Best Of

Man, if I had two displays that didn't match on my desk something would break in my fragile psyche. Monitor features and specs have gone pretty wild. It used to be, I got to store, pick a size, am I a graphics pro that needs perfect color, yes / no, this is the one... Now refresh rates, G Sync, Free Sync, IPS, TLS, TN, pixel response rate, trying to figure out if anyone reports a true contrast ratio. Shopping for a monitor can be a challenge.

G Sync will inflate the monitor price. It's an NVidia proprietary technology. It works well in situations where you have a variable framerate and screen tearing that you would usually remedy by turning on V Sync in the game properties. G Sync and Free Sync on the AMD side takes that idea and gets the monitor and the GPU talking to each other to sync frames so you don't need to enable it in software, and it eliminates certain stutter issues that make playing in V Sync sometimes feel jerky. Just depends how serious you are about the 3D titles that are going to push your hardware. If you are, it may be a worthwhile feature, if your more casual about it, you could save a few euro skipping that feature. A lot is said about higher refresh rate, resolutions past full HD, but for a two display setup on that card, I'd run two 1080P monitors at 60Hz and it will be great. 4K makes more sense on a large single display. I'm not sold on 144 Hz monitors changing the world, I've seen it in action, I'm sure if you were an ultra competitive gamer you might see a marginal benefit, for guys like us, a screen that can adequately refresh itself 60 times a second is plenty. IPS monitors tend to look better, have much better off center color performance and generally speaking are the panels vendors pay a little more attention to, they respond a tad slower, but unless you are a tournament gamer you are not going to notice. If you can budget it, IPS will give you a better panel. TN panels respond faster and can be a pretty good value. If I were you, I'd really think about treating myself to a pair of displays. Get two, nice and evenly lit and uniform looking going across your desk. I work in an environment where we recently did a life cycle of users displays. #1 complaint is when we leave the old one on the right and don't give them two at once. It looks weird, you can't ever match the brightness, the look of the screen, once you have two nice uniform monitors you will never go back, and seriously, it's a ten year investment now, the current crop of LCD monitors never seem to fail so it's a good solid investment.

Yeah, Water cooling isn't always quiet cooling. It can be, but my experience is the pump noise will be the loudest thing going once you start loading it. For me, it was about achieving a look. It was a shallow selection because I thought it looked pretty cool. It does a good job, the pump does not bother me much, but something to keep in mind. I had a corsair unit that could raise hell when it got a little warm. I might look for a super quiet air cooler. Noctua makes some premium stuff, if you don't mind brown in your PC (I do). I have used a ton of coolers from Arctic over the years, typically what I go to for friends and family builds and I swear they have this nice kind of nice sound signature, hard to explain, you can hear them a little when they reach load, but they don't vibrate, cause any hum of any kind, they just move air. Cheap and good - https://www.amazon.de/ARCTIC-Freezer-Prozessorkühler-Multkompatibel-voraufgetragener/dp/B0048F64DU/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1514740406&sr=1-1&keywords=arctic+freezer+13

My experience with GPU coolers is that the single fan configurations are rarely the most quiet under load. There are some exceptions, NVidia has actually made a few decent low sound reference blower style coolers, but typically what's quiet and dissipates heat away from the GPU best is usually an open shroud double fan cooler of some kind. Asus makes some really great quiet designs. Honestly, any 1060 should not be too bad, that card is fairly efficient, they have done a good job to tune the software fan curves to try and keep the noise levels down. There are so man variants, just have to look online. Tomshardware and pcper.com both do some sound testing. What case is your gear living inside?