SPCR

I've been using liquid the last 1.5 years, but I haven't maintained it, now there's so much gunk in it that I've gotta dismantle the whole setup. Since I don't do any sort of overclocking and I don't do a lot of gaming anymore. Maintaining this system just isn't worth it for me.

I'm considering moving back to air.

I've got a 8800 gts, 780i mobo, q9450 cpu. corsair TX650W psu, 4 WD Hds, 4 raptor drives.

I looked at the solo and p183, but obviously they won't be able to hold all my hardrives. I'm currently looking at the Whisper and HAF932.

What's the quietest case that can support all my stuff? I'm willing to spend up to $250 for the case. Another $150 on dampening, fans, and coolers.

I'm going to pick up a fanless GPU and CPU cooler as well.

Any suggestions?

after a lil research,

thinking about picking up:

whisper case
accelero s1 vga cooler
Prolima Megahalems cpu cooler

basically, the top recommendations from SPCR

Just double check that the accelero fits your graphic card, especially if you have the older G80-based core (320MiB or 640MiB).

I'm guessing you're running water cooling on the chipset as well? The stock cooler (that heatpipe thingy) isn't that great; loud fan with annoying characteristics. Have you thought of any products to replace this one, or are you just gonna go with the stock cooler and swap the fan for something else? Whatever you decide to cool the northbridge with must also be capable of cooling the NF200-circuit located close to it. (here's a pic on how I solved it: http://rushdie.mine.nu/pics/burk_01.png )

P182 and P183 should have room for 8 or even more drives - with 2 of them mounted on the floor of upper or lower chamber anyway. If you don't use all the 5"1/4 bays, there's a lot of room up there too but some modding for cooling them is necessary.

There's the Silverstone Fortress FT-02, the review is up on the home page. It has 5 internal 3.5 slots and 5 external 5.25 bays, so if you put some 3.5s in the 5.25 bays you should have enough room. I got one, and it's a pretty quiet case, and looks good too. Not quite sure if it's in your price range, but the included fans and damping are good enough that you may not need to replace too much. Worth considering.

I'd think about an NAS on your budget.

Do you really need all the HDs in the main case? The case probably won't make a big difference when you have 8 drives, especially with 4 Raptors.

A few more details about the setup could help.

You could always try to exchange some of those drives for new larger ones. Or maybe switch to SSDs that take up a lot less space.

Pretty much no matter what, 4 raptors are loud especially if they are the older non-VelociRaptors. They were great for performance (I will grant you that being that I used one for my main disk for a few years and upgraded to a VelociRaptor after they came out).

They will still most likely be the loudest things in your system when all is said and done. If you are not gaming or doing video streaming to multiple computers, you could do well with replacing them with one or two bigger drives which are lower RPM. I personally like the WD Green line, but there are others here who swear by Samsung (however I had a LOT of failed Samsung disks in my work, 22 out of 32 failed in the first year for one project, 6 more from that same grouping failed in the following year, these were the F1 1TB disks. Maybe we just had a bad batch, but we are no longer using them as a result of this due to how much time/labor was required to restore from backups all the data that was lost).