Impressive 100% passive cooled top end system

[RejZoR]

Just seen this today. I have to say it's pretty impressive. My system is stupendously quiet as it is using moving fans, but this is seriously impressive, especially at those temperatures. Sure, it's big and heavy, but we have to agree that's seriously impressive system.

Was thinking, how about making the same thing, but simplified. Not a refrigerant, but a classic water pump that's VERY quiet, routed trough a massive heatsink. Since tubing from the CPU/GPU could be a flexible rubber tube, it would easily be a very modular upgradable system. Unlike these rigid metal tubes for the refrigerant.

Sure, pump is not noiseless, but if you sound proof enough a quality pump, it could be doable imo. Zalman has done similar passive cooling with Reserator. This would just be maximized Reserator.

 

[Prima.Vera]

That's nice, however, my system's loudest component is still the HDD even when I'm playing games. Also playing with the window a little open, the background noize is much bigger than the fans inside. So this system is nice and all, but damn heavy and expensive for my taste...

 

[RejZoR]

People still have HDD's these days? Oh, right, people still using 128GB SSD as "boot drive" and then stupid normal HDD next to it...

Yeah, I went full on SSD because HDD clicking was the loudest thing in my system, despite the fact I had it suspended on elastic holders and padded with felt pads to further dampen noise and vibrations. It just didn't work as the rest of the system is so quiet I heard the drive over everything else. I don't think this system had regular HDD in it. At least I see Intel SSD there on the side so that's probably the only drive in it.

 

[cadaveca]

People still have HDD's these days? Oh, right, people still using 128GB SSD as "boot drive" and then stupid normal HDD next to it...

Yeah, I went full on SSD because HDD clicking was the loudest thing in my system, despite the fact I had it suspended on elastic holders and padded with felt pads to further dampen noise and vibrations. It just didn't work as the rest of the system is so quiet I heard the drive over everything else. I don't think this system had regular HDD in it. At least I see Intel SSD there on the side so that's probably the only drive in it.

I have Samsung 950 PRO in RAID. Thousands of MB/sec.

I have mechanical.

To each I installed BF1.


The difference?


Nothing.

There is however the cost. 256 MB Samsung 950 PRO here is a whopping $250 each, or $500 for 512 MB of storage.

The 4 TB mechanical was $165.

All that expense for the Samsung drives with like 10x the throughput = zero tangible benefits for most games, even in loading times.

My OS, it's on a RAID of SSD, with about 1000 MB/s.

But my Surface, with no RAID, and about 250 MB/s, boots faster.


So... Yeah, people still have HDD, and are very much right to do so. Most people don't care about a little bit of noise. Yes, us enthusiast often care about having the best possible, and sometimes the best is the quietest, but we enthusiasts are but a tiny part of a percent of the world's population.


Besides, Linus thought that removing 15 screws to install a system in a case was too much, and too difficult for "normal people". His opinion and videos are meaningless to me. It's nice that he make a few hundred dollars or more per video though. ( 1000 Youtube views = $1.50)


If you want silence, you take you water cooling, have the pump outside your room, and your cooling is copper tubing buried underground. THAT is impressive.

 

[RejZoR]

You're doing the elementary mistake, talking about drive bandwidth and not access time. You get get 1TB of speed via RAID0 HDD's. But the access time will still be shit. It's why there is hardly any difference between my SATA SSD drive and PCIe M.2 SSD drives with 3-6 times the bandwidth. As for why Battlefield 1 behaves like that is because it was designed to close the gap via texture streaming. Otherwise you'd be sitting at the loading screen significantly longer. And this texture streaming often causes hitching and micro stuttering on HDD's which is not encountered on SSD's. This was the case in Killing Floor 2. NFS 2016 as an EA title with streaming system had issues where cars fell through the floor because it didn't load fast enough on HDD drives, but it did on SSD's.

 

[The Von Matrices]

I gave up with passive or even extremely quiet PCs when I realized that I could just buy long monitor and USB cables and put the PC in another room.

 

[RejZoR]

I remember someone drilling a hole in the floor and placing PC in the basement with fans at 100% speed I have an option of placing it outside for the winter, running it at zero or even sub zero temperatures

 

[R-T-B]

I remember someone drilling a hole in the floor and placing PC in the basement with fans at 100% speed I have an option of placing it outside for the winter, running it at zero or even sub zero temperatures

Fun fact: I do this. Well, not literally drill a hole. But I have a "PC closet" where the PC goes, fans blazing, and I just run wires to my workstation.

 

[silentbogo]

Looks super-familiar:
https://www.overclockers.ru/lab/20484/Besshumnyj_kompjuter_korpus-radiator_i_teplovye_trubki.html

Ghetto uber-mod, circa 2005. I remember reading about the first prototype of this rig back in college... along with phase-change cooling rig from repurposed freezer
Back then it was super-duper-impressive

 

[cadaveca]

You're doing the elementary mistake, talking about drive bandwidth and not access time. You get get 1TB of speed via RAID0 HDD's. But the access time will still be shit. It's why there is hardly any difference between my SATA SSD drive and PCIe M.2 SSD drives with 3-6 times the bandwidth. As for why Battlefield 1 behaves like that is because it was designed to close the gap via texture streaming. Otherwise you'd be sitting at the loading screen significantly longer. And this texture streaming often causes hitching and micro stuttering on HDD's which is not encountered on SSD's. This was the case in Killing Floor 2. NFS 2016 as an EA title with streaming system had issues where cars fell through the floor because it didn't load fast enough on HDD drives, but it did on SSD's.

I didn't make any mistakes. What people care about are not these things. I made a friend a rig with AMD A10 APU and 780 TI. He plays pretty much all games, and has ZERO complaints. You are taking things to too "elitist" of a level to be relevant to the majority, as does Linus.

That's why my reviews have no overclocking. Majority do not care about OC. Only enthusiasts that OC care about OC, and most of those realize that OC is not guaranteed. There is no reason to show people stuff they might not get.


That said, does silent = cool? YEP!

But you know, I have four kids. Noise drowns out the noise they make, so... only lonely people want silence.

 

[R-T-B]

I didn't make any mistakes.

You said the 950 Pro was 256 MB, not GB.

Sorry, was gonna let it slide, but then you had to go and "not make any mistakes"

 

[RejZoR]

I didn't make any mistakes. What people care about are not these things. I made a friend a rig with AMD A10 APU and 780 TI. He plays pretty much all games, and has ZERO complaints. You are taking things to too "elitist" of a level to be relevant to the majority, as does Linus.

That's why my reviews have no overclocking. Majority do not care about OC. Only enthusiasts that OC care about OC, and most of those realize that OC is not guaranteed. There is no reason to show people stuff they might not get.


That said, does silent = cool? YEP!

But you know, I have four kids. Noise drowns out the noise they make, so... only lonely people want silence.

Nonsense. I had one of the fastest HDD's, a 2TB WD Caviar Black. It had basically the speeds of Velociraptors. It was fast but it wasn't that fast. Trust me, when I paired it into a hybrid software SSD/HDD system (it was cheap, way cheaper than big SSD), it was incomparable. A 2TB HDD paired with first 32GB SSD and later with even faster 128GB SSD. System booted way faster, apps with cold launch started way faster, in online games, I was suddenly ALWAYS the first to login to servers. Games loaded significantly faster in general and because of SSD caching, I never experienced falling through ground in NFS 2016 where people with only HDD's did.

 

[bug]

You're doing the elementary mistake, talking about drive bandwidth and not access time. You get get 1TB of speed via RAID0 HDD's. But the access time will still be shit. It's why there is hardly any difference between my SATA SSD drive and PCIe M.2 SSD drives with 3-6 times the bandwidth. As for why Battlefield 1 behaves like that is because it was designed to close the gap via texture streaming. Otherwise you'd be sitting at the loading screen significantly longer. And this texture streaming often causes hitching and micro stuttering on HDD's which is not encountered on SSD's. This was the case in Killing Floor 2. NFS 2016 as an EA title with streaming system had issues where cars fell through the floor because it didn't load fast enough on HDD drives, but it did on SSD's.

In all fairness, even when preloading textures, the game is doing sequential transfers, so seek time isn't that important.
I've moved my games onto a SSD and also haven't noticed much improvement. Though you can't easily judge "smoothness" unless you're looking very carefully (and I wasn't).

 

[RejZoR]

Texture reads aren't sequential when HDD head has to jump around a 20GB texture file (or several of them) to read textures it needs from it... And if you were a Natural Selection 2 player you'd notice the difference for sure.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Phase change...with no pump...intriguing. I wonder if there's a way to make it lighter. At bare minimum, they should make caster wheels for it standard. I also wonder what the service life is like on this cooling system.

Texture reads aren't sequential when HDD head has to jump around a 20GB texture file (or several of them) to read textures it needs from it... And if you were a Natural Selection 2 player you'd notice the difference for sure.

Textures are usually streamed (loaded on demand) or pre-loaded. NS2 would preload them into RAM and/or VRAM before the render starts. GTA5/Watch Dogs/etc. stream the textures so as you enter an area, it loads the textures from the area and as you move to another area, it unloads textures from the previous area that are no longer necessary while it pulls in new textures from the storage medium. More RAM means bigger/higher detail textures can be used by the developer.

 

[RejZoR]

Yeah, but in order for you to reach that you'll have to wait at a loading screen. First time load is always a "cold" load where you need to wait. You can only stream textures once in actual level.

As for the lighter cooling, I think they could achieve this by making fins thinner than these huge radiators. Aluminium becomes heavy at those thicknesses. But it would be more fragile and more prone to bending and deformation. But would certainly exchange heat faster, that's for sure.

 

[bug]

Texture reads aren't sequential when HDD head has to jump around a 20GB texture file (or several of them) to read textures it needs from it... And if you were a Natural Selection 2 player you'd notice the difference for sure.

And here I was thinking you've heard of this novel thing called defragmenting. It's done automatically since Win7, iirc. And no, I haven't heard of that title.

 

[RejZoR]

What good is defragmenting if data inside a texture file in its contiguous form is separated by 10GB of other textures and your HDD read head has to travel? You need to understand the basics of how HDD works and how defragmentation works...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Yeah, but in order for you to reach that you'll have to wait at a loading screen. First time load is always a "cold" load where you need to wait. You can only stream textures once in actual level.

The wait time in Witcher 3 from a 6 TB HDD is less than 30 seconds. There is no loading unless you fast travel or restart the game (has to start streaming from the new location). An SSD would reduce that load time, but cost versus benefit. I can fit hundreds if not thousands of games on that drive for $300. $300 towards an SSD will, at best, get you about 30-40% of that capacity. There's also the matter of integrity. I expect my HDD to last 2-5 times longer than an SSD.


Not sure what that has to do with this comp anyway. They definitely used an SSD to eliminate the sound of the HDD.


The loudest component in my system is my R9 390. Witcher 3 especially makes it excited.

 

[bug]

What good is defragmenting if data inside a texture file in its contiguous form is separated by 10GB of other textures and your HDD read head has to travel? You need to understand the basics of how HDD works and how defragmentation works...

What good is it? How about it ensures there's almost always just one seek operation per texture? As in, you find where it starts and then transfer the rest sequentially.

 

[nomdeplume]

This is very relevant to my recent dabbling here. No doubt all of you are familiar with the problems of power=heat and normally a lot of noise/vibration dampening. The common thread here is frequency. When the sole use of the computer becomes production of and use in an environment filled with very exact frequency response at high db the solutions get pretty wild. Especially when you remember to account for the fact it also occurs beyond the range of human hearing

If you want silence, you take you water cooling, have the pump outside your room, and your cooling is copper tubing buried underground. THAT is impressive.

Now we're to the point I got real interested in seeing where this went. There are some obvious flaws in making your heatsink an earth ground and so on with this example. It does capture the key points of physically removing the separate parts from each other on a larger scale. More of an off-site server with suspended floors and intricate data travel solutions scale for a personal computering. Looking at the prevalent thoughts in that sector it quickly becomes apparent efficiency outperforms mitigating the scaling problems. Produce less heat instead of producing more complicated cooling solutions. Physically reduce the size of your operation thus shrinking the isolation footprint. Regulate the wavelengths leaking from the device as a whole and you're able to tune your dampening to a very specific set of frequency.

• Processor: Intel Skylake i7 6700K
• Memory: 16GB DDR4
• SSD: 1TB (Can be upgraded to 2TB, 4TB @ additional cost)
• 5ppb stability OCXO with low noise power supply replacing the motherboard system clock
• Low noise dual choke power supply for computer motherboard and CPU
• Low noise, high frequency power supply for SSD
• Mundorf Mlytic capacitors with 660,000 microfarads storage capacity
• Steel potted power supply transformer with internal copper foil shielding
• High performance RAM with custom aluminum heat sinks
• Heatpipe cooling system for CPU connected to copper billet CNC milled heatsinks allowing fanless high load operation with CPU overclocking
• Optimized BIOS settings for CPU and RAM (BIOS unique to this machine)

That is what a $16,000 current state of the art audiophile level music server looks like. Notice the lack of a single fan or pump based cooling system. Instead you have a considerably large and ultra pure output custom PSU in a separate bay, aluminum radiators for side panels, and a fanless copper CPU cooler (note extension over M.2 slot). Dead silent on the outside due the attention to detail and a single open exhaust/intake(?) port on the rear panel. Primary use is sitting front center in a room with ground shaking speakers without causing or being interfered with by the sound waves. In real time under heavy load doing complex computations. Thousand of hours by doctorate level enthusiasts to reinvent the computer using off the shelf parts grudgingly in areas self production wasn't feasible. Using the shortest cable runs possible you hook this up to roughly $100K of DAC and amps running your $50K speakers. If you can't take the source off site you overengineer and weather the worst of it.

I hope to accomplish a fair bit of that performance for considerably less outlay. So I've been picking the brains of the active members here. Not for technical data but for the finer points that come with long close experience. Meanwhile experimenting with the effects of inefficient speakers throwing off inexact frequency responses on a surface that does nothing to absorb them. With an overworked computer sitting between them getting bounced around. My focus has been trying to capitalize on the refinement in business class HP desktops with platinum PSU's and a very stable architecture. At some point it is going to turn into learning to solder and apply audiophile grade improvements to whatever box I settle on. My current sticking point has really been feasible solutions to removing the computer that hates shocks from the speakers that do nothing but make vibration. That and hoping to make an insightful forward thinking decision on what processor to use.

 

[RejZoR]

You're assuming all needed textures will be inside a texture file in nice sequence. Which is often not the case. Unless all levels are using identical textures. Which is often also not the case.

@FordGT90Concept
It has to do with this topic in lines of unachievable with HDD. You could in theory do it using SSHD or SSD/HDD hybrid system using 5400 RPM notebook drive which are usually quieter, but I think in such system, you'd hear all clicking anyway. I did in mine and I still have fans in it. Very slow and quiet ones, but still. Going full SSD was the only option left. Now I can put heavy load on the drive even through the night and it's absolutely silent.

I wonder if I can make it even quieter... Such stuff always makes me want to emulate results at fractions of a cost. Maybe decreasing fan speeds even further and figure out how to dampen exhaust fan even further.

 

[cadaveca]

At some point it is going to turn into learning to solder

You should START there.



Anyway, that's a neat PC, but the motherboard is disgusting as it has barely any power cooling on it, and the chipset heatsink is puny. The inside of that case is likely 60 degrees C +. A device of that nature should have a custom motherboard, not off-the-shelf stuff, especially give the cost. So very inelegant to have that board there by the rest of the really nice gear.

You're assuming all needed textures will be inside a texture file in nice sequence. Which is often not the case. Unless all levels are using identical textures. Which is often also not the case.



@FordGT90Concept
It has to do with this topic in lines of unachievable with HDD. You could in theory do it using SSHD or SSD/HDD hybrid system using 5400 RPM notebook drive which are usually quieter, but I think in such system, you'd hear all clicking anyway. I did in mine and I still have fans in it. Very slow and quiet ones, but still. Going full SSD was the only option left. Now I can put heavy load on the drive even through the night and it's absolutely silent.

I wonder if I can make it even quieter... Such stuff always makes me want to emulate results at fractions of a cost. Maybe decreasing fan speeds even further and figure out how to dampen exhaust fan even further.

You are 1000% right for some apps. Thing is, most people don't care about that stuff, it's affordability that matters. And passive cooling done right is hardly affordable are doesn't always have the results you really want. (hence my first comment)

 

[RejZoR]

Passive cooling is never affordable, mostly because of PSU (which is where cost problems would start for most users). Plus CPU and GPU cooling. You need ridiculously oversized coolers and even then you can't run highest end hardware. Alternative is clever design with low speed fans and dampened case. Either DIY or aftermarket. That's how my system is designed. Super low speed fans and dampened everything. Works really well and is semi affordable.

 

[nomdeplume]

That whole paragraph coming to the point about efficiency and heat management was there for a reason. At least to explore the relationship between sound and heat both decreasing in tune with each cooperative step up in efficiency. I'm not advancing that server as "the answer". Both machines displayed here are rife with inconsistencies before you even get to their marketing. Some pieces got an incredible amount of attention and others are obviously a laughable afterthought glossed over as adequate and functionally equivalent to the best effort.

Where the one I posted holds a considerable advantage is the PSU. It's not touted as being medical or government grade because its actual use in every other application is considerably more sensitive than that. Medical and government grade is only a step up from mass production in a multiple use factory unworried about variables in their environment to mass production accounting for a reasonable amount of variables and a laundry list of strict specs. Those capacitors are works of art considerably more capable than found in the average piece of hospital equipment or industrial generator. Quite safe to say they produce a fractional amount of noise or heat when compared against even the highest quality made to order unit designated for computer use. Which doesn't even begin to examine their hallmark quality of impeccably clean power output.