So, taking the idea from Mojo and Mike C.

I'm currently building my Q6600 P182 build, and I just couldn't avoid it.
There is nothing that knife can't do to help, so I went ahead. See the results for yourself.



So yeah, you can cut the the back guilty plastic pieces as I'm doing here.



Here you can see the results, a good modded panel on the left v/s the stock on the right, and of course all the plastic pieces (going to the trash).

I have to say it works beautifully, I cannot post temp comparisons yet, since I will finish my build tomorrow.Right now I'm finishing the case and tweaking up all the cabling ready to cradle my newly owned X38 and 4 beautiful gigs of Crucial Ballistix DDR3.

The use of this particular knife is very good because the cuts are mostly clean, so there is very little to polish. Took me a total of 30 mins on both doors. Just take care of the back plastic pieces, DON'T cut the front ones.

This works well.If I blow air from 10cm away, the air passes through and I can feel it with my hand on the other side.While in the stock one, you can barely feel air passing through.

Thanks to Mojo and Mike C for the idea. No need to buy from Antec, a little DIY and you got what you need in 30 min, some patience and a firm hand and wrist.


Cheers![/img]

oscar3d nice job. You had same Olfa knife that I have. I just finished my own P182B front grill cutting project. I need to sand out the small pumps knife left. But it really seems to work. More effort than simply taking out the doors, but aesthically very pleasing.

Hay, no need to apologise, I probably didn't explain myself carefully enough. Plus, I see English is not your native language, so thanks for make the effort to contribute.

Chris Chan, I'm afraid I don't know what make it is. I found out once but have since sprayed over or removed all the stickers with model info on them. It is a full server case made by a Chinese company. I wanted to keep it but am moving house and don't have enough room, so I got a P182 for the new system.

Would it happen to be a Chenming like this one? The grill you depicted sounds a lot like the grill on that series of case. They where sold by a number of other manufacturers too, including Antec. They where pretty popular back around the 2001 timeframe.

Hi, this is my first posting here

I measured some temps on my P180B (modded like P182 on the back for better wiring):

All values measured at idle, with Everest Ultimate
Closed original panels, with filters: GPU 69 degrees Celsius
Closed original panels, no filters: GPU 65 degrees Celsius
Open original panels, with filters: GPU 65 degrees Celsius
Open original panels, no filters: GPU 58 degrees Celsius

My graphics card is a 8800GTX (and CPU is C2D E6700). Interesting is that I also tried the Antec 900. With the additional side fan I got GPU 59 degrees Celsius.
Conclusion is that temp immedeately goes down 10 deg C with open panels and removed filters. It takes only 2-3 minutes to reach. My recommendation is to open up when gaming.

/Hans

I found some picture but am still unable to figure out who made it:







You can see the door quite well. That was when I first got the case, it's not painted black and I removed the inner slot covers to improve airflow.

Are there any news about the new vent covers?

Thanks for the idea, I've done this too, and am very pleased with the results! Cheers

Wouldn't it be easier and also show some effect if you get loose of every 2nd of those plastic pieces and leave half of them untouched?

well, aesthethics would suffer... and that would affect more general rigidness of the frontal door.

I agree! The way we did it, you cannot tell it's modded unless you look really closely with a flashlight. Great mod!

I have a question that "somewhat" concern the airflow in the p180 cases, but ina different manner: How much does affect this case internal airflow the fact of having the front door opened or closed?

I mean, I know that closed door will increase the restriction, of course, but is it restricted in a sensible way? And there is any sensible effect on sound damping to have this door opened or closed?

Tnaks a lot in advance, and sorry if I posted in the wrong place for mistake.

Nice research there. 10c just with that restriction gone... wow.

Any news on when Antec's releasing the new vents?

On the small vent door topic, why not remove them for good?

The bottom one does absolutely nothing good, and the top one would only be useful if you chopped the metal away, removed the fan filter, and needed something to protect children who opened the front door.

Great post! I bought a P180B from newegg two weeks ago and it is just like the P182 without the light. I guess they make changes on the fly.

I think that my setup is keen.

First off, I cut the metal out for both front intakes and removed the filter for the upper intake but, kept on the filter for the lower intake because I run the bottom 2 fans 24/7 which I explain in the 'Lower Compartment' section.

Secondly, I have this fan controller installed because I don't use a floppy and want to be able to completely shut off the upper compartment fans when I'm not doing anything that stresses the system...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813999902

Lower Compartment
I only use 1 HD (320gb) that I keep at the bottom. To cool the HD I have the bottom center fan at low and attached to the HD itself I have this....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835200032

I took off the fan that this cooler came with because it made annoying clicking sounds and attached this fan to it instead...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811999199

I have both bottom fans connected on 1 channel of the fan controller running at 25% 24/7. This is dead silent and very effective for 1 HD bringing the temps down from 40c to 34-36c. 40c was the result of using just the bottom center fan at low without a HD fan cooler attached.

Upper Compartment
I only use 1 DVD drive therefore I have 3 extra 5.25 bays which I installed this for better cooling since there's only 1 intake fan in this compartment. I had to mod it a little in order for it to fit...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185020

The fan that comes on this is terribly ineffective at cooling therefore I replaced it with this fan which everyone already knows how great it is...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185006

My P180 came with a stock fan at the front, rear and bottom. I relocated the front fan to the rear and added another SFF21F in it's place.

I have the 4 fans in the upper compartment divided as 2 fans per channel occupying the last 2 channels of the controller. When I do anything intensive like gaming I run just those 2 channels at 50% which is comfortable for me. The 2 stock fans that I have at the rear I keep at High setting so when the controller is set to 50% they will then run as if they were set at Med naturally.

Just how many fans are in this setup? Sounds like a bunch.....which is the direct result of a relatively tall case with "compartments". IMHO....fewer fans=less noise. Simple. But when you try this in a 180.......difficult.

There are 2 aspects involved in this.. silent and noisy which I accept.

The upper compartment has a total of 5 120mm fans which are the 2 intake/2 exhaust + 1 120mm CPU. The Cpu fan is also another SFF21F which I failed to mention in my first post.

The only fan in the upper compartment that's active 24/7 is the CPU fan which is connected to the mobo controlled by Speedfan. It's set at 50% normally until gaming or so when required to goto 100%.

When all the fans are off and it's just the cpu fan going at 50% it's about dead silent since this case does a great job at dampening sound compared to alot of others. This is also taking into consideration of the 3 fans in the lower compartment which are on 24/7: Corsair 620HX PSU 120mm fan, HD 80mm cooler fan, 120mm center fan. All of which in detail I explained in my first post except the PSU which I'm just now mentioning.

When I manually turn the 4 120mm fans on (by means of the fan controller) to 50% along with the CPU to 100%, the best way I can describe the sound at 2 feet is a mild hair dryer sound on low with a towel wrapped around it baffling the sound.

This is all required to properly air cool a quad OC'ed rig. This is strictly the process I use for my P180. I have an HTPC setup if you want me to get into that?

I didn't actually find that removing the filter doors and filters did anything significant. Just a couple degrees difference. However, sticking an intake fan on the middle mount makes a huge difference, up to 10C lower GPU temperatures with a tricool on low. I can presume that it's because of the negative pressure. With either the rear or top fans on, air is sucked through the PCI vents into the case, which completely ruins the 8800GTS' airflow path and raises temps since it's not exhausting any more. However, for some reason there's also lots of turbulence noise with the mid fan on. IDK why; it was quiet in the lower bay. Perhaps a slipstream would fix that?

My turbulence noise went away (or at least no longer noticable) when i cut out the fan guard grid, cut up the doors and removed the filter. If you put the HDD bay in the middle and mount the fan at the end of it i believe you'll have the best of both worlds. Decreased temperatures and no turbulence noise.

As good case P18x/P190 is, there is always some slight improvement. ^^ Not a perfect case out of the box but very good. With these mods, its close to perfection.

That's what I meant, but it's still very turbulent. I think the tricools just suck, they really should have used lower rpm fans in a case meant to be used for silencing.

How about running the top fan so it pulls air from outside?
My rig uses a total of 5 fans including the one in the cpu cooler, the setup pulls air from the front of the cpu cooler, a Noctua 120-1200, and blows it towards the fan in the back, another Noctua 120 this one running at 800rpm. So if I use the top vent to blow air inside towards the cooler so it´s fan blows it towards the back one, would it work? is that a good idea?



BTW the actual cooler is a Ninja rev.B, I has some noise problems with the AC Freezer 7 Pro.

Edit.
I just finished a 90 minutes Prime95 session, so far is not bad at all max Tcase 48, max Tjunction 61. All this at 21ºC ambient.
Tomorrow I´ll try with the top fan blowing air inside.

My testing of a 10% overclocked X2 4200+/Zalman 7700AlCu w/ Nexus mod in my P182 w/ 850RPM FDB Scythes shows very little difference in temps when the filter doors are off. Just opening the main door makes a far bigger difference.

I'm not quite done obtaining all the numbers yet, but I do have best and worst case scenarios already figured. With everything closed up and stock, and the top intake fan unplugged, I get CPU at 61, System at 41, and nForce 6150 at 52. With fan filters and doors removed, main door open, and a TriCool on low for the intake, I get CPU at 55, System at 38, and nForce at 41. All temps taken at 22 ambient, with 2x CPUBurn running low priority. Temps were allowed to settle before recording.

I'll supply all numbers when testing is done.

Your solution sounds very good.

Has anyone who bought a P182 recently got the less restrictive filter doors?

Got mine a week and a half or so ago.

Same old doors.

X-Acto knives pressed into service.

I also recently got one and got the crappy fan doors. I will also be cutting those suckers up. Are we in agreement that it's also a good idea to cut off the metal grill in front of the intake fans too?

Nope, I disagree, unnecessary... but to each his own.