Build a silent RIG

Everything you need to get some peace and quiet while retaining your PC ’s performance.

Of all the things you think about when building a PC, the noise it makes isn’t usually at the top of the list. The search for more power can often leave you with a big box of noisy parts, and the way your bespoke machine sounds may only become an issue after you’ve got it up and running for the first time.

You may be designing a machine with silence as an afterthought, or peace and quiet could be your highest priority. Either way, silence is an important consideration when building a system intended for use as the hub of a home theatre, a rig assembled for use as a server, or even just a system that’ll keep humming while you’re living or sleeping in the same room. Whatever the reason behind it, it is possible to achieve a serene machine.

Toshiba HG6 512GB

Toshiba makes its mark on the performance end of the SSD market.

Sometimes, simplicity is lovely. Who makes this SSD? Toshiba. Whose 19nm MLC NAND flash memory makes up its precious bits? Toshiba’s. Who makes the controller? Samsu… no, it’s Toshiba. Good thing for the company, then, that it’s not a bad piece of kit at all.

Despite Toshiba having bought OCZ seemingly as a good name for consumer-level stuff, the HG6 drives sold under its own name are still a nice option for the higher end of the general market, where the roughly £250 price tag is fairly normal. Yes, it’s almost £100 more than you can get Crucial’s 512GB MX100 SSD for, but it’s a lot less than you pay for the same size Plextor M6e PCIe SSD.

Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB

The time of affordable 1TB SSDs is upon us. Well, affordable-ish…

The SSD conundrum has always been whether to sacrifice size for speed. Do you spend the same cash on a smaller, faster SSD or a capacious, slower hard drive? Recently, reasonably affordable 1TB SSDs have meant this doesn’t have to be such a hard choice, although ‘reasonably affordable’ still nudges £400 in this case.

Still, if 960GB of flash storage is what you want, then Kingston will provide it. The SSDNow v310 ‘range’ isn’t so much a range as just this one drive, lording it over the 480GB maximum size that the SSDNow v300 range hit. The unit packs a Phison 3108 controller alongside nearly 1TB of storage all into a 7mm chassis, and it’s available to buy alone or in an upgrade pack complete with cables and a caddy for your old drive.

Gigabyte Brix Gaming

Half the size of some graphics cards, this tiny PC is packing a GTX 760.

Miniature PCs used to be tiny systems with correspondingly tiny power, but that’s no longer true: this latest small form-factor PC from Cyberpower is packed with top-class hardware.

Star of the show is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760 – a full-fat graphics card that’s somehow been squeezed into this tiny chassis. There are two versions of the GTX 760, and Gigabyte has opted for the version with a narrower 192-bit memory bus but a more generous 3GB of RAM. That’s not enough for this machine, though – that memory amount has been doubled by Gigabyte, so it’s got 6GB in tow.

Iiyama ProLite B2888UHSU

Yet another TN 4K panel? Yup, but this is the best of the bunch.

Seen one, seen ‘em all. It’s funny how quickly what was initially spectacular becomes borderline routine. We speak, of course, of the brave new army of 28-inch 4K PC monitors with TN panels.

Six months ago, a 4K pixel grid (on the PC that means 3,840 x 2,160 pixels) would set you back several thousand pounds. Now it’s yours for under £500 and no longer seems nearly as exotic. And all of them, as far as we know, are based on the same TN panel.

It’s an excellent panel that significantly raises TN’s game for colours and contrast. Only the limited viewing angles give the game away immediately, but in return you get much lower cost than IPS technology and faster pixel response.

Asus Maximus VII Formula

Whatever you do, don’t mention Haswell-E. Or that M.2 port…

Hey, have you guys heard about Intel’s awesome new Haswell-E processor and the X99 platform? You know, the cheap six-core CPU with an unlocked multiplier that drops into a big, fat LGA2011-v3 socket with oodles of PCI Express lanes and almost infinite memory bandwidth thanks to quadchannel DDR4?

Kind of makes the idea of dropping a ton of cash on a board with Intel’s mainstream LGA1150 socket look like folly. Enter the Asus Maximus VII Formula, a bleeding-edge Z97 board for LGA1150 chips that’s yours for just £250. Whoops!