it is much quieter with the lid on, it drowns out most of the noise from the fans.
regarding the $200 worth of lego, it took over 1400 pieces to build, all of which were ordered online because you can't buy bricks like this in bulk from a store. i bought them all from
brickbay.com and got reasonable prices on most of them. One of the stores i bought them from was considerably higher, but he had the most pieces available and some that i could not get anywhere else so what are you going to do?