Jim nailed it - I went with this behemoth of a cooler to be cool AND silent. I am stunned at just how quiet the Noctura fans are!
 
The case lid won't actually fit though - I may have a hole cut out and mount a speaker grill or something on the top for the cooler to sit under. :)

Even with a mid tower some of the coolers are too big.  One reason I used a liquid cooler.  For all practical purposes my new build is "dead" quiet and CPU temperatures idle around 25C and rarely get over low 30's according to CPUID Monitor.
 

filtersweep - thanks for your story I don't feel so alone! :)
 
Happy to say I have it home and put in the GTX1080 and everything is running fine. Boots in about 5 seconds, but I think I can cut that in half with some BIOS tweeks; I've never seen anything boot this fast.
 
I have a bit more to do and will document the final touches, but I am off to the races! The chicken/egg issue with a BIOS update being needed to use my CPU sucked, but I was fortunate to have some resources to address it. Some of the Gigabyte boards now support Q-Flash+, which can flash your BIOS with no CPU or memory installed! In 5 years, that's what I'm going for! lol
 
BTW, if you are looking to make your DAW quieter you HAVE to look into the Noctura fans. Between those fans and the fact I have no traditional hard drive installed, you can't even tell this thing is running using your ears! My old build is really noisy in comparison...

azslow, I do not have a separate video card, using the Intel Video in the i7 6700K.
The case is a BeQuiet Silent Base 600.  The liquid cooler is Deepcool Captain 120EX.  I use a Samsung EVO 850 SSD.  Putting my ear to the front or top of the case, I cannot hear any fan noise. 

OK I thought I'd wrap this up...
 
Once the firmware was updated all of my hardware seemed to work fine. I was very nervous when it came time to updating the firmware on my Apollo to support Thunderbolt. I originally bought this as an open box and someone had enabled the Thunderbolt card, which meant it wouldn't work with Firewire. I had to use my daughter's Mac to connect to it and reflash. I wasn't sure how this would end up.
 
The first time I installed the UAD drivers my Apollo was not recognized. I rebooted into the Bios and changed a few Thunderbolt options in the Bios and tried again. This time, the Apollo was recognized and received a prompt to update the firmware when I ran the UAD install. The firmware update went smooth as silk, and both the Apollo and my two UAD Octo PCEi cards were found and setup perfectly. I haven't had a chance to give this a full workout, but so far everything is running great!
 
A few software hiccups to work out. 
 
1. My Sonarworks still is broken. I followed the process to un-register my plugin on my old machine but I am now waiting for a new key to install Reference, headphone calibration, and system wide. I don't see any issues with this once I get my key(s) but had I known it would take a few days, I would have started that process sooner; I can't mix without it...
 
2. BFD3 doesn't recognize all of my add-ons in the Library drop downs for Presets or Kits. They are all there, but I can't sort by kit - which is a huge problem. BFD tech support told me the solution is to re-install all of my kits! :( Man, I was hoping to avoid that and thought that having them all installed on an external drive would solve that. I'm very disappointed that this happened as I have a LOT of kits. I hope to wrap up the re-install of them all today (fingers crossed).
 
3. I can't get Blue Cats gain suite to be recognized in Ableton Live. This sucks because my project I'm trying to wrap up uses a number of these, and I need to find the gain values if I'm going to switch controls. Not sure what to do here - but may have to boot up my old machine, open the project, write down the gain values, and switch components.
 
4. I think Izotope has issues with their installers. I had problems on my old machine but hoped that my new machine would solve that. DDLY and Morphius just won't install, and I have had issues with Nuetron and Ozone. Half tempted to sell those, but hope to get them working.
 
That's it! Well, and putting this thing in my desk and cleaning up the bomb that went off in the studio during this process. The speed of this machine STUNS me - plugins load sooooo fast, as do libraries. Everything is on SSD drives except my Dropbox drive. I have Dropbox pro which is 1TB and I use about 850MB of that so far, so that sits on a traditional spin drive. I might change that out for an SSD just for the noise factor. I chose the quietest GTX1080 video card I could find, and I'm happy to report it is very quiet.
 
Oh, on the topic of noise - this machine is QUIET! The front 120mm and the 120mm on the cooling tower or almost inaudible. The back 80mm fans stay off most of the time, but when the motherboard fires them up they are still super quiet. Since all but Dropbox are on SSDs, there is no drive noise. And the boot time to login is roughly 5 seconds.
 
Here are a few more pictures.
 
1. Here is the GTX 1080 video card with my two UAD Octo PCIe cards. Not much room left. The leftmost high speed PCEi slot is disabled due to the NVMS M.2 memory boot drive. That's OK because the UAD cards are PCIe 1x. The two blue cables you see below go to a back panel I installed that has two USB 3 ports. So I have the extra two in back, and the two in front plus the ports that come in the standard back panel.
 

 
2. Below you can see the mess of cables that are right in front of the CPU cooler. If I did this again, I would probably by 5.24" adapters and mounted all of the drives in the far right drive bay. The spacing for the cables was really tight here (I cut myself a few times messing around here) and this blocks some airflow for the CPU. This doesn't bother me enough to redo though! :)
 

 
3. The final build! In the old days I would spend another hour zip tieing cables and cleaning things up, but I'm ready to be done (for now). Perhaps when I upgrade something in the future I'll do this, thought I'm not seeing a need to upgrade anything for a year or two.
 

 
If I think of anything else of value I'll post it, and I'm happy to answer any questions but I'm calling this build officially done! :)

I finally got Ozone working. It took awhile with a few steps, but basically rather than install the Music Product Bundle (which puts stuff all over the place) I installed each component one by one so I could specify where to install the VSTs. I also deactivated some Izotope licenses on my iLok and only activated the MP bundle.
 
DDLY and Morphius still won't work, but I can live without them.
 
My project plan really helped! I probably have 10 hours into re-installs but since I had a plan and I prepared ahead of time, it went really well overall. I think I should backup my boot drive before doing anything else... :)

I am sort of wishing I had stayed challenge/response with the Izotope products... :/

You're scaring me Tom!!! :)
 
Overall, not too difficult for this one. Had the motherboard not needed a Bios update this would have been pretty darn smooth.
 
The back panel USB3 doesn't seem reliable - I might pull that out. Otherwise, I am rocking!
 
Next up is to fire up my big project that caused me to update in the first place and see how it behaves. Been a bit nervous for that but I'm ready.

It's important to note that prior to Z77 motherboards, literally ALL USB-3 ports were provided via 3rd-party controllers.  USB-3 had not yet been integrated into the Intel chipset.
This is the reason for many compatibility issues with USB-2 devices.
Liken the situation to using a non-TI chipset Firewire controller with a Firewire audio interface.
It opens the door to compatibility issues...

OK, fired up my big ass project and all plugins loaded! I did have to re-choose my Sonarworks Adams profile, but that was easy. 
 
The project actually runs with buffers set to 256! I was running at 1024 before, and still getting some stuttering at times and had to run at 2048 to make it solid. Moving the buffers up to 512 and it is running rock solid so far!
 
Wow, I am blown away. 

fireberd
Even with a mid tower some of the coolers are too big.  One reason I used a liquid cooler.  For all practical purposes my new build is "dead" quiet and CPU temperatures idle around 25C and rarely get over low 30's according to CPUID Monitor.
 

Always been freaked out about liquid cooling. If it's set up right, it does an AMAZING job. But MAN, it's pricey!! And if something goes wrong, the potential for everything to be fried is huge.
It seems like it should really be doable for WAY cheaper at equal or nearing quality, but the kits that are out there are so danged expensive that I'll gladly trade off a little bit of noise and a little warmer CPU for keeping my wallet not-too-slim, especially since I'm not recording in a very "sound-sterile" environment anyway. But I suppose one can't risk hundreds of dollars worth of electronic equipment on a cheap jerry-rigged cooling system.
 
I've been thinking about a system where the PC is elevated a bit, and a Stirling engine would react to the heat from the processor - somehow - and that engine would then be used to draw the water through the tubes into the cooling system - helped a bit by gravity - and then be pushed back upwards into the system. Perhaps the cool-water side could also be used as the "cool air"-side of the Stirling engine, producing an even greater difference between the hot and cold points. Of course then the system would probably need a small kickstart when booting every time.
 
It probably wouldn't work immediately, and it'd take a LOT of tweaking, but if it could be made to work it seems like it'd be a great, cool-looking semi-mechanical system. Question is whether it'd be cost-effective.
Discuss.
(Not meaning to hijack the thread! Just wanna see what someone thinks, as I've been thinking about this for about 2 weeks now!)

Gonna move this into another topic. I'd like to discuss it a bit.

fireberd
I'm not referring to the huge "water" coolers with external pumps/reservoirs hoses that go outside the case, etc.  What I'm referring to is the small internal liquid coolers (basically use auto anti-freeze liquid coolant) with a small radiator and fans and a small coolant pump on the CPU heatsink.

I think I've seen those... you're talking about the ones that appear to have two tubes, a fan, and a small pad that fits over the CPU? How do they work? Where does the fan actually mount?

smallstonefan

 
I have on more bang mark and I finally figured out it was my mouse. The mouse works fine, but I want ZERO bang marks in the devices.

What's a bang mark?

The "bang mark" must be a relatively new term.  
I worked as a programmer years ago at NASA Goddard Space Center, and then later on IBM "big iron". 

Has to be older than 1991 when the poem "Waka Waka Bang Splat" was written by Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . > . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED
 
I first heard about bang and others from the poem while working with Unix in the early 90s.