My modest system with a few custom mods.
The ingredients:

Antec SLK3700-BQE
Athlon 64 3000+, overclocked to 2200 mhz & 1.4v
Ninja
Asrock 939Dual-SATA2
1 gig Geil
XFX 6800GS PCIe w/NV Silence 5 rev 3
200 GB seagate 7200.7
FSP Green PS FSP400-60GLN
PCI Lucent firewire card for the MOTU 896 interface

Temps: (ambient approx 19* C)

1) with case fan at 940 & with 92mm fan at 1400 rpm on ninja:

idle:
cpu: 29 C
motherboard: 27 C
gpu: 36 C
hd: 24 C

load (1 hour of prime95)
cpu: 39 C
motherboard: 28 C
gpu: 37 C
hd: 24 C

2) with case fan at 940, no cpu fan, and massive duct from case fan around ninja:

idle:
cpu: 31 C
motherboard: 27 C
gpu: 35 C
hd: 26 C

load (1 hour of prime95)
cpu: 45 C
motherboard: 27 C
gpu: 36 C
hd: 25 C

Pictures:

Overall system shots:






Hard drive suspension pics:
The 3700-BQE comes with slide-in/out hard drive rails. Removing the front rail upright (drilling/breaking 4-5 rivets) provided enough room for this simple suspension. The bungee cords are wrapped around a bic pen body in the front.



Hard drive suspension and NV Silencer:
The NV Silencer 5 rev. 3 will fit the XFX 6800GS XXX edition, but you will have to shave a little bit of plastic off the duct right above the fan connector on the pcb - otherwise the cooler will not fully seat on the memory/gpu. I don't have a good picture of this...


Plexiglass duct pics:
The duct was made from some 1/8-inch plexiglass I had leftover from another project. I clamped a large metal ruler to my work bench, clamped down the plexi and used a heat gun to slowly bend the plexiglas down around the metal ruler. I bent the plexiglass at about a 95 degree angle so the duct would pinch the case fan. I stuck some adhesive backed weather-stripping to the inside of the duct, to seal where it mates with the rear case fan. This is also the only thing holding it on! The duct doesn't seem to have had a very big effect on my temps. Hopefully I'm keeping the psu cooler...



Jay

nice!

good example of the kiss-principle.

That egg-shaped foam beneath HDD makes any difference?
I know that won't hurt either.

Thanks - yeah, I'm a big fan of simplicity.


Acoustically? I doubt it. But it's also a safety net in case any of the hd bungees decide to snap. I stuffed a wad of it behind the top 2 5.25 drive bays as well, more because I would have otherwise thrown it away.

The system is not as quiet as I'd like. I can't hear the D12SL-12 case fan, and I can't hear the spinning hd (seeks are slightly audible, but infrequent enough that they don't realy bother me), but I can still hear the Nv Silencer (barely) and the PSU fan (mostly).

My FSP400-60GLN came with the medium speed ball bearing yate loon fan (like the SPCR review), and it's not as quiet as I'd like. Hopefully, with the CPU heat ducted away from the PSU intake, I can swap in a D12SL-12 and still cool the psu properly.

Jay

Maybe this thread http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=26455 can help you out with your PSU and HDs.

i love the duct, very clean cut.

Badger - what is your PSU fan wired to? It looks like you've just run the fan wires to an external header? This is the only way I can think of to control & monitor the PSU fan...



Thanks - it was extremely easy to make. Staring at my open case and the arrangement of the cpu heat sink and the rear case fan (they are almost perfectly aligned), it dawned on me that a simple "C" shaped channel would be appropriate. I had read articles about building a diy plexi bending jig out of large resistive heating elements. But since I couldn't really seeing myself using such a tool very often, I came up with the heat gun & metal ruler method. I overheated the plexi in my first attempt - it gets really bubbly and blackens. Just take your time and keep the gun 2 inches or so away from the material and you'll be fine. And because there are only straight cuts, the whole thing was cut with a razor knife and ruler. There are some articles I can link to if anyone's interested (i'll have to search for them...).

Jay

Yes, the PSU's fan is wired to my motherboard. I control it via Speedfan, therefore it always starts at 12V (which is good to ensure it starts up) and then once Windows and Speedfan loads it is automatically dropped to 5% and under heavy load Speedfan automatically bumps it up to 8%. There is another 120mm Nexus running off the same header for the CPU fan, so they they both speed up and down at the same time. With two 120mm fans running off the same header, I noticed that I had to use more % in Speedfan to keep the fans spinning as fast as if I only had one fan connected to that header.

This setup is pretty darn quiet, I idle at 51-53 and load at about 58C (socket A, though).

At idle, with the duct, there's nothing but cool air coming out of the psu grille and the rear case fan. Without the duct, I think the psu pulled more heat off the cpu than the rear case fan. I defragged last night and my hd temps only went up 1-2* C. So, I have do doubt that I could use a slower fan in the psu and slow down the case fan a bit more. I downloaded speedfan last night, but didn't have much time to play around with it. And I'll probably have to look into rivatuner to slow down the nvsilencer's fan a bit more.

Jay