Need new "silent" case

Antec P180. End of.

I got an Antec P150 for my parents' PC and was amazed at how quiet it was. And should you not like the P150's snow-white color, the Antec Solo is the same case in black and silver and without a NeoHE 430 PSU (also surprisingly quiet).

Probably the watercooled kandalf by thermaltake, slap on their special side panel with a 25cm fan, and you're onto great cooling and pretty quietness, though a watercooled p182 would be better, it won't have a window

Gigabyte Poseidon. If you don't want the blue LED exhaust fan, replace it with a Scythe S-FLEX or some other silent fan. Plus, you have the option of wire mesh or a window on the side.

cool, pm me or msn me for more info if you'd like

But it's not just about fan speed, the p180b's sound dampening helps too, though it adds tons of weight

The p180's size isn't ridiculous you just need to get used to it. It's great you once thinking about watercooling and what not

no, that's not true, that all depends on what pump you have, and what fans you have on your radiator. Don't put down something unless you are willing to compare high end to high end. If you compare the high end silent hsf, then you need to compare them to high end watercooling parts, and almost all of swiftech's parts are silent

But I already have a dead silent system with the exception of my zalman hsf, so that just shows even with 5 case fans, it's all about what fans they are, not how many, because my single zalman hsf is far louder

I like a tower case like this with lots of room and fan bays. Run the fans at 7-8 volts and all is quiet:
Chenming CMUI-P-601AEB-0 Blk SOHO Tower w/o PSU $60+16 3/31/07
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6811125480

(2) Scythe 3110KL-04W-B19-EB1 80mm 1400rpm Fan $9+5 3/31/07
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6835185034
or get Panaflow low speed fans when available.

In any event, check out http://www.silentpcreview.com for more info.

Yeah, sorry, forgot to mention that. Well picked up on
Personally, I'm going to get the Lexa because it's fairly quiet, looks nice (imo) and isn't stupidly heavy (matters a little bit as I go to LANs). But, yes, window cases will never be really quiet because they lack the dampening.

Hahaha, nice.

Just built a system in an Antec Solo case. I second that recommendation. Only bad thing compared to bigger cases that I noticed is, if you ever need to change the PSU, you have to completely disassemble the system again, e.g. remove the motherboard and that big heat sink in particular. My aim was a quiet, but fast system and I researched components fairly thoroughly. Perhaps it will be of interest. There are only 3 sources of noise in my system, which are, in the order of producing most noise, the hard disk, the Antec case fan, then the PSU fan. Here's what I came up with:

Corsair HX520 PSU. Based on Seasonic, which have a reputation for quietness. One 120mm fan on bottom, which spins up gradually. In practice it always spins very slowly and quietly with 1 Core 2 Duo and 1 mid-range graphics card loading it (see below).

Thermalright HR-01 heat sink with fan duct. This is a passive CPU heat sink, but the fan duct connects it to the case fan, which therefore stands in for the CPU fan as well. With the fan duct, the heat sink remains cool to the touch, even with E6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz. The Antec fan has 3 speed settings. I leave it at the lowest, which is quite sufficient. Interestingly it is not designed to be speed regulated, aside from having the manual 3-speed switch. In practice the constant fan is nice and unobtrusive. The fan noise ties with the hard disk when it's not seeking.

Powercolor X1950 Pro SCS3 completely passively cooled graphics card. The reviews say the passive cooler actually works better than the stock one. I wouldn't argue with that and, of course it's completely silent.

Hard disks. I chose a Seagate. Samsung are possibly quieter and they have some slower, still quieter disks for consumer electronics, which might be worth investigating.

perhaps, I curl 40s in each arm so 50 pounds isn't all that much, but I definitely wouldn't use it as a lan case