I’ve been building PCs for 30 years (starting with 386SX-25!) and I’ve briefly experimented with water cooling but almost always stuck to air cooling.
My typical solution was to put the PC in a different room (or basement) and use fiber optic cables for DVI/HDMI and USB to reach my monitor. The quiet was amazing. However, now I need to put the gaming monster on my desk and boy is it loud.
Brief specifications:
i7-13700k
4090 RTX
Noctua NH-D15 cooler
Fractal Design R5 case
Noctua NF-A14 + NF-A15 fans
This PC is obviously going to generate a tremendous amount of heat from the CPU/GPU) but does anybody have any suggestions? I’m thinking about a larger case and AIO water blocks maybe? Would that become “very quiet” or is it basically impossible with this high-end rig?
You could also do what others have done, and that is to run the computer from another room/closet (with sufficient ventilation, of course) but then you have to deal with running the cabling between rooms/through the wall.
But as Mathew said, with how hot and power hungry modern components are, compared to a passively cooled CPU from the 90s and fanless AGP gpus, things are a lot different now. A high performance machine that stays cool, doesn’t throttle, and remains silent isn’t a real possibility anymore. Even with a custom loop, you’ll still need fans to help transfer the heat from the radiator, and those fans may ramp up once again putting you right back into the loud fan noise realm.
Broadly yes, what @lisbone50 said. Unless a 480’s back on the market, CPU AIOs only go up to 420 and, IIRC, 4090 AIOs to 360. Loop requirements depend on power levels but a basic rule of thumb is 100 W per 120 mm fan mount with quiet builds being increasingly under that. A 13700K pulls up to ~260 W and 4090s are often ~500 W at stock so, for a quiet build, waterblocking both in a custom loop with two 480 mm rads isn’t really even entry level. For internal rad builds I’d use a Corsair 7000D with 2x480 + 360 rads and back to front airflow as a reference.
A power supply which stays under noise targets at ~800 W is also needed and, the quieter the rest of the build gets, the more likely coil whine will become the limiting factor (ask me how I know ). So there’s diminishing return in moving to external rads, though that is also an option. Haven’t seen anybody do it but, with the 4090 risered on its own supply, ~800 W with dual PSUs in fan stop is possible (conceivably also with a single supply, though I don’t know of any such units).
My take on what @PentaxEnthusiast was speaking to is to look at a build’s noise requirements and then choose components and cooling within that constraint based on budget. As a result, everything I’ve built lately’s been power constrained with CPUs and GPUs chosen on energy efficiency.
If you plan on keeping the D15, message Noctua customer support and request a set of 140mm fan clips. The stock A15s (which use 120mm fan clips) are complete garbage IMO and you’ll be much better off with real A14s in both performance and acoustics. (I ran the 3,000RPM A14s on mine, but there was obvious diminishing returns past 2,300.)
Otherwise if you want water cooling, you really need to go custom loop. Even large AIOs do not have the thermal capacity to handle such hot parts continuously and will eventually heat soak.
What you would need for the best performance and acoustics is large, thick radiators with big, slow moving fans (that can still provide static pressure) and a large reservoir to increase thermal capacity. You can see right away that there are already conflicting parts to that equation.
In my experience, (with a 140mm fan swap) the D15 can handle 250-260W sustained and only seems to hit its limits past 280W (probably the limit of the heat pipes).
This was with a 10900K on a Z490 Unify, fans at 2,300RPM with a sub 20C ambient.
). So there’s diminishing return in moving to external rads, though that is also an option. Haven’t seen anybody do it but, with the 4090 risered on its own supply, ~800 W with dual PSUs in fan stop is possible (conceivably also with a single supply, though I don’t know of any such units).