Super Lanboy Case

[Pghpooh]

Hi
About 15 months ago I bought a Antec Super Lanboy case. It was one of those sales where there were rebates, etc. If I remember right the case cost around $40 after the rebates.
The case didn't come with a power supply. It has everything else.
With AMD and Intel coming out with new cpu's I want to build a new pc.
My biggest concern is making that case as quiet as possible. The case will sit on my computer desk beside the monitor AT EAR LEVEL!!! Now, I have a hearing loss and wear hearing aids. Then, why does it have to be quiet?????? Two reasons. The closeness to my ears and,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, my wife has extremely sensitive hearing.
Are there fans I can buy that would be quieter then the ones that came with the case?

Not sure about the cpu choice. I do like the Thermaltake Big Typhoon CL-P0114 120mm Cooling Fan with Heatsink for cpu cooling as it is very quiet!!!

What else can I do to quiet this case down?
If it would be more cost effective I'll buy a case that has a better design for quiet and cooling and give the Lanboy to one of my buddies for his next build.
Thanks
Pghpooh

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Pghpooh
If it would be more cost effective I'll buy a case that has a better design for quiet and cooling and give the Lanboy to one of my buddies for his next build.

What's the budget of "cost effective" to you? If you're willing to throw $100-200 into making it quieter, then may as well get an Antec P150 or P180. Otherwise... the fans are reasonably quiet, but not silent. An easy improvement will be to remove the front fan, cut out the grill for rear fan and replace rear fan with something known to be good and "silent" such as a Nexus fan which is an undervolted Yate Loon and considered "reasonably silent".

There is a problem with chasing after a "quiet" system. As soon as you make one thing quiet, then something else becomes the next noisiest component.

The Big Typhoon will have to be undervolted. Buy a Seasonic S12 series PSU. Buy a Seagate or Samsung hard drive. If you're really extreme and don't need much disk space and are willing to give up some performance, a notebook HDD will have a lower noise floor than a desktop drive (see SilentPCReview.com for recommendations). Yes, it is possible to have a system so quiet that the HDD becomes the noisiest part.

Besides that, just don't buy anything that creates a super amount of heat. That means CPU choice is important and perhaps don't overclock. If you are buying now, then an Athlon 64 of some kind, perhaps one with lesser amount of cache. In the future, the Core 2 Duo (AKA Conroe) may be a good choice also - depends on when you plan to purchase. Make sure to buy a motherboard that is already passively cooled - don't need to mess with finding a replacement passive heatsink for the chipset only to find out it blocks your video card. Speaking of video card, choose one that puts out less heat to begin with. You can find passively cooled 7300 series if you aren't a gamer, or passively cooled 7600GS if you are a casual gamer, or get a 7900GT and an aftermarket cooler if you play a lot of games. Yes, it is possible to get other cards to be quiet, but they also put out more heat that your fans have to deal with.

 

[pkme2]

I recommend a LL PC-60 and swap out the 80mm fans with Yate Loons. I replaced the top fan with a YL 120mm on my 2 PC-60s and the rest with YL 80mm.
If you add a Seasonic, you should have a whisper quiet and very cool machine, cooling that is.

I still use the AMD HSF on all three of my machines, because of the LLs excellent cooling properties. I had an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro, but went back to the AMD when cooling wasn't a factor.

 

[Zepper]

Light Al. cases are harder to make quieter than are steel ones but the usual methods apply: buy quiet devices to begin with, isolate potential noise sources from the chassis, dampen ringy panels with something, make direct exits for sound from the case into indirect ones.

.bh.

 

[pctwo]

I have this case and found that once I undervolted the case fans and swapped out a noisy PSU fan, the case has a resonance humming from, I believe, the hard drive. I have a WD 2500KS (sata II, 16mb). If I unplug the HD, the resonance goes away. The sound is a low pitch hum that goes up and down in volume rhythmically. If your wife has sensitive hearing, it will probably bother her as it does me.

Oddly enough, if I take the HD out of the case and place it on the (carpeted) floor next to the case, the resonance is still there. This tells me suspending the drive won't do much good since no part of the HD is even touching any part of the case (well, except for the power line to the psu).

It's the paradox of silence: the closer you get your rig to silent, the noisier it seems to get

 

[Pghpooh]

HI
A little info for now.
I found this site some years ago when I built my first pc. I never bought there. Their philosophy seems to be to keep the internal parts cool. And there are some quiet fans there. Coolcases
In the beginning I won?t over clock the pc. Once the pc is up and running for a long time if I do over clock it won?t be by much. I have a t-berd 1200 running at 1300. Not much of a boost. If I do bump the speed up it will be minimal

To me to be cost effective on a case mod would be adding more then $50.00 to $60.00 to the Lanboy. The Lanboy is frail and weak compared to what I use now.
My Case
This case is so strong my grand kids climb up and stand on it!!! If I could quiet this case down I would keep it! It?s on the floor now so I can live with that. I have four 80 mm fans in it and when I bought them they were rated at 32 db which was quiet back then.

Why would I have to undervolt the big typhoon to get it quiet when the specs say the noise is around 16 to 18 db???

I forgot about the noise the hard drives and fans on the video cards can make. My old MSI video card uses a passive heat sink. What scares me about that heat sink is that it is so big that the top of it is a hair away from the card beside it. Any closer and they would touch each other and PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! LOL

The fans that come with the cpu's now,,,, are they quiet enough that I can get by??

Lots of dumb questions here!!!

Thanks
Pghpooh

 

[Zap]

If you want more of a "durable" case similar to your Antec but quieter, consider Antec SLK3000B for $32 plus shipping or Compucase LX-6A19 for $38 plus shipping if you don't like doors over your drive bays. Both those cases have rubber grommets for the hard drives which are somewhere in between direct bolting to metal and suspending the drive in effectiveness.

Originally posted by: Pghpooh
Why would I have to undervolt the big typhoon to get it quiet when the specs say the noise is around 16 to 18 db???

Well, Thermaltake is notorious for measuring using "new math" or some such... basically pretty much everyone who have done side by side comparisons have come to the conclusion that 20 is 20, but a Thermaltake 20 is really a 25, but only when it isn't a 30... something to that effect.

Nearly any fan is quiet if undervolted enough. Thing is that will it then provide enough cooling to keep the CPU cool? With current Intel desktop chips, doubtful. Current AMD chips, likely. For all chips I think most would consider the retail box HSF to NOT be really quiet if running at full speed.

 

[Pghpooh]

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[Pghpooh]

HI
Um,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, This old guy goofed as he tried to do a quote from another post.
Be back after I wipe the egg off of my face!!!

Pghpooh

 

[Pghpooh]

HI
Zap,,, you said that Thermaltake rates thier stuff differently. IAlmost like audio equipment manufacturers rating the power outputs of the amps.
How dows Zalman rate? Are they "more honest" and give truer ratings?

Thanks
Pghpooh

 

[Zap]

It's tough to say if one company is more "honest" in their ratings than others because most just give a rating and don't disclose HOW they obtain that rating. For instance, it's easy to measure power draw and RPM of a fan, but CFM and decibels? We're talking about dB... same fan can give greatly differing numbers depending on whether you measure from 1", 10" or 10'. How do manufacturers measure? Who knows? All I know is that generally speaking most manufacturers ratings are kinda sorta clustered around each other, but Thermaltake's ratings tend to be off on its own. Their fans aren't necessarily bad and they're usually priced like any other fan, but you should ignore their dB claims and just assume that they match other brands of fans in dB that have the same RPM.