Anyone tried styrofoam for insulating your case?

[Jugernot]

I just lined my Inwin Q500 Full Tower with 1" styrofoam. As far as I can tell the noise level was dampened by around 25%, but my CPU core temp has gone up 2-3F (91F now from 87-88F before).

Anyone else tried this? How did it work in the long run?

Thanks

 

[farmercal]

Insulation is used to keep heat or cool from escaping. Everything in the case gets hot and if you insulate the inside of your case the heat can?t escape. I understand the noise suppression idea, but your going to hurt your components in the long run, IMO.

 

[Jubjub]

Actually Jugernot, it looks to me like a pretty good trade-off. If you're running at a CPU core temp of 91F, it doesn't sound like you have much of a heat problem at all. If you were really concerned about that 3 degree increase, I'm sure you could buy it back with some slight venitalation changes, cable bundling, etc.
Of course, if you get into overclocking (I'm assuming you're not at present) or start running some fast SCSI drives or something, that insulation might get to be a problem; the increased airflow you would need to generate in order to compensate might offset your noise reduction.
Anyway, just my two cents...

 

[Jugernot]

Actually I ended up taking half of styrofoam out and the noise didn't increase much at all. The core temp went from 95F to 87F in about 25seconds (I've got lots of case fans). The noise did lower quite a bit though. I'll probably end up modifying the piece I took out and see if I can get the temp down.

I'm running a Duron 600 at 800MHz (1.66v) for the mean time because I only have stock cooling. I was running 900MHz, but I wasn't comfortable with over 100F with stock cooling.

btw: I have all of my cables rounded except my two UDMA66 cables.

Jugs

 

[toph99]

what you can do with the ata cables is say every 5 wires, take an exacto knife, and cut a slit all the way down, then eventually, gather them all up together, and tie it off with a zip tie, and then you just have bundled cables instead of having them obsruct the air. i don't think there should be any problem with this, i have never done it myself, but you might wanna look into it

 

[Jubjub]

Man, nice temps for an overclocked rig!

You've got me thinking, what about heat-sinking to the outside of the case itself? Just thinking out loud here, but do you suppose we'd get any gains by somehow sinking the processor's heatsink to the chassis itself? I guess there'd be some point of diminishing returns on heat transfer, but I wonder if you could somehow have a HS conduit from a hot part to the outer case shell to take advantage of all that metal exposed to the outside air. Steel sucks for heat transfer, though, I guess...

 

[MasterMind]

Styrofoam is used for insulation and not sound dampening. Anything you put on the inside of the case will make the case temp go up but if you use Dynamat (sound dampening material) you will reduce the case noise.

If the styrofoam does reduce the noise level enough for you then a 3°F temp increase isn't much to worry about.

 

[zuffy]

Dynamat does not reduce the case noise. I have it... waste of 50 bucks. The case more solid and heavier though

 

[Tweakmeister]

Okay let me try and put this subject to a close. I did some testing, and found that styrofoam boards did help in dampening the noise from my full tower case. You can find the results here I did not have a sound decibel meter to test how well the foam worked, because my RadioShack one did not go below 50db. I just ordered one that reads as low as 30db, and also received some generic form of dynamat samples (tar on plastic) from two companies and will wrap up everything in the near future.
If you look at it for face value, anything you add inbetween your ears and the noise producing source should produce a reduced/muffled sound. In otherwords, the intensity has been reduced.
As for tempurature, I found that adding foam helped because I could better direct the flow of air. So while the ambient case temp increased, my component temp decreased (this is good).
I'll post here with my findings (price/performance/application/etc) in the near future....

 

[Jugernot]

toph99, that is what I meant when I said I had round cables. I did that about 2 years ago and they still work great. I was kinda worried about crosstalk at first, but everything has been fine.

Jubjub, thanks I've been perfecting it for a couple of years now. I finally ended up with
2 80mm sunons in the top rear
1 cheapo slot fan
1 60mm in middle back
50mm on my Voodoo3
92mm round opening in the side that was supposed be a hole for a blowhole. I attached it and found that is was too loud for my taste, so I left the hole.

I'll be adding a Alpha soon and hope to hit 1GHz.

My system:
Duron 600MHz@800MHz 1.66v with stock cooling
Abit KT7 Raid
InWin Q500 ATX case with PC Power and Cooling 300watt turbocooler PS
392meg of PC100 at 133MHz via BIOS
19" Samsung Syncmaster 900P
Voodoo3 2000 AGP overclocked to 175MHz
18gig Western Digital Expert UDMA 66 7200rpm
20gig Seagate Barracua ATA UDMA 66 7200rpm
Sound Blaster X-Gamer Live!
Netgear FA310TX NIC
CL 5x DVDROM
Panasonic 4x8x CDR

Jugs