Haven't turned it on yet so don't know how noisy/quiet it is...

wow, your camera sucks.

sorry, cell phone.

If you get turbulance, take the CPU fan, and put it on the other side of the mugen, or take it out completely. You may not even need it.

Looks really clean aside from that. What are the specs?

can't place the cpu fan on the right, the ram's in the way with their stupid ricer heatsinks. going to replace them today hopefully with normal ram.

asus rampage ii gene matx mobo (x58 chipset)
12gb patriot ddr3 pc3-1600
intel core i7 930
visiontek hd5850 1gb
corsair hx650 psu
40gb intel x25v ssd
2tb wd green caviar wd20ears
3x 1600rpm scythe slipstream
scythe mugen 2 ver b

definitely don't need the CPU fan though. Try without it? You've got the such close proximity it shouldn't make a difference at all.

Looks like a very nice build. Very clean, I know you are looking to get rid of the ram, but the ramsinks look nice the way they are.

I do think that those fans might be a bit loud for you, at 1600rpms, they tend to sound like vacuum cleaners.

I'd be interested to know how it goes when you fire it up. What are you waiting for?

about to turn it on. it was a bear getting the video card to fit, had to take out the jmicron esata connector.

Using 2 of these in the case and 1 on the CPU fan:

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/0 ... etail.html

(the 1600rpm version)

Pretty awesome. Set the fans to "silent" with Asus Fan Control in the BIOS and the ones that weren't controllable with that I set to 40%.

40-45 C degrees idle, 65-70 C load. Same for HD 5850 leaving it set at Auto, it idles at 1200rpm.

Quietest, coolest most powerful system I've built. I'm sort of but not strongly tempted to replace the fans with Noctuas.

taking out the CPU fan might quiet it down even more, being so close to the exhaust and upper fan, i don't think it makes that much of a difference.

The HDs do get kind of hot so I'll leave the CPU fan in.

What's "kind of hot" with these drives? Have you tried it without the CPU fan to see if your HDD temps go up? If they're hot it may be because there's little airflow across them.

What's the point of the lower intake fan? GPU cooling? I question it's usefulness - your GPU will cool as good/bad as it's built-in fan will allow. Looks to me like your case is biased toward negative pressure. I'd remove the front fan and block the opening; this should force fresh air in through the upper HDD bay.

My main complaint with this case is that it's too open. It would take too much effort to block 90% of the holes to get air to move where I want. I love it's features otherwise - I wish they make a NSK3480-ish version of it.

Thanks for the constructive criticism.

However, I've recovered from 5+ years of SPCR obsession at absolute silence and have learned to live with a degree of faint white noise as long as the sound characteristics aren't jarring to the ear. I have no need to do away with the fan on the side of the CPU heatsink.

The 2TB WD Caviar Green that's mounted sideways in there across from the CPU shares the cage with an Intel 40GB SSD. It's currently showing 37 C and I'm not ready for that temp to raise by removing the fan.

This system is the best high-performing/decently-quiet compromise I can come up with after building so many systems in the past few years (I even bought Anitec's SPCR-labeled SilenT3 system and beefed it up, but it was a little lacking in power) and I'm just plain tired of tweaking.

However, I like Noctua's fans and may experiment sometime in the future after my finances replenish.

you really don't want to push an i7 930 too hard without a cpu fan.

it looks like a great build to me.

Why did'nt you put your GPU in the top PCI-e slot? The fan of your GPU can get more air then.

Just an update: I'm running 2x40GB (not in RAID, I would lose TRIM) with the 2nd 40GB for my swap file + CS4.

I had to put the video card at the bottom initially since the PCIE slot was the 2nd slot. The sound card I bought was PCIE and could only go in that slot.

However, I returned that sound card since it crackled like crazy. I reused a PCI XtremeGamer in the bottom, relocating the video card back up to the first slot and it's about 5 degrees cooler.

Running everything on "silent" according to Asus's BIOS fan control and 1 of the case fans on 40% duty--everything's fine for me.