Pappnaas wrote:I'm sorry to read that the Advance has disappointed. The non-advanced did fairly well for the price and i have build one that is fairly quite, but not silent.
Some testing showed that the GPU temps improved when removing the slot cover beneath and blocking the mesh parts of the side panels with cardboard. Fans had to be decoupled with rubber sticks. I thought about dremeling out the fan grills, but the owner wouldn't let me
If you need more than 1 SSd and 1 HDD you're right, you'll need a different case.
tldr: Yes, it is cheap and flimsy, but you'll get a good base for a neat little system. But many other cases will be more silent (and bigger and more expensive) if budget allows.
JFYI: after some weeks of tweaking and testing with the Aerocool QS-200 Advance, I was so lucky to end with a somewhat decent setup.
It isn't really quiet, but sort of.
First of all, I have to admit I didn't get a clue on it, at first.
Using a 125W CPU and a 100W GPU I thought to use some more fans than I was used to, hoping to drive them very low.
So I put three case fans, and I tried various setups: 2 intakes & 1 slower exhaust, 2 slower intakes & 1 exhaust, 2 exhausts & 1 intake, 3 intakes... obviously along with the GPU own fans, and turning each time the CPU cooler accordingly to the back fan configuration.
Nothing worked satisfactorily: temps under stress were almost terrible, while noise-wise it was definitely far from quiet.
I used different fans: Alpenföhn, Aerocool, Cooler Master, Yate Loon, 3-pin, all PWM... always with comparable results.
So I gave it up: I dislodged any intakes (the most annoying noise sources, along with the VGA fans), and swapped the rear exhaust with a rubber decoupled Scythe Slipstream PWM.
I thought: if it cannot run cool, at least it could be a bit more quiet. And it was.
So, after tinkering a lot with SpeedFan, I was able to work out a custom fan curve to lower the noise of video card but remaining under 80°C on FurMark, and while the CPU cooler is never quick at recovery from stressing, nonetheless it also never overheat: oddily, reversing the airflow (turning the exhaust as intake, and turning the CPU heatsink) the VGA temps improve by some degrees, but the very same degrees are added to the CPU rise over ambient, and it's definitely not clearly preferable.
Well, the flimsy panels still have spurious resonances, even if I suspended with rubber the only mechanical disk drive, and being mATX the graphics is too close to the bottom (further subtle resonances), but after 6 hours of OCCT PSU test every fan (the case back exhaust, the CPU, the VGA and the PSU ones) runs under 700rpm, and Prime95 works about the same.
This rig still cannot love FurMark but, as I said, now it stays under 85°C with VGA fans running under 2700rpm and case fans under 900rpm (and under 80°C with fan spinning under 3000rpm, with other fans under 1000rpm): so it's not FurMark-proof. Maybe with an Accelero S1 Plus and another Slipstream PWM I can best those results, but in such a small mATX enclosure there's about no room to grow the current graphics assembly.
What puzzles me is that adding two intakes, I add a "considerable" amount of more noise, but not any huge or substantial cooling prowess (even blocking the side vents didn't help) as I expected, and that this rig seems rather insensitive to any fan arrangement (from violent positive pressure to mild negative one) when more than just one case fan is used. Whether it improves, it does slightly, letting me feel a little peculiar & annoyed.
All's well that ends well? Maybe.