It’s been probably a month or so since I undertook this whole project to make my main PC rig quieter.
The previous posts are QQ1, QQ2, and QQ3.
It was pretty much a success — more than I had expected. The rig isn’t ‘silent,’ but that was not the goal. The goal was ‘quiet’ and that goal was met. Mostly through greatly improved airflow, larger fans turning slower, and an excellent PSU.
There’s plenty of room inside the case (and in the capacity of the PSU) if I wanted to add another video card and do the SLI thing. There’s plenty of room for radiators, should I decide to go completely off the chain and try liquid cooling.
That said, there are some things that there _aren’t_:
With so many (large) fans, there aren’t enough motherboard headers for all of them. For now, a couple of Silverstone CPF01 splitters are doing the duty.
The fan speeds are not controllable at this time. Either I need some other software, or some different fans. I don’t have a free drive bay for something like this without cutting a hole in the case, so I think that approach is out, too.
The case inexplicably doesn’t come with filters for the top-mounts, even though it seems likely that whomever is interested in this case is likely to mount fans/radiators/combos there. [The case does not come with fans mounted in this position out of the box.] I had to order a couple of different potentials from the ‘Egg, which was a little annoying. Two of these ended up working great. This did not (it’s long enough, but too thick to fit under the top bezel piece of the Corsair Carbide 540 case).
Next, I think it’s time to finally get rid of that fossil HP 2500CP and re-arrange my desk and ‘office’ space.