anyone had experience building your own PC?

[JJretroTONEGOD]

I had a quick look and if you want a good CPU cooler for half the price the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 looks on par with the 120mm Nocturas, as I said only quick look so might be a benchmark tests of the Noctura NH-D14. I use the older Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 92mm fan one that runs a quad core Q9400 at 30C idle

What brand hard drives you getting? I always go for 5 year warranty western digitals but the seagates are probably quieter, I've avoided maxlor since they got bought out incase they went down hill (no idea if they actually have)

When I upgraded 2 year ago AMDs were on par with Intel for performance and price (I think) but the Intels ran cooler

That coolermaster will probably run anything!!! It's got a single V12 rail with 98 amps!!!(make that 65 amps cos retailers site has it wrong!) For perceptive my corsair 650w has 52 amps on the V12, I found the box and it has a graph for the fan speed which stays below 22dba until it has 375w of load

Just found this too for working out power needs (says I only needed 400watts, but then I maxed capacitor aging and it went up to 550W so I guess it'll survive my next upgrade :D) http://www.coolermaster.outervision.com/PSUEngine

the HDs will most likely be this one: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/ss1tb-samsung-hd103sj-spinpoint-f3-sata-3gb-s-7200rpm-32mb-cache-89-ms-ncq-oem

[JDC]

3 year warranty on that I believe, just so you know third generation 25nm intel 320 series of SSD drives are out any time now, I'm planning on getting one the 40Gb one for running windows/appz off. Then give it another few years and I'll get a bigger one when they get cheap.

If Roo reads this he'll probably rave on about his until the cows come home. *poke!*

[JJretroTONEGOD]

3 year warranty on that I believe, just so you know third generation 25nm intel 320 series of SSD drives are out any time now, I'm planning on getting one the 40Gb one for running windows/appz off. Then give it another few years and I'll get a bigger one when they get cheap.

If Roo reads this he'll probably rave on about his until the cows come home. *poke!*

SSDs are amazing, my current PC takes 5-10 minutes to load up! anything faster than that would be a bonus, the paq case is something I'm now going off, just because you can't get it without the 430 power supply, but I'll need 800watts not only that, there's only certain things that fit inside...it has its limits, BUT it's the quietest, torn between choosing the PAQ and the Corsair 700D case

[JDC]

Wow that's a lot of money for a case, says me who spent £160 on one 8 years ago and now I can only just fit everything in it and the power button has a life of it's own so I disconnected it and use the reset switch in it's place

How do either case make the PC more quiet? If it's just fans you could replace the fans on another well made case, I found the 120mm versions of the quiet fans I use and they are 20dba (mine are 80mm 15dba, not 25dba I mentioned before but pitch will be higher compared to bigger ones.) Could use rubber washers on fans and acoustic foam if needed

[Roobubba]

Agree about SSDs! I got an intel 80GB SSD about a year and a half ago (I think). It's absolutely superb! Really makes things snappy, I would recommend ANYONE building a new machine to seriously consider whether you can work one into the budget, they make a HUGE difference to system performance :)

Roo

[JJretroTONEGOD]

Wow that's a lot of money for a case, says me who spent £160 on one 8 years ago and now I can only just fit everything in it and the power button has a life of it's own so I disconnected it and use the reset switch in it's place

How do either case make the PC more quiet? If it's just fans you could replace the fans on another well made case, I found the 120mm versions of the quiet fans I use and they are 20dba (mine are 80mm 15dba, not 25dba I mentioned before but pitch will be higher compared to bigger ones.) Could use rubber washers on fans and acoustic foam if needed

yes by using very large fans eg 180mm or 200mm apparently the bigger they are the less noise they make, plus you can also buy acoustic deadening kits if you really need to, but if I get it just right and get everything quiet in the first place there will be no need to get the acoustic foam ie the correct fans and plentyof them, quite excited about starting the project now, but it's been a lot of research, it should hopefully all pay off, will be posting pics too

[Alex]

Yes and now. Really large fans are a bit hit and miss. If they are large and slow, there's no point in having them, the air pressure is really low (never believe the CFM ratings manufacturers put on them).
I'd really rather recommend getting stronger fans with lots of air pressure and using a fan controller to dial them down.
I use an NXZT Sentry 2 and it works very nice, plus it looks cool.

[JDC]

I'd really rather recommend getting stronger fans with lots of air pressure and using a fan controller to dial them down.

Surely that's a bit backwards logic as a quiet fan I would assume has an optimal fin design since it's running at maximum

I also could not be arsed to manually alter the fan speed every time

[Roobubba]

If they're on the appropriate PWM header of your motherboard, you don't need to.

Incidentally, I use a Prolimatech Megahalems CPU cooler coupled with an Apache (or perhaps 2...) 120mm fans. I never hear the CPU. The graphics card is quite noisy, but I don't mind when I'm playing games. I wouldn't recommend a Lian Li case (I have one), it's over-priced, not quiet and not particularly great for cooling either. My old Chieftec Dragon case was superb, but rather out-dated and tired. I've built into a lot of cases, and probably my favourite of recent times was an Antec P180. It was just abotu big enough for a high end rig, almost completely silent, and kept things moderately cool. That rig wasn't for overclocking or gaming, but did require large amounts of CPU power for the work done on it.
Almost no manufacturers provide accurate information about how quiet their cases are (it's not just the fans, JDC, although undoubtedly quiet fans help matters!). This Lian Li I have was marketed as quiet, and it's pretty poor, in my opinion based on very similar (and in one case identical) specced systems being built in other cases. Yes, it's aluminium, but that's a gimmick in most cases - steel works just as well, and yes it does look quite good (less of a gimmick to some), but really that's the only positive thing I can come up with.

I digress...