DJS wrote:Wondering if anyone has built one with a hot processor, eg 4770K i7, and if they passively cool sufficiently. I notice the 4770K TDP (thermal design power) of 84W is below the 95W total defined for the Streacom F10 cooling system.
How have your silent case experiments gone?
I built a new PC in February 2014. It's primary purpose was video editing however. It runs the Adobe CS6 Production Premium suite. It's an Antec P183 case, an Asus Z87 Expert MB, an Intel i7 4770K, a Zalman cnps10x optima CPU cooler, a CoolerMaster M2 850w power supply, and I replaced the Antec case fans with Noctua NF-S12A fans. Oh, yes, it's got an NVIDIA Geforce GTX760 graphics card in it.
The PC is very quiet, but not silent. The case is nice, composite panels are very quiet. It's sitting on my desktop, my left ear is 55cm from the front panel. So yes, I can hear it. But it's a very low white-ish noise, no hums, no peaks. IOW, the
quality of the noise is good. Without the GTX760 it would be quieter I'm sure (it's using 400w all by itself, and running two additional fans). And if I'd actually set it on the floor and put a sound barrier around it, it would be very hard to hear.
The thing about the 4770K is that when you stress it, it gets very hot very quickly. Lots of stress is going to require lots of cooling, or it's going to result in internal downrating of the CPU (it will slow down to reduce heat). I've read that the 4700K responds well to liquid cooling systems, but I'm not willing to go that route. I suspect that the i7 4770K is not the ideal CPU for an audio computer, but it works great for video editing.
I'm thinking actually that a i5 might be what Pyramix needs. Lower power, much lower TDP, and I doubt that Pyramix or any of the top end DAWs need or would use the horsepower required to do video editing except in extreme cases (lots of channels at very high sample rates?). But... actual numbers have been hard for me to find.
I'm thinking about this stuff right now because I'm thinking about a laptop computer for Pyramix for location work. So any numbers you've got on what Pyramix needs would be helpful if you care to post them.
). The Streacom cases seem the best engineered option that I can find, I think they are presently being used by Merging in their turnkey PC's.
