CPU cooler
Since you have the budget, and it's actually available right now, go for the TR Macho 120. If you want to take the time to stress-test and watch temps, you should be able to get away with no fan, but if not, one of the motherboard's control settings should leave the fan off most of the time, anyway. It can do the job without a fan, but I'm not building it and verifying it, so you get caveats, as it is dependent on good air flow.
Case
You want a case with some baffling, damping, dampening, etc., and/or good straight front to back airflow, and not too flimsy construction. You can't really use HDDs, or factory gaming video cards, and get very far without audible noise to some degree, so just making no noise at all generally requires too much compromise on performance. You can make the computer inaudible, but that degree of silencing, for anything not low-end, costs a lot of money, time, and effort. You can do better than the big OEMs without custom parts and whatnot.
Silverstone's Kubai (KL04) is a nice full-size case, that's really sturdy. The side intake is kind of odd, but it seems to work for noise and cooling. It doesn't look like it should, but it does. Intakes are filtered. It is styled much like popular 'gamer' cases, with bright blue LEDs, and sleek panels, though not garishly so.
Silverstone's Temjin (TJ08) has simple front-to-back airflow, and uses a non-standard fan size. It can cool well running that one fan very slowly. Intakes are filtered. It only fits up to MicroATX size.
Fractal Design's Arc Mini and R4 are good cases, but it's too easy for noise that could otherwise be deflected inside to have a straight shot to you. They are good cases, but require some care to use quietly. If you like one of the two aesthetically, don't let that stop you. They will still be better for it than most cases, even with no additional cabling, fan configuration, etc., efforts.
Fractal Design's Arc Midi, however, has all the goodness of the Silverstone cases, filtering included. While there are plenty of spaces for air to move about, the top vents are mesh-covered and filtered, which makes all the difference in the world. Configure the included fans as dual front intakes, and you would be set, allowing most of the other vents to be exhausts of varying efficiency. ATX, this one.
Fractal Designs' Define Mini is good, but with the intake slits and door, it sacrifices quite a bit of potential cooling to be quieter. Good if you're stuck with very loud components, but you shouldn't be. I also get the impression you'll go to the optical drive a lot, so maybe a full door isn't the best idea (this is also why I'm not bothering with the Bitfenix Ghost, Antec P280, Corsair 550D, etc.).
Silverstone's PS07 is not bad, either, kind of cheaper brother to the Temjin, but I would only choose it over one of the others, given your budget, if you really wanted white, as that limits the choices. It's not built quite as well as the others--but, like with the R4 v. Arc Midi, it's still very good, just not
as good. MicroATX only, again.
Any of the above will probably amaze you, as far as how quietly a high-performance PC can be. Just make sure to do decent cable management, plug case fans into the motherboard (if you choose a case that comes with 4-pin fans, go ahead and make 4-pin chassis fan headers a consideration for motherboard choice, too), and make the motherboard is set to automatically adjust fan speeds. Aesthetics and price are perfectly good ways to make the choice.
Power supply
Just go straight for a Seasonic S12. The 380W would do just fine, but the 520W or 620W would be under little stress, even under load, and don't cost much more. Overclocking is what typically necessitates the higher-wattage PSUs for midrange PCs, though we often get 500-600W anyway, simply because with a quality PSU, the price difference isn't much.
Video card
Any Asus DirectCU should be good enough, acoustically. It's not just how much noise, but what kind. They've done a good job at keeping it from being distracting, on their cards with those coolers. If the HDDs aren't being accessed, there's no reason for the idle video card fan to not be the
only thing you hear, in a typical home environment, if the system isn't under heavy load.
OTOH, if you're not going to use software that stresses the video card much, consider the Asus passive Radeon HD 7750 or passive Geforce GT 640. The 7750 is much faster, but if you run software that uses CUDA (nVidia's proprietary programming language; also, don't bother with GPU-accelerated encoding, only editing and filtering), the GT 640 would take advantage of that, where it have to be done on the CPU with the HD 7750, at a much slower rate. If you're not using software that will use CUDA, the 7750 would be faster for any other uses of the video card, and would also be plenty for light gaming, unless running a very high resolution monitor, like 2560x1440 (browser games, educational games, MMOs, anything LEGO, etc.).
I'm not an Asus Fanboy, but Asus, Sapphire, and Powercolor seem to be the only video card makers that have been truly serious about acoustics for their cards, beyond a dB(A) chart, to a point that I would feel comfortable recommending cards I haven't actually bought, just based on cooling type and branding (FI, DirectCU, or Vapor-X, up into midrange cards).
SSD
Finally, off the decibel issues! The Intel 520 series is good, but only great with compressible data. If any of your video work will hit the SSD, quite a few SSDs will actually be faster.
Samsung's 840 Pro is among the fastest, today, generally, and they're a top-tier maker. It will cost about the same as Intel's.
Plextor's M5S 256GB is a really good value, right now, though. It can be had for under $200, isn't much slower than the Samsung 840 Pro, and Plextor has a good reliability track record. Likewise, the Samsung 830 (older series) is available while they last for low prices, too. Good for bumping up the capacity for minimal cost. But, they won't last, at least not at those prices (the 830 256GB,m FI, went from in stock to out of stock at 2 stores between the time I first posted this, and the time of pricing out parts, below).
HDD
Newer denser drives are faster. The latest run of the mill mainstream 3.5" 7200 RPM WDs, Seagates, and Hitachis with 1TB platters are among the fastest non-enterprise drives available, at the moment. Also, none of them are too loud just spinning, and IME, the recent WDs and Hitachis don't vibrate much, either.
Motherboard, USB, and card reader
The Asus P8Z77-V PRO is an overclocker's motherboard. You will get zero benefit from the extra money it costs, without trying to get a substantial CPU overclock. About half of the cost is some combination of marketing, better heatsinking for components that only get too hot when you overclock, and minor design tweaks (R&D cost) for better overclocking.
Also, these days, it's rare that you need or want to plug too much into the PC' internal slots, so a single spare PCI, and PCIe 16x, are enough, and might never get used. USB has simply taken over, and USB 3.0 is already becoming mainstream, for most of what you used to add cards for.
So, you want 4 RAM slots, 4 USB 3.0, and a spare PCIe slot. 4-pin fan headers wouldn't hurt, either. With a 2-slot video card, assuming a MicroATX case, the Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H seems to fit the bill, except for USBs, but very few boards have additional headers.
- 4 RAM slots
- 4-pin fan headers
- All PCIe, with 3 and 4 being physically 16x
- All right-angle SATA connector, for easier cable management
- Not $200, and probably won't overclock as well as a $150-200 board
The Z chipset is wasted, but it has the rest. Then get a
header-equipped USB 3.0 card for the bottom slot, and you will be in business, able to use the front USB 3.0s, and plug the card reader into something, while still having a spare slot for some future use, all in a MicroATX case (optional, of course, and full ATX would make this much easier).
With MicroATX, the positioning of the PCI slot as slot 3 or 4 is quite annoying, IMO, since PCI is already a legacy slot. It's good that PCI isn't dead, since we still have useful PCI cards, but they almost all are a case of bringing legacy hardware to new computers (a quality old sound card with external DACs/ADCs, FI, hasn't gotten any worse over time
). Meanwhile, USB 3.0 is new enough that you often end up wanting to use up a slot for a USB 3.0 card, even with onboard USB 3.0, since there aren't many ports from the chipset. This can leave otherwise great B75 and H77 boards as problematic choices, since that would mean all but the PCI slot end up used or blocked, with any quiet or performance oriented video card and extra USBs.
CPU and RAM
Here is your RAM, if you order before other places get any back in stock.
The i7-3770K is a whopping 3% faster than the i7-3770 and E3-1240 V2. For all practical purposes, if not overclocking, get the cheaper one (probably the E3-1240 V2). The differences between 3.4GHz and 3.5GHz base, and 3.8GHz and 3.9GHz turbo, are 3% and 2.6%. The E3-1240, however, does not have IGP, should you want to have that for whatever reason (just Intel making their SKUs weird, to differentiate them).
High budgets make for too many choices!
PCPartsPicker is missing some parts and combos, so I leave you to choose some parts and add it all up. It should still be a bit under budget, even with no combos or anything, I'm pretty sure.
--
P.S. OK, curiosity about the actual costs got the better of me, so I kind of lied, I guess.
A Full ATX build:
From Newegg:
Case: Silverstone Kubai ($90, so
+$20 for any other case choice, pretty much)
PSU: Seasonic S12II
Motherboard: GA-H77-DS3H (4 DIMM, and officially supports the E3-1240V2)
CPU: Xeon E3-1240V2 (3.4GHz base, 3.8GHz turbo, v. 3.5/3.9 for the i7-3770K)
RAM: 2x(2x8GB) Crucial value stuff, 1600 MHz, 1.5V, 9-9-9 (the low-profile Ballistics is sold out)
Video: Asus Radeon HD 7750, passive model
SSD : Plextor M5S 256GB ($190; Samsung 840 non-pro is $180, slightly faster at reads, slower at writes)
HDD : 1TB Caviar Blue
USB 3 card: Syba with header (linked in prior post)
Card reader: Silverstone SST-FP37B (the nMediaPC one is a USB 2.0 card reader, it appears)
Windows 7 Pro OEM (combo -$10 w/ RAM kit)
From SuperBiiz:
Thermalright Macho 120 HSF
Newegg total: $1340
SuperBiiz total: $36 (free 1st-class shipping)
Total: $1376
Practical shipping might make the Macho from SuperBiiz no cheaper than the Amazon seller, adding $10-15 to the total. Doing it with a MicroATX case and mobo might add $20-30 to the total (case and motherboard would be the only differences).
While there's not a lot of play room, reducing the SSD back to around 120GB would save $60-90. A larger HDD might be welcome, as video footage piles up, and if you're not backing up much now, maybe get another HDD for that, too, and get started backing up routinely, or automatically via backup software, before you get bit by data corruption or straight up data loss.
You could also drop back to 16GB RAM, but I've never been one to recommend getting
less RAM
.
You could also move up to the i7-3770 (3.4/3.9GHz) or i7-3770K (3.5/3.9GHz), but even with the motherboard combo (-$13), it's awfully expensive for, at best, 3% more performance, which you will never actually notice, sticking to stock speeds. You probably wouldn't notice the difference dropping down to a Xeon E3-1230V2 (3.3GHz/3.7GHz), for that matter, if you wanted to spend a little less, without losing much performance.
Finally, if you use eSATA, and the board doesn't have it, but get a rear bracket or front panel for it. Pretty much all ports on all boards are eSATA compatible, these days, and have been for several years.
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