Show & Tell - Swapping PC case

[McJamweasel]

After upgrading my machine in september I decided that it was time to replace my 6 year old Antec Sonata case too. I settled on the Fractal Design Define R3, a gorgeously understated case with good cooling and lots of soundproofing to keep the noise in.

https://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/1579.jpg

So, first off here is the existing system.

https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/01Medium.jpg https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/02Medium.jpg

First job was to strip out the cabling, disk drives and the expansion cards:
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/03Medium.jpg

Next out came the motherboard and PSU, leaving a rather sad looking, empty case:
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/04Medium.jpg

And a pile of components (AMD Athlon X2 250, 4Gb DDR3, MSI 770-C45 motherboard, Gigabyte GTX460 1GB and drives.):
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/05Medium.jpg

Now time for the build up. I started by fitting the fans. There are 4 120mm fans in there, 1 bottom & 1 front on intake and 1 top & 1 rear on exhaust duty. The front is motherboard controlled and the other 3 are run by a fan controller on the case. There's still space for another 120mm in the front and a 120 or 140mm in the roof and in the side panel. The front, floor & PDU intakes are covered with filters, the unused side panel & roof mounts are covered in more sound proofing.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/cooling.jpg

Time for the disk drives next. The hard drives are in these removable trays with rubber supports to damp the vibrations.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/07Medium.jpg https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/08Medium.jpg

Next up was the PSU. The Define has plenty of space behind the motherboard tray for the cabling. The only niggle that I have is that the rubber gromets on the cable holes is a bit soft, so they easily pull out of place when running cables through.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/09Medium.jpg

Now it was time for the motherboard.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/11Medium.jpg

Next up were the Wi-Fi and GPU cards and the cabling.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/12Medium.jpg

Alas, this is the extent of the cable tidying job that I had to do:
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/13Medium.jpg

Tidying done. Not the best job, but good enough. I've used rapstrap in places rather than cable ties, they work very well.
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/14Medium.jpg

And the finished build:
https://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/McJamweasel/Sonata%20to%20Define/15Medium.jpg

Temperatures are basically unchanged from the Sonata, under load (Furmark for GPU and Prime95 for CPU) I get 72 C for the GPU and 40 for the CPU with all case fans on minumum (room temp 21 C). If I up them to full it only makes a couple of degrees difference so I won't bother, I prefer the quiet.
The Sonata was 2~3 degrees higher with only 2 case fans, so I think that speaks volumes for the cooling efficiency of that (admittedly noisier) case.
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BCF: Be yourself, just don't be an arse.

[Frost]

I did something very similar. I got a big CPU fan, the quietest i could find and upgraded to a soundproofed case with big fans. On starting the system up it ran exactly as cool as my old one, but wasn't much quieter. I messed around in BIOS and with some software and turned the CPU fan down from about 5000rpm to about 800. The secondary case fan didn't even need to be plugged in!
After this the system was basically silent. It's within arms reach but i can't hear a thing.

[Neorion]

Nice improvement, pop an SSD or a hybrid drive in there and you would be laughing.
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VFR FI 2000- Shiney Red Thing
"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"

[Frost]

If you fancy a project, you could always go for a water cooling system