SubJeff on 6/1/2017 at 19:23

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Well that was interesting.

I getting the heatsink on was a mission, was was connecting everything up.

But once I booted up it has a little bit of device gathering and then bam, I was playing Hyperlight Drifter just like that. I've never had such a simple upgrade before.

Now I need a network card (I think) as my old one was for the teeny tiny PCI-E slots which this mobo doesn't have.

Renzatic on 6/1/2017 at 21:10

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Hey, sorry I didn't see this earlier.

The only sound that comes from the watercooler is from the case fan just behind the radiator, and it always runs at the same low speed regardless of how much stress I'm putting on the CPU. When I'm just doing stuff on the desktop, the sound coming out the case is a low, light hum, with the occasional "swisssshhh" to liven things up. My external harddrive is actually louder than my computer when it's idling.

Now my GPU on the other hand, it can get pretty damn loud when I'm putting a load on it. Fortunately, that usually happens when I have the sound up while playing a game, so I only rarely notice it. But when I do...man, it's all kinds of "WWAAAAHHHHH."

If you want as silent a machine as possible, I'd suggest getting getting a watercooler for both your GPU and CPU. The only reason why I haven't gone that route is because I don't have enough room in my little case to stuff a second radiator in there.

Al_B on 6/1/2017 at 23:31

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First time I put a x1 card into a longer slot it "felt" wrong but PCIE is well designed.

Enjoy the PC - making me itch to upgrade mine :)

Gryzemuis on 9/1/2017 at 10:52

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I have a Super Flower Golden Silent 500W PSU.
It's awesome.

Completely silent. No fan. At load it is 95%+ power efficient. (Note, that is at 230V. And 115V the efficiency drops to 90%+). That means it hardly produces any heat, even under load. Which is key, when your PSU has no fan.
500W doesn't seem like a lot. But with current CPUs and GPUs, it's more than enough, unless you do SLI. I bought one of those thingies that measures power usage at the wall socket. While playing games, I hardly ever go over 250W. 500W is more than enough for my i5-3570K+gtx1080.

This PSU is made by a Chinese company. (That explains the weird name). And it is sold under a few different brandnames. I think they sell them as Super Flower in Europe. In the US it's called Rosewill. And I think I've seen 1 or 2 other names.

Here is a review by a website that does silent PCs.
(http://www.silentpcreview.com/Rosewill_Silent_Night_500_Platinum_PSU)

Here are the specs (on a Dutch website, sorry). So you can see the Rosewill and the Super Flower are exactly the same PSUs.
(https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/335610/super-flower-golden-silent-500w/specificaties/)

At first I bought a Seasonic hybrid PSU. Those have a fan. But they're supposed to not use the fan unless they go over 50% load or something. Mine had its fan running all the time (even after a cold boot, with only the desktop running). I returned it and got myself the Super Flower. No regrets.

BTW, I got an almost silent PC. It's a lot of work to make it silent. Unless you really really want that, and you're willing to spend a bit more money, I can't recommend it to others. But once it runs, it runs fine, and doesn't need much extra maintenance. The things that are the hardest are: getting the pump silent, realizing that you need some minimal airflow through the box, and getting the motor of the HDD quiet. Anyway, if you're interested, I can write a post to explain what I've done.

Hope this helps.

Judith on 13/1/2017 at 18:26

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I'm about to buy a GTX 1000 card, but I'm kind of confused by both the pricing and the amount of VRAM those pascal cards have. Seems like the 1060 is the best deal now, but I'm not sure I need 6 gigs of vram for 1080p gaming. And what kind of future-proofing I get with the 6 gig version.