The rig has an Athalon X2 4000+ (stock cooler), Gigabyte Nvidia 700 series Nvidia mobo with integrated graphics, a generic 380w psu, and a 40GB WD drive I had laying around.
As I said, the case is an audio nightmare. It's cheap, thin steel, and quite prone to both resonance and vibration. The visible perforations are basically all the ventilation the case has.
Here's the internals. The wiring was a total mess.
The one rear 80mm fan was overpowered, noisy, and had a terribly restrictive fan grill. It's by far the loudest component.
Naturally, the solution was a fan improvement. I happened to have a fair 120mm fan on-hand, so I figured I would cut out the grill entirely and stick the large fan in instead. There was a small problem, however. The fan was just barely too big-- pretty much my the thickness of the frame.
Not wanting to admit defeat, I set about reducing the fan's width. First with a saw...
...and then with a dremel.
The fan: now a tad bit thinner.
And now doing what I had planned on doing an hour ago, cutting out the rear grill.
After putting in the fan and reinstalling some hardware, you get the imropoved rig below.
But it still wasn't enough. The older model hard drive was vibrating horribly, and the way it was hardmounted was making pretty much the entire case shake. Time for some softmounting.
Having bought a spool of 1.8mm magic stretch, I began to thread it through the 5.25 drive cage.
View from the front:
To mount the drive, I twisted the two lines past each other. It's really quite secure.
A bit of cablegami later, all is finished.
Verdict:
Although the case is far from silent, it's vastly improved. Idle noise level is below the broadband whoosh of our house's HVAC, so most of the time the computer is unnoticeable. I was planning to possibly undervolt the fans or do some PSU modification, but according to my brother it's certainly quiet enough for him already. Suspending the hard drive lowered the case vibrations to very near null.
Overall, I'm calling this a success, given the curcumstances.
