homemade case - what's the best vertical fan?

[AEmer]

So, I'm quite inspired by the silverstone fortress 2, but I'm building a custom system for my desktop. The case will be a part of the desk, and mount in a very particular way, where it'll be possible to have essentially no bottom on the case (apart from dust filters).

I'm going to be buildinging it in steel, using steel plates, bolts and square-pipes for the inner chassis, and glued on veneer and massive wood for the outside. It'll be quite the project.

The thing is, the design calls for a case with the back panel facing towards the top, and a full size ATX interior, with the motherboard area being about a foot wide, and cooled by two 14 cm fans in the bottom, as well as two 14 cm fans in the top. Hailing back to the design of the original p180, the psu and hdd drives will be mounted in a seperate rectangular compartment with a 14cm fan up top and one down bottom.

SPCR generally recommends that you mount the various fans in a vertical position; but the silverstone design calls for horizontally mounted fans. Can you guys think of any way to test the acoustic qualities of the setup apart from just...well...buying a bunch of fans and trying them out?

And surely, it must be possible to buy the 18cm silverstone fans as spare parts, so I could go there if it comes to that, but I would really prefer the case not being nearly that big. Since everything will be custom made, I can do the design in a very exact (and simple) way, so I was hoping to avoid that I could just use a total of 6 truesilent antec fans from the 14cm fan roundup as the basis for my design.

Thoughts and comments?

[flemeister]

Two links that may interest you:

* upgraded FT02 with AP182 fans - my exp.
* Vertical vs. Horizontal Case Cooling

[AEmer]

Very cool, thank you. I'm not building the case this way primarily for performance; a big part is looks. By having completely vertical airflow, the system can be completely enclosed. That makes it ideal when the situation is such that the case has a prominent location in the room, and you don't need to access anything in the cabinet while the computer is running.

The computer is really melded with the table itself. The table will - for structural reasons - have wooden ducts running along the underside towards the back, where all the cabling will fit. Power will be provided through running cables in a similar duct in the table 'leg' - so basically, you pulg in the 'table leg' to a power socket, plug an ethernet cable into the table and that's it. Having the cables oriented upwards is basically ideal.

It's tricky to describe, and a bit of a fankenstein concept, but the end result should be worth it.

[Cistron]

Show us some pictures when you're assembling you system in the table - sounds swell.