Up grade

[Jim Baxter]

My system is getting close to 18 months of age and I am thinking of a couple of items for upgradeing.

First, my unit sits on my desktop about 18 inches from me and is a little noisy with all the fans
wirring away. I have it there as I am in and out of the CD/DVD drives and the front USB port frequently.

Is there a quieter case than the P-180?
I have noticed that most if not all of the O.E.M. machines are almost silent.

I am also thinking of new optical drives using lightscribe technology and maybe bump the memory up to 2 gig.

Any other suggestions or thoughts.

Thanks

[flanzig1]

Instead of looking for a different case, start thinking about replacing the case and CPU fans with ones that use ball bearigs instead of sleeve bearings and look for ones that have a low dB sound rating.

[drew.]

These silverstone case fans are supposedly great for cooling and have low noise levels at 17dba at the lowest setting. Also comes with an adjuster so when its just idling you can tone them down.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811999344

[Mesaeus]

You can also cut down on the noise by simply slowing down the fans a bit. You can use either premade fan cables that do this or (like I do all the time) simply connect the 12V wire of the fan to the red wire of a molex plug (which is 5V). It's a huge slowdown but a noisy fan will usually still turn fast enough to move a decent amount of air. Also check your motherboard with a program like Speedfan, I can smoothly control all fans connected to fan headers on my Asus A8N-SLI in Speedfan. My two 120mm fans for front intake and cpu run at 70% and are silent while still cooling effectively.

I don't think there's a quieter case than the P-180, I wish I had one instead of my Antec 3700BQE. As you found out it doesn't matter how quiet your case can be if you're running fast, noisy fans in it. I have four 120mm fans running in my system, plus one 60mm fan on my MSI 6800GT card. Through use of Speedfan (for the front and cpu fan) and RivaTuner (for the video card fan) my system runs very quiet yet still cools very good. IMHO it's far better to use more fans, larger fans and slower fans instead of less, smaller and faster.