Over the years I have been a pretty tweaker, looking to eeck out every ounce of performance I could get from my PC. However for the last 5 or so years my focus has shifted. I became more concerned with making my PC quiet. I didn’t want to not hear the PC, even under load.
I could have gone the route of custom liquid loops, but I love to tinker so that means replacing parts would be harder. Also, custom loops come with a pretty big cost increase and then the hassle of the build itself.
RAW performance is a none issue for me as I have access to some pretty high-end hardware. I am running a 9800X3D with a 9070XT, so I get some great performance for my gaming at stock. What I found was even a little reduction in performance, however, could go a long way to helping me reach a quieter computer.
Let’s start with the CPU. I like to run SFF or smaller builds, hate AIOs for cooling and prefer top-down coolers. (They cool not just the CPU but the surrounding power systems and the RAM) This means I do not have the cooling muscle that others have with AIOs or big tower coolers.
To get the quiet operation I want this means I need to lower the power draw. I hate all that tweaking for a full under-volt, so I go the easy route and turn on ECO mode. This drops the stock power draw (typically as much as 95 watts in gaming) and puts a limit of 65 watts.
While this can limit performance in all cores heavy workloads, in typical gaming scenarios the power limiting is less of a factor. The chip is very energy efficient and does not push this limit hard for most games. The few it does the actual performance drop is lower than you would expect.
The result on temps however is amazing. I went from 85C in Cinebench to 75C and in gaming the drop was from the mid 70C range to the high 60C range. This temperature drop is a big deal because it means the noise level drops off significantly. I can lower fan speeds and still maintain a lower temperature.
What about the GPU? For this I just lower the Power Limit. For the 9070XT I find -10 to -15 works well. This results in a lower clock speed and lower benchmarks however you would be surprised at how little of a hit the system takes in day-to-day gaming performance. This has the bigger impact of dropping the Hotspot temp by as much as 10C in many cases. Again, this lowers the fan speed and thus lowers the noise.
How much does this affect real world performance? Well for gaming not nearly as much as you might think. I have never seen a single benchmark performance drop of more than 4%. To put this in perspective, most of my games, at 4K high detail can hit 100 FPS with 1% lows above 60 FPS with no issues. A loss of 4% is 4 FPS at this range. In other words, you would not notice.
In 3Dmark and many other games the difference is even lower. In Steel Nomad the difference between stocked and tweaked for me is less than 2% (closer to 1%) Yet the temp difference is around 10C cooler with the tweaks, so much QUIETER.
I know this approach will not win any benchmark competitions. However, these are practical, simple tweaks. They seldom cause stability issues (I have never encountered one), They lower power consumption of your PC, reduce temperatures and this means less noise. All this while using a $30 CPU cooler (Thermalright AXP120-X67) with the fans at lower speeds.
Next time you get the itch to make your PC run a little cooler, or quieter; maybe give this approach a shot. You might be surprised at just how much impact it can have.
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