Cooling for new Computer

[Chris2008]

(not sure if this is the right section)

This is the new PC I am getting built, wondering how many fans and what cooling system I should get for this set up. I am keeping this computer on the 2nd level of the house so it does get quite hot upstairs during summer and summer is about to hit us in Australia. My old computer didn't have any cooling and the GPU was at around 60-80 degrees celcius constantly even when the rooms temp was below 20 degrees celcius. The room airconditioned but I do not want to run the aircon unless it's 30-40 degrees celcius outside.

I believe heat was the cause for the death of my other PC and I'd like to make sure this doesn't happen to this one.



• Antec “Three Hundred” Tower Gaming Case – Black, NO PSU, 9 drive bays, top mounted 140mm exhaust fan, Top USB/Audio In/Out

• Dual Switching 825w +12 High Performance power supply

• QUADCORE Q6600/2.40GHz/2x4MB/1066FSB/LGA775/QUADCORE

• Gigabyte EP45 S775, P45, FSB1600, DDR2, 2xPCIEx16, SATA2, 2xGbLAN, ATX, DES

• 4GB Kit Kingston HyperX 1066 RAM

• Graphics Card: PCIe 2.0 GTX 280 1GB

• 20x DVDRW Dual Layer

• 300GB 10,000 RPM Raptor

 

[Kraynor]

GPUs run 60-80 anyway so that's nothing major to worry about. Could you list the manufacturer of your PSU? I'd suggest going with something from PC Power & Cooling, or Corsair. They are among the most reliable and efficient. Don't want a generic low-quality PSU burning out your system after 6 months because they cheaped out on components

PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W is probably your best bet in a single-GPU setup. It's powerful, reliable, and reasonably priced. If you want more power, then the Corsair HX1000 would be my personal choice, though 1kW is a much. Unless you want to run 2 HD ATI 4870X2s. How sweet that would be...

You might want to pick up an after-market CPU cooler with some Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste. The Sunbeam Core Contact Freezer seems to be the best one out there at the moment if you don't mind a little noise.

If you're building a gaming rig, save yourself some cash by ditching the GTX 280, and getting an ATI HD 4870, or even 2 HD 4850s It's almost as good, and considerably cheaper. That way you have a better budget for the other things, and the option to go Crossfire if you need some extra juice in 12 months (and don't want to do a complete system overhaul). See http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Best-Graphics-Card,review-31363.html if you want to compare graphics cards.

As for the motherboard, which Gigabyte EP45 is it? DS3, DS4, DS5? With the money you save on graphics cards I'd recommend going for a Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6. Why? If you decide to go crossfire you'll get 2 full speed PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes, maximising performance. And it's a great board.

Onto the RAM. 1066 MHz, not really required. 800 MHz ram will give you pretty much the same performance at a lower price. If you're going for 4GB of it, I'm guessing you have a 64-bit OS lined up, otherwise you'll end up with something in the region of 3.5 GB usable. If you do have a 64-bit OS, and decide to drop from 1066 to 800 (very little real world difference), then you'd actually be able to pick up 8GB for $20-30 more than 4gb of 1066, be able to disable the windows page file, and have better system performance overall (that's what I've done with this machine, and it's very nippy).

Final note is on the hard drive. I'm guessing that 300gb Raptor is expensive, and with the performance of some of today's 7200RPM drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 for example), it's not really needed for a standard PC. If you must have it though for whatever reason, I'd suggest going for a smaller one, 74GB or 150GB and picking up a larger 2nd drive, 500GB is pretty cheap these days. You could even get 2 500GBs and RAID them to get better performance than the Raptor for gaming or whatever it is you plan on doing with it, but that might be a bit much.

CPU... I can't fault it. Have one myself and it's a beast. Overclocks really well too, 3 GHz is pretty much garaunteed on the G0 stepping chips without too much tweaking. Even the older B3 can pull it off nicely (mine does).

Long post but I'm in an elaborative mood tonight. Interested to hear what some of our other forum members think of my suggestions. I think they're pretty good, but then again I could barking mad.