Post
by Maelwys » Wed Mar 11, 2015 6:06 pm
Just a quick update on my NCASE experience. First, I will say that this case was a lot of fun to build in, and by that I mean it took a while to get everything figured out. It's challenging, like a 1000 piece puzzle - you can't be in a big hurry. After many changes, I ended up putting the following components inside:
Power Supply: Silverstone ST45SF-G with PP05-E kit
Motherboard: Asus Maximus VII Impact
Memory: Kingston HyperX DDR3 1866 2x8GB
CPU: Intel i5-4690K
CPU Cooler: Corsair H80i AIO
Graphics Card: Asus GTX 970 Mini
Hard Disk: Samsung 850-EVO 512GB
Cooling: 2x Gentle Typhoon AP-14
It is not silent, to be sure, but extremely quiet considering how much is crammed in there. First issue was the 80mm fan in the Silverstone ST45. It was loud, did not have any rpm management that I could discern, and had an annoying constant rattle. Terrible, horrible, no good fan; extremely disappointing given the price of the unit. So I ripped it out, and put a Nexus fan on the outside connected to a PWM header on the motherboard. The Nexus has a very small buzz when running at less than full rpm, but it seems to come and go. I may swap it next time I'm in there.
Next to go were the Corsair 120mm fans. Massive RPMs that were completely unnecessary for cooling performance, and they undervolted poorly so were always audible. I replaced them with the GT AP-14s running at 60% power. The Corsair H80i pump is the loudest component at idle. My terrible iPhone based SPL meter says 39db @ 1 meter, which it also says is the sound level of my cat purring. So I dunno. The GTX 970 Mini takes over the sound profile when gaming, but is otherwise unobtrusive.
Idle temps are +10-12C off ambient. Gaming temps are +25-30C on the CPU and +45-50 on the GPU. Internal case temps hover around +30-35C under load.
All in all, it's not a cheap journey, and you can build better larger for less, but I like the way it turned out.