kitekrazy1
Amazing how impractical CPU coolers are these days.  If one does not overclock stock coolers are sufficient.  If they weren't Intel and AMD would be in trouble with a lot of RMAs.

Sufficient as in keeping the CPU cool enough... to avoid problems.
What stock coolers are not great at is keeping the CPU cool *AND* being super quiet.

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. :)

Yeah, the larger CPU coolers are usually 1/4" to 1/2" too tall for a 4U Rack Case.

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.
 

It has been fun and educational to follow your build. I did my first ever build over the summer (a 6700k baby that seems so 2016 now!). It was a cool project and I will definitely do it again though was surprised at how many things do just not quite go as smoothly as I thought they would. I did it alone and mounting the water cooler was really a three handed task, plus I had to take it out and reinstall after I realized the drive bay for one of the ssds could not be accessed with it in place! That, along with screws that were too short to mount the fan to the case, side panel that took forever to get in place and motherboard mounting screws that I swear would strip if you looked at them wrong made me appreciate the art and patience needed to get the job done. Fortunately mine posted on first try and has been running beautifully. If I had too disassemble to flash the BIOS it might have gotten ugly!

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...

smallstonefan
BTW, if you are looking to make your DAW quieter you HAVE to look into the Noctua 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...

Really good fans.
 
But all "dead quite" stories should not be perceived as absolute trues. My S12A ULN (with LNA attached) is audible (for me, in my room, during silent night). It is quieter then any other case fan I tried before, but it is not absolute silent.
The only absolute silent component which potentially can create noise in my current system is MSI GTX1050Ti. It is simply not turning on fans till in heavy duty   I have made my choice based on power consumption specification, it is almost a half of 1060 and still manageable to be cooled by the air flow in the case. Not suitable for real gamers, but definitively more powerful than fan-less low-end boards.
My second success was BeQuite DarkPower. It is not audible for me when not under load, with closed case and away at least 1m (under all that conditions only, otherwise it is audible...). I have Pure Power on other PC and I had 2 Seasonic units. All of them are/was relatively noisy for me. I was thinking about fan-less and semi-silent PS, but they have one common problematic point: nominal temperature inside and I have found many reports the circuit can be noisy (my surge protector has started to disturb me once I have tried to fix it on table... may be I am just paranoid about noise...).
 
I still have long way to go, with SSDs (I have HDDs hanging on ribbon strips), CPU cooler (probably Noctua, but nominal noise level in the documentation is way to hi. 2 watter coolers I have observed was noisy. May be choosing CPU which can be cooled with case fans is the only way). And finally I hope to update the system itself, it was not top even 8 years ago.
 
But everything is "dead quite" when comparing to watter cooled server racks I have to visit now
 

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. 

Under load I can hear the fans just a bit, but I haven't started tweaking settings yet. The BIOS will let you make stepped speeds for each fan header based on a temp; not sure I'm ready to go down that rabbit hole! :)
 
But man on man is this machine FAST. I'm getting a boot in 3 to 5 seconds! I've only played Overwatch on it, but I'm in the process now of installing everything and hope to open a DAW project this weekend...

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! :)