Silent gaming rig

[Frodis1]

Hello!

Like the thread name states, I'm interested in building my own silent gaming rig.
I will use the computer to play BF3/BF4 in addition to a little rendering and normal use (surfing, watching movies etc).
The components which I have considered so far for the build is:

Chassis:Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 620W PSU
Motherboard: MSI Z87-G43, Socket-1150
CPU: Intel LGA1150 Core i5-4670K
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L12 CPU Cooler
Ram: Kingston DDR3 HyperX 1600MHz 8GB (2x4GB)
GPU: XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 (black edition)
SSD: Samsung SSD 840 PROSeries 128GB 2.5" OEM
OS: Microsoft Windows 8
And some cheap hdd for movie storage etc...

The thing that I'm most uncertain about is probably the PSU...
I need it to be quiet and obviously sufficient.
I will probably go for mild overclock on the CPU and maybe GPU, but I doubt that I would want to buy another card for crossfire later on. I don't think I need to spend extra money on a larger capacity PSU, or what do you think?


Generally I'm just really curious what you think is good/bad and what you would do different?
This is my first thread, I hope it's not too unstructured...

Thank you!

 

[sam_p_lay]

The 7970 is far from silent

 

[Eastside G]

Everything looks pretty solid here, except the gpu. Do not buy a XFX GPU, they are notoriously unreliable. Go for a MSI or Asus, or any other really than XFX. For the PSU, a SeaSonic or Corsair 500W would be sufficient and good, at the same or lower price. Other than those two points, your build is solid.

 

[Frodis1]

The 7970 is far from silent

Okay thanks, but the 7970 is only loud at load yes? And do you know of a more silent alternative?

 

[sam_p_lay]

It really depends what kind of performance you're after and what kind of settings you play at. The lower you can go GPU-wise, the less wattage drawn, the less heat generated and the slower the fan(s) will spin.

 

[Frodis1]

Everything looks pretty solid here, except the gpu. Do not buy a XFX GPU, they are notoriously unreliable. Go for a MSI or Asus, or any other really than XFX. For the PSU, a SeaSonic or Corsair 500W would be sufficient and good, at the same or lower price. Other than those two points, your build is solid.

Thanks, but do you think the 7970s in general are fine? Except for the ones from XFX... Or are they all noisy? Would I be better off with a Nvidia card you think?

 

[sam_p_lay]

No in general they're pretty noisy. I'd really stop to consider how much you really benefit from maxed settings if your goal is a silent PC. I'm not too bothered about either personally but a really powerful card will never be silent.

 

[Frodis1]

No in general they're pretty noisy. I'd really stop to consider how much you really benefit from maxed settings if your goal is a silent PC. I'm not too bothered about either personally but a really powerful card will never be silent.

Okay, thanks for good answers. I understand that a more powerful card that requires more wattage will also become warmer and need more heat dissipation, but as long as it's not noisy when idle I don't really mind. When I'm gaming I normally use a headset anyway.

 

[sam_p_lay]

Exact same thing for me and the reason I said it doesn't bother me Almost all graphically intensive games are gonna be loud games (gunfire and explosions or screaming engine noise and pounding music etc). Only exception I can think of is maybe stealth games. But those are generally frustrating so I don't usually play them :-D