The Compucase CI-6919 Black.

. 12 cm front and rear fan, intake filter on front.
. Rubber grommets on HDD mounts for less vibration thus noise.
. USB and audio ports on front.

Well, this case looks like a sweet deal to me. Readily available in Scandianavia, how all you people overseas fare I do not know.

the 12cm fans I thought at first would be a very good thing, but it turns out at least in my experience that 12cm fans are harder to silence than 80mm fans (although they push more air for the same db). Also, running fans at low rpm's, I find that decoupling with grommets won't help too much at all, and for harddrives grommets will help but will also make the drive a lot hotter due to no natural heatsinking from the drive cage. Maybe it will interest someone, but for the most part I think all cases that are decent are created equal in the silenceability factor.

-Ken

I guess I agree with that statement when applied to whats available now, as most cases are designed pretty simmillar. I cant help but think that if a case was scientifically designed to dampen sound, it would do wonders. Maybe different materials, radical geometry, lots of insulation, these are just guesses. But i bet it can be done. Maybe enough to bring our quiet computers to silent computers.

I agree with that statement in principle but one thing is that some cases sometimes need some significant modding to achieve quietness.... Like the cases with the restrictive fan grills, cramped internals, bad placings for fans and the like..

Technically, there is no such thing as a quiet case: none of them actually make the noise. But there are cases that are cooler. These, of course, are the ones designed for better obstructed airflow, which means you can use slower fans to keep things as cool, which in turns leads to a quieter case.

I don't mean to dispute the wisdom of our fearless leader, but I was under the impression that cases could directly affect noise in a few ways. First, cases with tighter construction made from thicker metal are less likely to transmit vibrations from (say) your hard drive. Second, cases with fewer openings (while possibly tougher to cool) transmit less sound from the inside directly to the outside. And third, cases with plastic shells over their metal frames let less noise escape than the equivalent case without plastic shells. Granted, the importance of these factors might be insignificant in most circumstances, but they are nevertheless there.

I may be wrong about all of this, too. It's mostly a synthesis of scraps of info I've read on the Internet and my personal experience. Please say so if you know different.

Dispute & question! It's a "free" web.


You're right, they can & do. With a system that is not noise-reduced, they can make a significant difference. My point was a bit of a technicality in that case noise is the result of other devices; they don't by themselves make noise. Even though this seems like a trivial splitting of hiars, there is value in thinking of it this way.

In a system where the noise sources are reduced, there is little difference between a top quality case and the kind flimsy case used, for example, in my P4 quieting project. Why? Because there is so little noise from components that case vibration and noise insulation are almost non-issues. Fan noise is the larger part of the noise in most systems, aside from the HDD. How much you can reduce fan noise by slowing them down (without causing overheating) depends partly on how well air flows through the case. Decouple mounting can make any case utterly free of vibration-caused noise. Thus my comment.

BTW, with the quietest systems, even with all the components just laid open on top of the test bench (drives and PSUs on foam), the noise level is low enough that visitors get shocked. What I look for is a case that holds it all together with minimal airflow impedance, some noise insulation and allows decoupled mounting of the HDD -- and, I am starting to think, the PSU.

I was thinking the very same thing 2 nights ago in my silence-preoccupied restlessness. I need to decouple the fan from the PSU so the vibrations don't get amplified throughout the case. Go even further, I'm imagining a fan setup like the fan in stock Intel sunflower cooler setup - you know the frameless one. Less turbulence due to removal of frame of the fan.

I was thinking of decoupling it in the same way we all decouple hard drives - with that elastic string....