Introducing the TW390W – Our quietest 8 Core is also our visually loudest.

Over the past year or so the Intel i9 9900K has proven itself to be a superb flagship CPU amongst our mid-range systems. With the chip having some of the best IPC (instruction per clock-cycle) results that we’ve seen on any platform and the ability to leverage up to 16 threads of that performance, it has proven the perfect fit for many studio upgrades already this year.

Indeed you would have to spend a sizable chunk of cash more in the enthusiast range above it, in order to find a chip that can stand up to this powerhouse. Needless to say, it’s proven to be one of the most popular CPUs we’ve ever supplied when it comes to audio workstations.

When I took a look at the chip at launch, we realised that cramming this many cores into a CPU of this size, there would be some questions about heat dissipation and that we would have to carefully consider the cooling. This caused us to set out and try and construct a new solution for our ultimate 9900K based system and the result is the TW390.

So what sets this apart from our other systems?

A few years back I took a look at a number of cases that had appeared that featured bottom to top cooling solutions. Heat rises and given the majority of our noise comes from fans having to force air through the case, the thought process here was one of letting nature take it’s course.

At the time the testing went well, but the available fans couldn’t prove themselves capable and quiet enough for us to introduce them into our system range. Super large fans were still relatively unheard of at that time and of the options available to us back then, none of them had been specifically developed with quietness in mind.

Fast forward back to the present and this design idea has been revisited by a few more case manufacturers and in the meantime, more and more firms have begun to concentrate on larger format fans and specifically making them more sonically pleasing.

The perfect time to take another look perhaps?

Enter Cooler Master in the shape of the MasterCase SL600M.

The case features the required bottom to top airflow with a set of 200mm mounting points at the bottom of the case. We set out to test all the fans that would fit and see which ones sonically would stand up to the task in hand.

We found a winner and they were LED-based. It was at this point that we decided that we’d run with this new case design and introduce our first low noise, windowed, illuminated and overclocked studio solution.

The cooling allows us to run the 9900K at its dual-core turbo, but we have more than enough room to overclock all cores to that same turbo speed of 4.9GHz. In real terms, this means no changing of CPU clock speeds on the fly and that ensures that the power is always there when recording. No concerns here about potentially being caught short by your system power saving as the performance is always available when you need it.

We’ve chosen a board ideal for the task as the model here features full Asus AuraSync functionality. This allows you to have full control of all the connected addressable LEDS both inside and outside of the machine. We’ve set it up with 4 strips around the case and those colour changing fans, but you can also hook up a keyboard, mouse, mouse mats, monitors and anything else that features similar compatible RGB LED’s including the Philips home Hue system and have your whole room sync with the system!

Those fans, however, are not just about the light show. After all with all this power to cool you would expect it to be working hard and generating a sizable amount of background noise. This system, however, is tuned to allow us to run the fans at under 700RPM even with the machine running at a 100% full CPU load and in conjunction with the BeQuiet! cooler inside of this machine, it remains well below our demo room noise floor of 28db/a at less than a meter away!

This is a very, very quiet machine… at least sonically. To see more check out the video showcase below.