Hmmm, it seems that a contradiction in goals has crept into the argument, with acceptable noise vs acceptable performance. The level of "acceptance" varies from person to person, and depends on one's overclocking goals.
knipex has just stated though that absolute silence is more important to him than cooling performance. In such a scenario absolute performance is always going to take a back-seat purely because one is not "allowed" to fit even moderately powered fans on the radiator, nor use any of the stronger/noisier pumps. Such goals are fine so long as the system is stable and meets ones stated goals, but to claim that it is within 1-2C of a high-end system without any hard evidence is stretching faith more than just a little.
Nothing wrong with wanting adequate silent cooling, but surely one has to admit that it is a different set of goals to a more performance oriented system. Claiming that it is within 1-2C of a more performance focused system without evidence of such seems to me to be more a case of wishful thinking.
P.S. IMO, hard-drives don't need to be cooled with anything more than a low speed Papst 80mm NGL fan, which is what I use in my server case. That fan pushes a pathetic 19CFM or so in free-flow mode, is absoutely silent when in-case, and even when thrashing the disks (Seagate Barracuda's) they barely get warm to the touch. I can assure you that the disk drives are making more noise than the fan. For disk drives that do suffer from heat problems, these are typically noisy things too all by themselves.
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