I've gone on a silent crazy and have upgraded or worked on a number of cases for friends and family.
This post will center around the Outlaw build for my mum, she was using an old beige OEM from 2000~ for her P3 with an extremely loud 40mm fan on the Pentium 3 which sounded like a tornado. She uses this system to play Freecell and do basic Cakewalk work which she moves to a USB key if needed.
Build - P3 900mhz (probably a Coppermine), 384megs of ram, ATI Rage 128 16mb, 80gb Seagate IDE drive (didn't check which), Win XP Pro.
I've moved her build into the BitFenix Outlaw which I picked up today for $40; boxing day sale. The case was very nice to work with, although I found myself turning it upside down to work on before placing it on it's feet and realizing I was working on a flipped case.
Some things I did not like were the quality of their stand offs and threads, they were very uneven and would not hold. I had to use nuts on 2 of the 6 stand offs to keep them in. But in the end, at $40 for this great case it's not a big deal and I did take the last case which was a display model so maybe it was abused a bit
The quality of everything else was top notch, the case doors hold well and have a tighter fit than my R3, the front panel removes and re-attaches very tightly and the soft touch plastic feels and looks like some high quality stuff.
There's ample room in the Outlaw and thanks to the side vent I placed the Bitfenix Spectre 120mm fan it came with in it with a resistor and some rubber fan screws as my CPU fan, it plugged in fine and is running at 700rpm cooling the entire motherboard as the CPU HSF. There's also a Noctua S12B at the front for addition cooling, it's at 500rpm... not that it even needs it, I could probably run the whole thing passive, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.
All in all I found myself really enjoying the flipped motherboard placement, if I was into case windows it would be a nice mod project to see all my stuff flipped turned upside down
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I can't speak about the Outlaw concerning newer much more power intensive computers but from my experience today and the cable management offered in the Outlaw I will be recommending this case to any friends looking to build systems if they do not have any animals or a lot of dust in their computer area.
The loudest thing in it are the fans, I have them running higher than I want but it's much better than the old 40mm fan @ 4000rpm or whatever crazy RPM it was at.
Temps and pics-
Temps before xfer - 42c load prime95 15 minutes.
Temps after xfer (with MX4) - 29c load prime95 30 minutes.
