Silent ITX Build: Recommendations

Personally when building a system I typically test it out with one fan, then maybe add another at a later date if temps weren’t in a reasonable region. Like right now, if you’re talking about case fans only, my current setup just has one. :slightly_smiling_face:

… But, I have got the Corsair H80i v2, which you could state acts like an exhaust… Which also has 2 fans…

Just to be clear, the two 120mm fans I’m talking about are on the morpheus II, not just in the case. I’m talking about a 4 slot card effectively. Take a look:

Ahhhhh… Okay, at first I was wondering why you asked why you’d do that… Seeing this, it clarifies a few things! :joy:

Looks like a lovely beefy card! :joy: … But to be fair, the temps & noise combo looks promising as hell!

The more fans you have the quieter it will be, I know that doesn’t exactly make sense at first but you’ll have more airflow so you can run them at lower inaudible rpms

That’s partially true for PWM fans, but for 3 pin or worse… Molex… :joy: … That’s not the case in my experience anyway…

I mean with SFF builds, you’re very limited with the number of fans that you can cram in anyway, often one or two being the limit.

Which is why …

Powerful
Small
Quiet

Pick two.

:wink:

Pretty much, unfortunatley… I won’t lie, after looking at prices & weighing up my options & actually thinking about it with some logic, it’s likely that I’ll just say screw it & go for small & powerful… I’d still try to achieve all three, i.e. get one of the more quiet GPU’s, like a Strix card or something, then get a good CPU cooler with some reasonably quiet fan(s)…

Obviously it won’t be anywhere near silent, but I’d imagine for the most part that it would be a reasonable compromise! :slightly_smiling_face:

Airflow is king in SFF. You’re talking about a few liters of volume, if you have a single 140mm fan at only 600RPM you’re pumping air through that chassis as much as four times over in just one minute. In the quest for near-silence and performance you really need to focus heavily on efficient airflow.

Thermal density is another key component. Lots of water cooled SFF boxes around because consolidating all your heat into your air channel helps you keep performance on the table. Sadly this introduces pump noise, but if you’re only two or three decibels over your noise floor that can be remedied by positioning; orienting the location of your PC to dampen acoustics.

As for the DB4:
I built a Ryzen 5 3400G rig in the Streacom DB4 for a recording studio. Not a big fancy one with sound isolated rooms, but a basement studio. The recording and mixing hardware sat only a few feet adjacent to a live mic due to space constraints, so absolute silence was necessary. The DB4 handles the 3400G without any problems and the onboard graphics was enough for their use. There is enough space in the DB4 for something like a 1070 Mini as well, which I tested, and GP104 was incredibly easy to keep cool at minimal fan speeds while still clocking in over 1800MHz and will definitely outperform a 1650. The GPU cooling kit offered by Streacom is not enough for a 1070 or equivalent card. Obviously they never claim it to be, but just for visual aid this is what it looks like running a 1070 with their cooling kit:

I much appreciate your input! :slightly_smiling_face:

But I think I’ll steer away from the DB4 for some time, I may revisit it again in the future, maybe when hardware becomes that much more efficient, so I’m gonna play the waiting game there… Instead, I think I’ll go for something like the DA2, it’s not silent, but has a lot of ventilation & I’ve seen some very promising numbers! :smiley:

Well hardware has got more efficient. The problem is when we get higher efficiency we also push higher performance, so the range of hardware that fits into the power envelope you want looks less impressive than it is. When the DB4 launched the 1050 and 1050 Ti were just on the scene performing at 2012 flagship GPU levels in a tiny chip. Now the 1650 is out and sat right on top of the 2013 flagships, and the 1650 Super hits the 2014 flagships. So if you’re looking at it from the perspective of how much you’re getting compared to flagship performance, you can build a 2014/2015 flagship PC in the DB4 with modern hardware that pulls under 200W. That’s pretty good!

But you don’t want 2014 flagship performance, so that’s not so good.

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