A Master Craftsman Builds A Case

From: Daniel Moore

I'm a furniture maker and a long time computer user since my first Ti994A computer with a whopping 16k of memory. Boy, have things changed.

Lately I have taken to building computer cases with two main goals: noise reduction and creating aesthetically pleasing designs.

Here is my latest Mr. Silent III case.

It houses a Core2 duo 6600 processor w/ 4Meg cache mounted on a 975XBK Mobo, 4 Seagate SATA drives (three in a dynamic RAID configuration) that use my bungee hard drive mounts. Most everything else is pretty much run of the mill, an X1800GXL video card, DVD and CD burners.

The acoustic and cooling characteristics of this design are very special. The case fans run at a frequency that does not resonate with the construction materials of the housing. The hard drives that do resonate during read and write cycles are isolated with the bungee post mounts that I designed. The Seasonic Power supply is isolated with a beaten copper mounting plate which is very damp acoustically. Aluminum would wprk as well but in this instance would not look as nice.

By increasing the case volume, the cooling efficiency is increased. This enables all the fans (case, power supply, video card and CPU) to run slower and quieter. The motherboard supports 4 wire PMR fans with digital speed control that do not chatter.

The mobo tray, backplane and cdrom holders are cut out of old ATX cases.

Conclusions

As with last week, what can I say? Come back next Friday for more reader tales of weird and wonderful PCs and PC mods.

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