I have a Silverstone RV03 case. I want to make my PC quiet while using fans in all the possible mounting holes. I know, more fans = more noise, but I don't want dead silence. I want a good airflow inside the case.

I would be keeping the bottom AP-181 fans as they are.

I need the following.
1. Two 120mm fans for the front intake
2. One 120mm fan for the side panel intake (for cooling the hard drives mounted on the back of the motherboard)
3. One 120mm fan for the rear exhaust (to exhaust the hot air from the video card as they exhaust hot air into the case. wrong choice of cards, I know! will eventually upgrade to a single better card. until then, i need this fan.)
4. Two 120mm fans for push and pull on the Kuhler 620.

I am not happy with the current setup. The quiet fans I have - Enermax TB Silent, don't push enough air (i bet there are fans that can push more air at the same dB) and the fans that push more air (Scythe Kama Flow 2 1400RPM x2, 1900RPM x1 on the Kuhler 620) are too loud.

The ones I have checked so far

I have two options for the Kuhler 620
1. Scythe GT 1450RPM x2 or
2. Gelid Wing12 x2
Is there anything else I should look for?

# Was looking for the Akasa Viper fans, but couldn't find any.

One note: forgot to mention that the Radiator would be on the top exhaust. Air is exhausting out the top of the case.

For the case fans, I was thinking of getting Slipstream 800RPM fans across the board. (i.e. 4 of them) Any better fans?

What about ones with LED's? I would not mind them at all. =)


Thanks

For the Rad, specially since its also going horizontal, i would go with Scythe Gentle Typhoon AP15, i used to run 5 with scythe fan controller, i was able to drop them 550rpm no problem, so you can always go up if you need to. Else look into AP14 or AP13.

For case fans, Scythe Slipstream is a good option or Nexus Basic 120mm, if you are want to spend a little more Noiseblocker M12-S1 would be my pick.

Should I buy 1200 or 1600 slipstreams then use a fan controller, or should I buy the 800 ones out of the box?

Agreed

You have way too many fans. Get the 800s and consider that you might need to reduce their speed even further.

Consider this to control fan speed:
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/ ... s_id=25981

Maybe even better than the slipstreams could be the SPCR Nexus reference fan running at 7v (12 dBA 720 RPM)

should i play with my existing fans first? for example, run the Kama Flow 2 1400RPM fans at...say...7V?
not sure about the Enermax UCTB12 though. might run at 7V, not sure if it would be enough.

have to do something about the fans on the RAD though. might buy a couple of GT-1450's or 1850's.

I would test first what you have, there is no loss there, i mean, if they perform both accoustically and cooling the way you want you will be saving some $$$, that always good. Then again this for me is a hobby and enjoy all the testing and tweaking, but this is up to you. I would test what you have first then work from there if something isnt peforming as you like. Remember more fans will be more noise, and to some point it starts to get some deminishing returns, read The Big Air Cooling Investigation. The RV03 has 2x180mm on the bottom, thats massive cooling, i live by with one of those with i5 2500k and gtx580, not saying two isnt better, but its a lot of cooling, i would probably undervolt them though, at stock speeds for my liking they are noisy, but thats on my tj08e, never have tested a rv03.

The GT are very well regarded fans in the OC community, specially for rads, you bearly see people going with monster deltas, they give very good performance for the money and they arent as noisy either, but remember a fan can be quiet on its own, but once its pushing/pulling through a surface like the rad it will create turbulance and thus noise, so i would defently get a fan controller to be able to tweak the GTs to you liking in preformance/noise. I used SCYTHE KM03-BK KAZE MASTER PRO 5.25 Fan Controller (Black) to control 6 GT, but in your case, you might want to look into the Scythe "KAZE MASTER" KM01-BK (Black) 5.25-inch Bay Fan Controller Retail SKU: KM01-BK and pair the 180mm to one, the two GT into another, the two new frontal fans to another, and the back fan to the last.

thanks for the reply. that was quite informative.

i managed to drop the two 1300RPM KAMA FLOW 2 fans to around 800RPM using motherboard fan headers and they got near silent. maybe the CFM rating at those speeds is not as high as slipstream 800's but i will see what the temps would be with the new speeds and act accordingly.

i didn't change the front intake T.B.Silent fans' speed though. they were kept as they were for the time being.

then i removed the KAMA Flow 2 1900RPM from the rad and plugged in the stock Silverstone case fan (i believe it is the FN121) to the rad to see what the noise would be like. the noise dropped significantly, but so have the cooling efficiency. must have risen by at least 5C. (didn't really stress the CPU long enough. maybe temps rose more than that).

the CPU fan header on my motherboard sucks. I cannot control a non-PWM fan with it. (edit: just found it can. i will see how it works) so i was stuck at 1900RPM all the time. So it was the loudest fan in the PC at idle. however, now that i have temporarily replaced it with a quieter fan, there were two more components making the noise. the bottom 180mm fans and the graphics cards' fans (i have two in Crossfire - i know, they are definitely not helping me with the noise)

i manually dropped the graphics cards' fans to 20% and i could hear the noise drop, which means even at their stock (idle) fan speeds, they were audible. keeping them at 20% is fine when i am at the desktop, but when gaming i have to let them get ramped up, thus everything becomes in vain, right? i probably need to upgrade (or side-grade) the two cards to a single GTX680 (or probably a GTX670 when they gets released this month(?)) or something. buy moving to a single reference video card, i think it can eliminate the need for the back exhaust. the only reason to have them is to quickly move the warm air (which btw, is dumped straight into the case by the graphics cards) out of the case.

then comes the bottom 180mm intakes. they can make considerable wind noise even at 700RPM. with the current fan setup (with the graphics cards' fans running @20%), I think I can hear them over other fans at 700RPM. at 1200RPM, they are intolerable. i never run them at high speed. i'll try to lower the RPM using the board's fan headers. might not be successful. i guess @ ~500-600 they would be inaudible from outside the case.

note: i will most probably get a couple of Gentle Typhoons, but I don't know which models to get. 1850RPM ones and a fan controller (Kaze Master Pro Ace KM04-BK can be bought for $42 so I will go with that) or just the 1450RPM models. isn't dropping their speed affect their efficiency? for example, 1450RPM model vs. 1850RPM @1450RPM = same?