We looked back at all three parts of our series and charted each case’s top-performing configuration to see if any stand out as a clear overall leader. The entries from Corsair and Gigabyte couldn't quite meet our maximum noise criteria, leaving just seven of the original nine contenders in the running.

The SilverStone Fortress 2 USB 3.0’s GPU cooling performance keeps it on top of our overall cooling chart, even with its fairly warm CPU temperature. With a reversal of lower CPU and higher GPU temperatures, Antec’s P280 takes second place.

The Azza Silentium 920’s well-dampened, low-cost enclosure tops our noise-reduction chart, in spite of our quality concerns. The higher-quality Lian Li PC-B12 takes second place for low noise.

The three noisiest cases in our round-up perform well enough to top our cooling-to-noise charts. The ideal combination of cooling performance and noise suppression appears to be elusive. Perhaps it’s time to take another look at value.

Azza’s Silentium 920 tops our price-per-performance chart, but, again, comes up a little short in quality. We might be tempted to buy it for $80, only if we couldn’t come up with the $110 for the number two value, Fractal Design’s Define R4.
At nearly the same price, Antec’s P280 and Nanoxia’s Deep Silence 1 are equally-attractive alternatives to the Define R4. Although, between these two I’d probably pick the Deep Silence 1 for its spit-door design.
Topping our performance chart, SilverStone’s USB 3.0-enhanced Fortress 2 falls to the bottom of the value chart. Though a high price is part of that calculation, its correspondingly high quality is undercut in today’s comparison by upward-facing expansion slots that blow graphics card noise towards the user. The goal of this series was to find a case that could stifle noisy blower-style graphics cards, so that the FT02S-USB3.0's improved airflow is better targeted towards users of the quieter axial-style graphics cards. Heat from axial-style coolers would not rise into the CPU cooler due to this case’s rotated motherboard tray. The Fortress 2’s otherwise good acoustic design appears to be best marketed towards silencing noisy hard drives. To say the least, the unique design of this high-end chassis practically begs us to perform expanded testing in a workstation-style build.
The bottom half of multiple charts is not a great place to see your product appear in a review, so we’ll spare Cooler Master the at-length value discussion of its modest-performing, yet well-appointed Silencio 650.
Lian Li finds itself in a similar position with the PC-B12, but with higher-quality materials and matching good looks. Lacking any price concerns, I might just be attracted enough to those materials to use this case for one of my own systems.

Having already won our Tom's Hardware Approved award yesterday in its own three-way comparison, Fractal Design’s value-oriented Define R4 graduates to a Tom's Hardware Recommended Buy award, officially concluding 2012’s nine-way quiet gaming case showdown.
- Nearing The Quiet Gaming Goal?
- Lian Li PC-B12
- Inside Lian Li’s PC-B12
- More PC-B12 Features
- Building With The PC-B12
- Nanoxia Deep Silence 1
- Inside Nanoxia’s Deep Silence 1
- More Deep Silence 1 Features
- Building With The Deep Silence 1
- SilverStone Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- Inside The Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- More Fortress 2 USB 3.0 Features
- Building With The Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- Test Settings
- Heat, Noise, And Heat Versus Noise
- Quality And Value: Part 3 Cases, Analyzed
- Quiet Gaming Case Quest, Series Conclusion
Thanks for that; I was wondering when it would arrive.
He is running dual AMD 5850's with axial fans and a Corsair H50 water cooler cooling an AMD 8150, it's very quiet even at full fan.
In my P280 I have a OC Intel i7-3770k with an Antec 920 water cooler and 2 scythe 2k rpm fans, with the scythe at full power and the 920 on aggressive thermal settings it keeps he 4.7ghz oc under 50 deg c under almost all loads while not being excessively loud.
It would be interesting to repeat the tests with an axially-cooled graphics card. After all, that style of cooler would be the choice of someone building for low noise. Of particular interest would be the resulting temperature differences, especially of the Silverstone.
Toms, thanks for doing this series it was really nice to see the time and in depth detail put into this. I will be bookmarking these for reference on my future builds.
Half finished building with it last night. Once you get th R4, you can tell that a lot of thought went into building this case. I'm still a novice when it comes to cable management, but FD makes it real easy. For $80, IMO, you're getting a steal.
Yea this competition combined with the killer R4 price is a no brainer for me. I was going to get the corsair 550d but not now.
I'm disappointed that the Corsair did so poorly with noise reduction, I thought from previous tests elsewhere that it did fine with that but had some cooling issues that could be resolved by removing the HDD cages and loading up all the fan postions. Unfortunately it seems that it would be louder still in that configuration.
Nice review, guys. I appreciate it...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rv02-e-lian-li-sonata-iv,2946-6.html
P183 ould have been interesting alternative. It should be more silent than p280? but harder to build because of dual chamber solution. Still it would be nice to see it compared to P280, if there are any real differences. If I am building silent gaming machine the case can be even a little bit more expensive if it can achieve good results. You can get gaming casis really cheaply, but they are definitely not silent...
What are you referring to?
(just curious...)
Maybe ask for your money back?
Sorry, but it bugs me when people whine so much about such minutiae. You're getting a lot of informative content for free. How do you think they feel after doing all this testing and writing to see snarky comments like these?