For most of you out there, the primary goal of building a custom gaming PC is related to performance: benchmarking, overclocking, gaming, and hardware enthusiasm are all aspects of this. As we discussed in our recent post about how CPU coolers work, more performance generates more heat, requiring hardware manufacturers to invest in better cooling technology.

The major downside to high-end, no-limits cooling is increased noise, but you can overcome loud fans and get the same, if not better cooling performance by considering incremental and optimized upgrades to your cooling setup. Given the right tools, it's not too hard to reduce the noise of your screaming rig to a low hum that you won't even hear when gaming.

This silent gaming PC guide will cover quiet case fans, bearing types, quiet CPU coolers, GPU cooling upgrades, and tips on how to make your PC less noisy. We will not be covering open loop liquid cooling (custom liquid loops) in this article due to its complexity -- that's best left for a future guide.

Hey everyone -- thought I'd do something a bit different. Rather than write a lengthy, highly-researched article (like the recent CPU cooler analysis and Star Citizen posts), I figured I'd take some time to share my upcoming project with you all.

I'm working on building my own mini-gaming HTPC that will serve as a DVR and console replacement; the primary objective is to consolidate the mess of boxes presently in the living room. The GN team is working to write a comprehensive guide on the subject of building a custom DVR / HTPC, but in order to do so, we must first make the journey ourselves. I'll be logging all of my progress regularly in quick updates, and once we've got all the kinks worked out, we'll post the full guide with all the necessary resources to do this yourselves. My hope is to save you all the challenges I will inevitably face by uncovering them myself.

SSDs are a hot item right now. In our interview with Star Citizen's Chris Roberts, we were told that he sees SSD and multicore utilization coming to the forefront for PC-exclusive games, and it makes sense. Not only will an SSD decrease the load times and increase fluidity of experience for games that stream data (heavily dominated by 4K I/O transactions streamed to memory), they also significantly decrease boot time and make for a more responsive OS.

This Holiday / Xmas SSD Buyer's Guide lists the best SSDs of 2012 (and the hangers-on from 2011) that we've worked with; the drives below have been picked for high-end enthusiast users, everyday / gaming users, and budget users.

We briefly covered CPU cooler engineering in our Tuniq Tower 120 review, and in continuing that topic, this post will discuss various cooler designs that pervade the market and which are best for you.

Picking the best CPU cooler / heatsink for your gaming rig is important if you're planning to keep things quiet or overclock your system; we'll cover noise level, cooling efficiency, and top-level thermal dissipation strategies for aftermarket coolers in this article.

In addition to our own research and benchmarking, we reached out to Edmund Li of Zalman for help understanding some cooler design elements, so a big thanks to him for his time and knowledge. Let's cover how a heatsink works before anything else.

This one's a classic case of "old but good."

The Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme first launched right around the Nehalem days, and despite its age, is still ranked as one of the top CPU coolers presently available. After our recent look at NZXT's brand new Respire series, we figured we'd start building our benchmark database with some stellar performers.

In this Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme review, we'll benchmark the cooling performance, provide a video hands-on, and compare a few CPU coolers/heatsinks against each other. We also plan to bring up heatsink and cooler design philosophy, hopefully helping you make purchasing decisions.