Silverstone LC-11 media PC case

INSIDE THE LC-11

Air is designed to enter from the lower front of the bezel, pulled in by an 80mm fan. It then flows toward the motherboard. There are two exhaust fans:

• A side mounted, 80mm fan that draws some air over the CPU, NB and memory section of the board before blowing it out.
• The 240W PSU uses an 80mm x 15mm fan to pull the case air into it, then blows it out through the rear panel PSU grill.

The rather large screen on the bottom of the case is designed as an air intake for the CPU fan. This allows cool outside air to be used to directly cool the CPU, as long as the heatsink fan is oriented to blow air down onto the CPU itself.

Interior view. Note front intake fan, exhaust fan on side and small PSU.

Removable 3.5" drive cage has room for two standard HDDs....

...but a single suspended 2.5" Samsung notebook drive was used instead.

The case includes space for mounting up to three 3.5" HDDs. Two spaces are supplied by the easily removable drive cage located at the left front of the chassis, the other is underneath the 5.25" optical drive cage at the right front of the chassis. For this review, I opted to use the space provided by the 3.5" cage to mount a super-quiet 2.5" 40GB Samsung notebook drive, using a suspension made from 1.8mm Stretch-Magic. This setup allows the drive to run virtually silent. If more storage space is needed, it can be provided by external network storage, thus keeping the basic system itself as quiet as possible.

Front intake fan. Fan is tailed with 4-pin Molex connector.

The stock front intake fan is an 80mm Everflow/Silverstone branded fan. It pulls outside air in through a small set of nine intake vents on the base of the front bezel, and then through the steel front chassis grill. The fan comes tailed with a 4-pin Molex connector and pass-through connector, and has no rpm monitoring ability. Oddly, the side fan, which is labelled identically, has a single 3-pin connector with RPM sensing.