1. Here's a shot from the front of the case with the inner and outer walls of one side removed (more on this later):
2. Here's a pic from the back. The unique thing about the Lian-Li PC-S80 case is each side has "two" walls. This serves two purposes. Firstly, it sucks in cool, fresh air from the grills on the side (you can see one here) and allows it to travel between the inner and outer walls through to the front where it is then pumped into the case. Secondly, it keeps out sound more effectively than one wall.
You can also see the sound muffler at the back. You can't see it from this pic, but on the inside, the sound muffler is covered in sound absorbing material. A big weakness of the Antec P180 series is that the rear and top fans are not baffled. The Lian-Li PC-S80 handles this.
3. Here's the inside of the PC. Cool air is sucked in from the grills on the side and pushed through the radiator by twin 120mm fans. This has two purposes. It's traditional purpose has been to provide air flow to keep the components relatively cool. The airflow, although limited, is sufficient to keep the memory modules and the massive passive cooler that comes with the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 motherboard reasonably cool even when overclocked. Secondly, it cools the radiator to keep the watercooling system working, directly cooling the CPU and the grahics card.
4. Here is a close up of the loop. Kept it nice and simple with only a T-line to act as reservoir. Went with a T-Line as it saves space and is more efficient. I'm keeping the Laing D5 Vario pump running at a setting of 3 which makes it inaudible outside the case except for the vibrations. To completely take care of the vibrations, just underneath the pump is a petra gel pad that absorbs vibrations. That then sits on top of additional sound dampening material.
In terms of sound, if move close to the PC and listen very carefully, I can tell the PC is turned on so it's not "completely" silent but, to many, it's quiet enough to qualify as a silent PC. The good thing about such a setup is whether I overclock it or undervolt my system, the noise output remains low.
I'm able to overclock and run my system stably and continously at 3.6Ghz, which is a high overclock to maintain indefinitely. However as my system is on 24/7 and I don't want a massive electical bill, I keep my system mildly overclocked to just above 3Ghz while "undervolting" my PC to below stock voltages "and" underclocking the 2D mode of my graphics card.
