![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , September 30, 2010
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
My "Quiet" Galaxy GeForce GTX 480 SLI Build
Take two screaming loud Galaxy GeForce GTX 480 video cards and put them into the "wrong" chassis and you will get an earful of noise. Take those same cards and put them into the "right" chassis and you end up with a system that almost quiet. Our Quiet Fermi Build that was put together with speed in mind as well.
Introduction
NVIDIA came to me a couple of months ago to show off its NV 3D Vision Surround technology which we wrote about here. What was even more impressive to me at the time was the GTX 480 SLI system that NVIDIA had brought with it. Keep in mind that at that time I had just personally spent a lot of time in an office with a GTX 480 SLI system running. One thing I know is that these GTX 480 systems are hot and loud! Or I thought I knew these systems had to be loud.
Incredibly enough, the system that NVIDIA had with it was not near as loud as the systems I had been testing and gaming. While playing through a game of Metro 2033 on NVIDIA's box it became clearly evident that the 480 cards had been quieted by something. I originally thought NVIDIA had new fans in its cards, but that was not the case. The system was not only "quiet" at idle speeds, but under full load as well. Anything you can do to quiet a GTX 480 at load is a good thing.
The Hardware
NVIDIA informed me a chassis from Silverstone was owed the credit for the 480 silence, not new fans. The chassis was the Silverstone Raven RV02. You can buy the RV02 at Amazon for $160 and is eligible for Free Prime shipping. The thing that makes this RV02 chassis special is the fact that Silverstone has done something so elementary that at first glance it seems sort of stupid. There is certainly a method to the madness though.
In late 2008 / early 2009 Silverstone released its first "90 degree motherboard" chassis called the Raven RV01. The thing is sort of ugly and just looks to not be setup well. I have never seen one first hand, and I never heard about this RV01 until I had my hands on the RV02 so I may be far off in my judgments of the RV01 by simply looking at pictures. What I do know is that the Silverstone Raven RV02 represents a sure evolution of the RV01 design with a back to enthusiast basics design scheme, inside and out.
The big feature of the RV01 and RV02 design is that Silverstone has simple turned the traditional ATX motherboard position 90 degrees clockwise. Now instead of your IO panel being at the back of your box, it is now on the top and Silverstone has a nice tray design that keeps all of your cable and wiring out of the way. But that is neither here nor there.
Now that our motherboard is mounted as such, we no longer have cards mounted horizontally in our case. Now we can install the cards vertically and with that Silverstone has now changed the direction of our airflow in our chassis from bottom to top instead of side to side. Anyone that passed 6th grade science knows that hot air likes to rise and that an upward vertical airflow would be beneficial to a computer case.
Along with this new upward vertical airflow, Silverstone has made the RV02 a positive pressure case. Now that we are moving air bottom to top instead of front to back, Silverstone has mounted three high volume and nearly silent 180mm fans in the bottom of the chassis pushing somewhere around 90CFM. There is one 120mm exhaust fan in the top of the case.
What we found out was that this positive pressure fed our two Galaxy GeForce GTX 480 video cards a great amount of ambient temperature air. Because of this cooler ambient air supply, we saw our fan speeds stay lower on our Galaxy cards, making these cards much quieter.
Here is some data that we see under stressful gaming conditions with our Galaxy GTX 480 cards.
Kyle's Quiet Fermi Build
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In the above three pictures you can see a good overview of the Silverstone RV02 chassis. If you would like to see some better pictures, you can see a nice gallery at Silverstone's RV02 site. In the second picture you can see three switches at the top of the case that let you vary the intake fan speeds. I leave mine at "Hi" setting and these are not noisy at all. The standout of course are the three huge 180mm fans at the bottom of the chassis. Take note of how thick the fan housings are. While the fans are generally "low speed" the fan blades have a heavy depth and pitch that move a lot of air. All of these fans have filters that are easily removable.
In the first picture above you can see the filtered intake for where our PSU fan intake will mount to the rear of our chassis. The second picture is looking up from the bottom of the chassis. And what else do we need for a build like this? An incredible HardOCP Silver Award winning Silverstone ST1500. This bad boy runs about $379 at Amazon with Prime Shipping.
I bought these drives on HardForum FS/FT many months ago and had not gotten around to using these so I decided this would be a good place for three 2TB drives in a 6TB RAID 0 configuration. There is a nice three-drive rack supplied with isolation mounts. You can remove all the drives from the front panel as well so you don't have to pull cards after the build is complete if you want to trade hard drives.
At the back Silverstone has put a place to mount a single SSD. I had two Corsair SSD here that I wanted to use so we did a bit of modding to the supplied mount (I had an extra mount from a second RV02 case.) and then put a tab of double sided tape into action to further secure our SSD, although I am sure it is not going anywhere.
It seemed important to purchase a BD and HD-DVD player combo many moons ago. Now it is just an overpriced and glorified DVD drive, but it does look nice installed. The RV02 has tool-less 5.25" bay slots that operate easily and secure the drive well.
Here is where we go a bit astray over what the final build ended up looking like. Above you can see I was using a passive Dynatron heatsink for our Core i7 980X processor. And it worked fine, but seeing as my main intent was to quiet the GTX 480 video cards, I later changed this and I will show you further along in the build.
Also in the above two lines of images you see our Silverstone ST1500 power supply in place. All the cabling is easily strung through the back of unit leaving everything in eyeshot nice and tidy not to mention leaving the unit's airflow unencumbered.
The motherboard we were using at that time was a Gigabyte X58A-UD7. I had issues with it seeing all 12GB of Corsair Dominator GT RAM installed and I ended up sending the motherboard back to Gigabyte to diagnose the issue. I instead went with a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 in the final build.
The fine folks over at Galaxy supplied me with two GTX 480 video cards. Now NVIDIA had given me the test system that I explained above was so quiet. To be perfectly honest, that system was so quiet compared to what I was used to, I was bit suspicious that the NVIDIA supplied cards might have been "special." Anyway, I wanted off-the-shelf GTX 480 cards so I reached out to Galaxy and it happily supplied us with the cards.
The UD7 board has this optional chipset cooler that is not on the UD5 which I used for the final build. I would have had to remove it anyway as I have a new Creative X-Fi sound card that will not fit in the PCIe x1 slot with the cooler installed.
You might remember the series of PCIE bus articles we ran recently. Above is where you see that original question emanating from. I did not want to put those two GTX 480 cards next to each other but splitting these up meant that I had to do a x16/x8 SLI setup. As we all learned, splitting them up into a x16/x8 SLI configuration means dick to real world gaming.
The one downside to having that big video card all the way to the edge in this system is that I had to make sure and have flush mounting SATA power and data plugs. As you can see the card is pressed right up against the drive plugs. As long as you plan for that, which I did not, you will not be slowed down at all. And the last shot is to prove to Galaxy that we actually used its cards in the build and did not sell those on eBay. ;)
This build was not a 2 day project. I was not in need of the system, so I actually was running the system specifically for gaming in my office next to my then daily use work/gaming box. So over a period of a couple of months I was able to tune things exactly the way I wanted them.
Here you see where we now have a Corsair H50 CPU cooler in place. I did not like the 980X passive cooler in the chassis. My one goal here is to get as much ambient air to my video cards that I can and leaving that warm air in the chassis was not sitting well with me so I installed the H50 with the fan set up exhausting the chassis. I had put a H70 in this build for about a week, but the H70 was simply too loud for me even at 1600RPM. At 1600RPM it did not really cool that much better than the H50 and the H50 is silent in this build so the H50 seemed to be the best choice for me and it will still keep up with that 980X processor at 4GHz.
So this where I was at when I originally thought I was done. You will also notice the change in DIMMs. These are Corsair Dominator GT DIMMs I had in the box that at the time of this shot. Further above you will see another set of Corsair RAM that I was using with the passive cooler since I needed a lower profile DIMM to fit under the processor cooler. In the pictures you see below you will see another 12GB set of Corsair Dominator DIMMs that ended up in the box at 1600MHz. The final set came out of my previous box.
Final Build Pictures
I pulled the system out today and took some up to the minute pictures of it.
You will see another hard drive included in the system which is mounted on some old steel rails I had which I need to replace with another Silverstone bay. I did something we have been warning people off of for years.....installing your old OS install in a new system. I actually cloned the drive from my old box to a new drive with Acronis, and with Windows 7 64-bit, it worked just fine. We have come a long way in terms of OS in the last couple of years. Still I was just moving from an X58 chipset to an X58 chipset so I figured it would work. Your mileage may vary and if you are going to try this yourself, I would suggest making a backup before moving forward.
I have also installed a GTX 260 as alluded to above in the temperature and fan data. I put this in when Mafia II came out as I wanted to see if PhysX really made any difference in the game, and it did make it more enjoyable....not enjoyable enough for me to get on board with proprietary physics API, but I need to keep up with what is going on.
You will likely notice an awful lot of cabling hanging out of the box. Given the immense amount of heat coming out of this box I wanted to get it as far away from my feet as I could. A trip to Monoprice netted me three 10' 24AWG Dual Link DVI cables and a set of 6' USB extensions. This allowed me to move it farther away from my three display setup. Overkill on the DVI cables? Damn right, but on the cheap.
Finally above you can see the air filters that are in the system as well. I wish they would be positioned so that we could remove them without taking the door off, once the door is off, these are easy to access. I have also made sure and placed the RV02 on a sheet of Plexiglas so that the airway on the bottom stays as unrestricted as possible.
My Own Sound Proof Booth
We have been telling you since Fermi's introduction into the market that it was hot and loud. With the Raven RV02 chassis, I have found an answer to loud. The fact of the matter is that the Galaxy GTX 480 SLI under full load it not distracting or even bothersome during gaming in terms of hearing it. Even with open back headphones you will very likely not be able to hear the video card fans unless you are listening for those. I was playing games with no sound at all, and surely I could hear the GTX 480 fans, but at the speed these fans are ramping up to inside the Raven RV02 I did not find it bothersome or grinding on my experience at all. Bottom line is that the Silverstone RV02 made a big difference in how I view my own Fermi cards.
My Own Nuclear Power Plant
As mentioned, I have spent a lot of time with Fermi over the last few months, but nothing prepared me for what it was like having two of these GPUs sitting at my feet. Oh my friggin god these things are hot! I can't really find the words to tell you how hot these cards are. Given the excellent ventilation that our RV02 chassis is providing, it is not uncommon to see exhaust temperatures at 150F with the ambient being around 78F in my office. Running these 480 cards at full load for a period of 30 minutes has the ability to raise the temperature in my office a few degrees easily. I can certainly feel the 480 exhaust pouring out from under my desk while gaming. Actually I can even feel the heat with the box simply at a 2D desktop. Even though I have gotten the box a bit further from me, I am still thinking about building a little heat shield so it directs the heat behind my back rather than at my side.
Below I took some photos to try and illustrate the issue.
In these last two pictures above you can see a picture of an infrared thermometer. What it is showing is the temperature of the surface of my desk, directly over the RV02 and GTX 480 SLI after about 25 minutes of gaming. The surface temperature of the desk is 103F. With its previous position, my Ratpadz XT would get hot along with my mouse and make my hand sweat while gaming. Right now while the system is idling the surface temperature of my desk above the system is 88F, with ambient temperature being 78F. At idle I can easily pinpoint hotspots on the top grill of the case at 110F. The Silverstone RV02 did a lot to quiet the cards, but there is little that it can do to make the GPUs more efficient.
The Bottom Line
The Silverstone RV02 made a big difference in how I view Fermi, actually it changed the way I hear GTX 480. If you are doing a new system build I think this Silverstone RV02 is very worthy of your short list when it comes to buying a new computer case whether you have Fermi or not. I have another system build to do here at home and even though it is not going to be a Fermi build, it is still going to be in an RV02 chassis. Once I experienced the cooling the RV02 delivers, it just makes sense for it to be the de facto standard at my house. You can pick one up at at Amazon for $160 and is eligible for Free Prime shipping.
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