Quiet build advice please

[vbuggy]

Interesting pointer about the 5970 - thanks. I was assuming due to historical experience: I don't think it would be a problem to get the cards swapped in the HP spec. I actually preferred the choice of an ATI card as some of the apps I plan to use don't like SLI - so the ATI's will give me scalability options if I feel there's not enough GPU power on tap.

Apart from that, yes - the more I think about it, I have to say the more I'm leaning towards buying the HP. My inner geek likes the idea of getting back into DIY's but I have a feeling I'll tire of it with the tuning I'll need.

 

[frostedflakes]

If you end up going DIY, whatever you end up getting, you should expect to just scrap the stock cooler. Most of them aren't what I'd consider to be quiet.

For the 5970, you can get something like the Arctic Cooling Xtreme. I had a smaller Arctic Cooling heatsink that used the same fan, and at 900RPM it still wasn't that quiet. But the Xtreme is huge and has a ton of potential as a quiet cooler, if you wanted to mod the fans to run at a lower speed it would probably cool pretty well and could be very quiet.

But really it doesn't sound like you want to do the DIY thing, for a powerful system like that it will take a lot of research, tweaking, trial and error, etc. to get it quiet. If you're happy with the noise level of that prebuilt, you should probably just go with that.

 

[tritonofg]

Vbuggy,
What do you plan to do with this workstation? you stated that you are not planning to play games but did not state the intended purpose. I ask because of the video card which you are getting which is an unusual choice for a workstation. I usually get a fire pro or quadro for CAD...most people look at shaders etc. and claim that they are the same as consumer grade video cards when they are not ( I have run them side by side on similar systems and found them inadequate)

Cheers

 

[vbuggy]

Vbuggy,
What do you plan to do with this workstation? you stated that you are not planning to play games but did not state the intended purpose. I ask because of the video card which you are getting which is an unusual choice for a workstation. I usually get a fire pro or quadro for CAD...most people look at shaders etc. and claim that they are the same as consumer grade video cards when they are not ( I have run them side by side on similar systems and found them inadequate)

Cheers

I think I made it quite clear in the original post:
"This will no longer be just a gaming PC but an all-purpose machine to partially replace notebooks I bought as DTR's but are not quite working out due to lack of absolute power"

But having said that, it has to balance power with silence - because one of the reasons I switched to an all-notebook setup was, as I also said in the original post, due to the silence - unless I crank up the gaming rig. Which I like. No longer will I have multiple, stuffed-to-the-gills workstations at home.

There will be CAD/Visualisation, there will be games, there will be Photoshop, there will be nooding in audio programs. As I said, all-purpose. The CAD products won't have certain optimisations but I'm not overly concerned - I'd just like to be able to do some semblance of work at home with a decent amount of speed. For anything really in-depth, I'll drive to the office. Some of the visualisation stuff actually scales in Crossfire (but chokes in SLI) so in one way it does make more sense to go with ATI.

In this scenario, to me a top-tier consumer card makes more sense - correct me if I'm wrong.



EDIT: Thanks for all the advice - I really appreciated it, but in the end I've decided not to build this time around and go HP. Many thanks once again.

 

[neilhu]

Vbuggy,

Can you tell me how noisy or quiet the Z800 is in a home environment?
I was considering a Z600 (less cost than the Z800) and from what I read, the HP workstations get good reviews for noise.

Also, you mention you had Dell workstations (T7500?) - how do these compare to the HP Z800?

Thanks
Neil