
My room had around 21 ℃ when the measurement were made. At idle, the CPU stays around 33 ℃ and the GPU at 41 ℃. CPU fan is around 350 RPM and is inaudible.
When stressing the CPU with Cinebench, it reaches 78 ℃, with the CPU fan at 900 RPM which is relatively quiet. Running Prime95 results to 94 ℃, but I consider this as a non realistic workload.
When playing Overwatch and hitting around 260 fps, the CPU temperature was 67 ℃, while the CPU fan was inaudible at 370 RPM. The GPU was around 70 ℃ with the GPU fans audible but tolerable at 1200 RPM.
Conclusion
I am quite happy with the result. You can find all the parts of the PC in my PC Part Picker completed build entry.
