Quiet gaming PC?

[bottlerocket]

I am planning on building a new PC here in the next 4-5 months after graduation before I get sent off to tech school for the Air Force. Right now my rig is as follows:

Antec P180 (still made, but this is one of the original runs purchased the week of release)
EVGA 780i SLI
2x EVGA 8800GT SC 512MB
4GB Mushkin Redline
2 TB combined storage on SATA HDD (all 7200RPM 64MB cache)

My biggest concerns of this build are obviously performance for gaming and noise. Right now my rig is air cooled with 4x Silverstone 120mm fans that move a TON of air, thats not counting the 80mm by the GPUs, as well as the rest of the heatsinks on it (2x GPU, northbridge and CPU).

I had contemplated liquid cooling, but I'm unsure how quiet (or loud) they are. I understand it takes the fans off of the actual heatsinks, but do I still need a shitton of fans in the case itself? Or can I get by with just one or two 120s with low CFM?

[06S197GT]

I had the same problem and solved it with a fan controller, touch screen too. It has options to control speed depending on system temp or manually for each fan.

[Mr_Fiux]

I would say stick to air cooling. If you want to do some liquid cooling its a hell of a lot more pricier, but it is quiet... until it gets warm then the fans turn on and move air unless you have them on all the time. I will do a liquid cooling mod once I have more cash in hand.

[roliath]

Take a look around Silent PC Review, its "very" easy to get a silent system with good performance and it can easily get out of hand with price. I would recommend switching all your fans to Noctua's (again look on spcr for more info) as their fans are just about the best noise/performance you can get right now. Scythe and Panaflos' are simply "too" loud compared to Noctua's in my opinion and from my testing. GPU fans, well not much you can do about that. And for your heatsink, go with the biggest baddest air cooler you can find bigger the better really, so you don't have to push a ton of air through it.

Don't bother with Water if your trying to go silent, you'll have the noise of the radiator fans and the pump running the water. On top of the other fans in your system.

Look into sound dampening material, our company issued mac pro's are loaded with this stuff that looks like Dynamat except its black and I won't lie it makes a big difference.

[BP]

Water cooling is a hassle but it's very effective. If you could fill it and forget it'd be great but the coolant evaporates, I have to top mine off every 45-60 days.

It won't help cut down on noise though if your power supply fan is louder than the processor one. Water cooled power supplies are out there but they are very expensive still.

Then you'll hear the drives and want some SSDs, which of course are also expensive. Get those to be quiet and you'll hear the video card fans.

[Tx Redneck]

Here's a how-to from Maximum PC for a quiet gaming rig.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/how-_build_silent_gaming_pc