Water Cooling

This is true. Higher pitched sound (likes fans) are more audible to me than lower-pitched sounds (like pumps) which is a result of too many metal gigs in my youth!

 

That's funny, It's the opposite for me That's why I like Noctua's fan, because they're more low pitch in my ears than the competition. The Alphcool pump is also low pitch. But the cooler master on the fury is pretty high pitch, that what I ear the most (and I've a 2nd gen "quiet" pump").

Anyway, the point is sound level is not just about dB

 

I'm using AIO water coolers. I for awhile had a box that sat outside my machine and I ran copper pipe to and from it with a bunch of radiators inside that box back to my pc. However AIO have picked up the burden of that.

AIO are almost silent if you do it right. You have smaller ones like the h60 or h70 that will have no problem cooling a cpu even with a smaller fan. The trick is investing a bit more and moving from a 120mm/140mm radiator to a 240 mm radiator and putting silent fans like these https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Prem...=1470545332&sr=8-6&keywords=corsair+140mm+fan

I have a corsair h100 which I bought about 4 years ago to cool a bulldozer its now cooling an i7 3770 and it works fine. The fans rarely go on and its typicly during gaming.

I have an h60 on my radeon 290 with a push pull setup and that never goes past 65 during gaming and is almost silent.


I'm going to upgrade my case at some point in the future so that I can have 2 240mm + AIO systems in it. 1 for the cpu and 2 for the crossfire or sli video cards.

If you want as close to a silent system as possible water cooling is your best bet. If i'm just surfing the web the only fan I hear is the one that is blowing across my hardrives and if my mechanical drive spins up for whatever reason I can hear it over all the other fans in my case.

 

You have a good pump. Sometime, even on the same serie, users have differents pump quality, and some are noisers than others.

With that said, I love my Alphacool Eisbaer 360 with 3*noctua PF-F12 iPPC 2000PWM. Even with the pump running at full speed, I can't hear it. Mostly because it's covered by my Radeon Fury X pump... And with a big rad like that, and good static pressure, the fans are running about 50% in OCCT, a bit less when I encode in handbrake, or folding, I don't hear them much either.
Damn I love my new case and cooling system

 

yea , I still think the water cooling pump noise is a non factor compared to having all those different fan coolers.

 

Yeah I can get that. For some, fan noises are less irritating that pump noises, and vice versa

Either way, their are a lot of solutions on the market, so, everybody can find the most fitting cooling system for his taste.