You can probably find a case that flows better, but it probably won't be as quiet.

Air cooling becomes harder when the power levels rise. You may want to consider water cooling. Water cooling can be very quiet and can dissipate twice as much heat as your components are generating.

The likely reason for no front fan is that the middle fan is quieter since its further away from the ears. Mike Chin in his P180 or P182 review suggests not even using the lower middle fan. Also the power supply and optional middle fans are probably enough to cool the drives. Remember that either of...

I have not taken apart a Tri-cool, but the switch is built into the circuit of the fan. In other words, the switch is controlling something in the fan itself. The switch isn't really the controller. Since there's only a 12V input, it could be switched resistors, or something fancier like PWM. (Most ...

Hi Ash, the Tri-cools at the back and top of the case have their speed switches held in a small plastic bracket between them at the back of the case. The switches are wired into the stock fans and probably would usually not be usable with other fans. P.S. All that's needed to get any of the stock fa...

[I didn't find obvious answers to this question in a quick forum search. If I missed some comments, please let me know where they are.] I have about 1.5 wedge packs (call it slightly less than a square meter) of Dynamat Xtreme that I'm going to add to a P180 v1.1. Does anyone have experience on the ...

Front fans contribute more to noise than rear fans, so its better to use back fans if possible. Hard drives probably last longest if they run between 40 and 45 Celsius. See the Google hard drive study:

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

I guess they had contracts to deliver some number of P180s and some number of P182s, so they keep making the P180, even though it's the same as a P182 except for the front door hinge. But yeah, it doesn't make much sense otherwise to have two models that are nearly identical. Regarding the soft side...

I'd recommend the Slipstream 1200s with a fan controller so you can adjust them down or up to full speed if needed, as others have suggested. They are quieter when slower. Or use 800s if you don't want to use a fan controller. I would recommend using the top fan, but probably against the front fans....

The stock Antec Silicone grommet hard drive mounts are very effective and do put a screw through the grommet. But the screw only touches the drive. Only Silicone touches the case. So there is decoupling thanks to the Silicone. The amount of compression Sorbothane is meant to be used with is in the s...

Well, I would say the correct way to use sorbothane is to set the drive on four small blocks (1 in each corner) and not use any mounting. But that would limit the amount of movement you can do. You may want to check the specifications on Sorbothane. It's supposed to be clamped (compressed) to be ef...

Eh, they can, but I recommend using them only if you're going to be moving the case around a lot. Otherwise, I'd recommend other forms of soft-mounting like elastic suspension, sorbothane, or other foam. See the Silent Storage forum for the gallery of suspension ideas. I tried Sorbothane and it did...

Heh, the 80s didn't fit the front very well. I put the screws through the grille into washers. Much better to use 92mm fans, as the case was designed for them.

Seems to be a good idea. You would avoid the warmer water going to the GPU after cooling the CPU, by having two completely separate cooling systems. The two hotter components would not affect each others temperature. Have you considered having a normal radiator in the middle of the circuit instead ...

It depends what you have in the case. For my new/old backup computer: http://www.jeffchan.com/pc/quieter.html the single 120mm exhaust fan of the P150 (now the Solo model, but which lacks optical drive hiding doors) seems to work well, though I also have 2 80mm Arctic Cooling thermally controlled fa...

High frequencies have short wavelengths. That's why they're more likely to be affected by short dimensions of sound damping stuff inside a case. For reducing hard drive noise, start with the quietest drives possible. The Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPMs are pretty quiet. Mike Chin is saying some 2.5 inch...

Good point about isolation being another way to reduce noise. That's what the soft hard drive grommets do, for example. Mass loading is one thing that something like Dynamat Xtreme does, but it also dampens out the actual vibrations by being highly viscous. It's almost like a really sticky liquid. Y...

Glad to hear the Slipstreams are working well for you.

It's nuts to be irritated by a noisy computer.

Silence is golden....

mkawa wrote:awesome, thanks! i'll check mine when i get back home. i was actually assuming it wouldn't have the cable cutouts because of the box pictures, but if it does, sha-wing!

Yeah, I was stoked to get functionally a P182 with silver panels at a good price. Silver is the new black.

Vibration usually means vibrations within solid materials. Sound usually means vibrations in air (or liquid). They're both vibrations, but the materials and techniques for reducing them are different since the properties of air and solids are very different. Vibration reducing materials like Sorboth...

Just checked: it says "P-180 V1.1" on the outside of the box, right below the bar code. HTH.

I just got a P180 silver on sale at $100 plus $30 mail in rebate or $70 from Fry's. It's labeled as P180 v1.1, as in version 1.1. It has the same water tube grommets, wire management cutouts, wire management holders on back of motherboard tray, inner sheet metal on the side and front panels. In othe...

The foam based ones are usually for reducing noise in the air inside the case. So AcoustiPack is probably more for sound dampening than vibration dampening. Some of the Dynamat foam materials are probably also for sound dampening.

Side vents may be bad for noise (and cooling), in that they disrupt the desirable front to back airflow and provide a direct path for sound to get out of the case:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article75-page1.html

One of the two 1200RPM Slipstreams I have, which are about a week old, had the same sporadic clicking when undervolting (attached to a Sunbeam rheobus). The clicking disappeared after a few days, though. I mention that because there was another post or two on here that had the exact same experience...

My reason for using a 1200 RPM Slipstream and 1600 RPM S-FLEX is that I can undervolt them for slow, quiet operation most of the time and turn them up to higher speeds for cooling if needed, for example during gaming. (However my system is water cooled, so the stuff inside the case mostly doesn't ge...

Antec Solo.

I would recommend Dynamat Xtreme first, then maybe one of the foam types over it for possibly unnecessary overkill. Dynamat Xtreme is what Dynamat itself sells for computer case damping, so Xtreme is what they think is the right one to use.

The Slipstreams are smooth and bearing noise-free at 12V, but when you start undervolting them through a fan controller, a random bearing chatter is introduced and is easily noticable listening up close. It's possible I had bad samples, but I was a bit disappointed by this. The S-Flex was smooth an...

I think you're probably right about similar sound at similar rpm, especially from reasonably far away where the clicks and thrums are harder to hear and especially at lower to middle rpms. At higher rpms, the thrumming on the S-FLEX is very noticeable to me. However at a given rpm, the Slipstream ap...

[Hope this hasn't been covered much before. I did a forum search and didn't find an obvious thread comparing them directly.] I got a couple S-FLEX SFF21F 120mm fans based on the SPCR recommended list and thought they were not truly silent. I hear a thrum (beating) at any speed, but moreso as speeds ...