Thoughts on cooling revamp?

[i sea]

im going away to college next year and want to revamp my cooling system so I can filter out dust and so my vga cooler doesnt piss of my roomate.

I wanted to spend around 50 bucks to add 3 120mm fans to my antec 300 case and buy a new vga cooler for my ati 4850. its a 1st gen 4850, so the cooler sucks, and playing empire total war with the fan at 100% it still gets to 85 celcius.

this is what i came up with from newegg:
3 X 120mm Scythe Slipstream
Arctic Cooling AccelS1 Rev2

comes to $56.61 shipping included

for the filter I was planning on doing something with cheesecloth, or picking something up at radioshack. I don't need a crazy good filter, just something to keep out most of the stuff.

whatcha guys think about this?

 

[photonboy]

Don't use filters like cheesecloth. You need only blow out your system with compressed air every few months.

It doesn't make much sense to spend money installing a passive heatsink then add fans to your system.

Unfortunately, I don't know what your entire system is so I don't know how much heat you need removed.

The HD4850 I assume, blows air out the rear of the case. If you remove this option then other fans in the case have to pick up the slack, though not as efficiently as directly blowing the air out.

If you really want to make things quieter for for not much money then sell your card and get an HD4770 which runs 90-95% as fast as the HD4850 but is much, much quieter due to the 40nm.

Other noise components are the PSU, CPU and case fans. A mid-range system like yours is optimized for noise with:

1) graphics card - blow out the rear (most efficient for performance is HD4770)

2) PSU - a good PSU has 3 fans speeds and is almost inaudible when doing basic tasks

3) case fans - 120mm usually. One needed for mid-range system. Get a low-noise one. Not much is needed for most cases.

4) CPU - Heatsink + 120mm fan (controlled by the motherboard). Ideally, the fan can turn will even turn off.

The noise is a total system affair. If you do decide to get that cooler, then add a 120mm fan to it and another one for the case, both low flow.

 

[i sea]

my entire system is:

antec 300 (has a 120mm exhaust and 140mm exhaust. also has 3 empty spaces for more 120mm fans. I want to take advantage of those spaces to improve airflow, mostly because its only 30 or 35 bucks and the 10.7dba rating means they wont add much to the noise..)

C2D E8400 with arctic freezer pro 7(fan is pointed at the 140mm case exhaust fan)

ati 4850(1st gen so it has a crappy cooler that does NOT vent out of the case, makes me mad sometimes they couldn't design it even decently)

4GB ram

550W corsair psu(pulls air from the case and expels outside)

2 hard drives and 1 optical drive

the greatest source of noise in the case is the fan on the 4850. I'm not trying to get the computer to be silent, just to not sound like a hairdryer when I play a game. I'm completely open to suggestions of a better solution in the $25 dollar range. In the future, I'll prob replace the antec tri-cool fans with something a bit quieter, but they're decent enough for now.

the reason for filters is the fact that my dorm will probably be dusty, and I will only be able to do a decent job cleaning my pc during breaks. i know filters don't stop dust at all, but they slow its buildup.