How safe and how quiet is a liquid cooled PC?

[Paul J Steinberg]

I have a Supermicro system right now and it is a real powerhouse but it is full of small fans and it is like working next to a leaf blower. If I'm talking to someone on the phone they ask if I'm in the car with the window down and when I'm rendering out of Resolve it REALLY kicks into gear. The noise is driving me absolutely nuts.

I'm weighing my options between a Z820 that would have small, self contained liquid cooled CPU coolers (but HP are being a bit of a pain getting it configured) or just buying maybe a Supermicro motherboard and putting it into a big Lian Li case with a full out liquid cooling system that would cool the dual Xeon CPU's as well as the Quadro 4000 and 2x GTX580 cards.

How safe are these systems? How quiet should I expect them to be?

Maybe I drill a hole in the floor and put the system in the basement.

Suggestions welcome.

 

[Richard Towns]

Is it the 7047GR-TRF? I just picked up one and I feel about the same. Love the power but I have to move the system to another room and run extenders it's so loud.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

Yeah, almost the same model. I have the 7046GT-TRF. It's awesome as has the room to run 3x double width GPU's and it's built like a tank but it sounds like a jet at takeoff.

There are liquid cooling systems that will do all the hot stuff, CPU's, GPU's and that should cut out a lot of the noise but I've never seen a fully liquid cooled system in person so I don't know how quiet it really is or how safe they are.

 

[Greg Barley]

I don't currently use liquid cooling, but I have 2 dual xeon workstations that I've greatly reduced sound levels by using better fans in the case:

http://www.acousticpc.com/silenx_ultra_quiet_pro_series_fans.html
http://www.acousticpc.com/noctua_fans.html

They aren't cheap, but they turned the leaf blower sound to more of a household fan noise.

Oh, and I also used this stuff: http://www.acousticpc.com/quiet_computer_case_insulation.html on a lot of the bare interior surfaces. Honestly can't tell you if it helped a lot or not...

 

[Marc Wielage]

I have a Supermicro system right now and it is a real powerhouse but it is full of small fans and it is like working next to a leaf blower. If I'm talking to someone on the phone they ask if I'm in the car with the window down and when I'm rendering out of Resolve it REALLY kicks into gear. The noise is driving me absolutely nuts.

My suggestion is to move the system and drives into an adjacent room (like a well-ventilated closet), and run long extender cables to your monitor(s), mouse, and keyboard. That way, you can picture edit and hear the sound without any loud, distracting computer fans nearby.

I know many, many editors, colorists, and Pro Tools editors & mixers who use this method. The alternative is to get an (expensive) sound-baffled rolling cart to contain the computer system, and that can work to a point. But shuffling the system to an adjoining room is a much simpler idea.

 

[Phil Holland]

I setup a colorist suite up a while ago that had sort of a beast of a system in there. What we did was in the desk off on the right side the main cpu was housed in a custom cabinet that had sound proofing material on the walls, a plexi front door, and was open in the back for ventilation. Behind that was another sound proofing panel. It was very quiet. This solution requires a woodworker or a free weekend to construct something like that.

 

[extrabyte]

Paul,

Installing liquid cooling these days is no more diffucult than installing air cooling. The beauty is that the new all-in-one liquid coolers are completely assembled: no filling, no attaching hoses and no maintenance. It's great. Thers are a few GPU liquid coolers out there but unless you're overclocking you really don't need them. A nice full tower case like the NZXT Switch 810 or the Cooler Master Cosmos 2 and quality, speed controlled fans, are all you need. Basically, the bigger the case, the easier it is to cool everything with minimal noise. As for a dual cpu, a good choice would be to use two, 120mm radiator systems, one for each cpu, in what's called "a push-pull fan configuration". The speed of the fans are controlled by the motherboard so they never have to run any faster that is necessary. Also, if they don't already have them, you can get "backplates" for your 2 GTX580's for about $15.00 ea. They not only make the cards physically more rigid and sturdy but they act as heatsinks that aid in cooling them as well.

Cheers