This is my LAN system, so it needed to be powerful, portable, and oh yeah.. quiet! It's actually salvaged from the remains of my disgustingly befouled Koolance system, which used to be my main rig. Based on the SPCR review of the Super LanBoy, I decided to pick one up and populate it with...
- P4 2.8, overclocked to 3.2 (250mhz bus)
- ABIT IC-7 i875 mobo (Zalman passive)
- Audigy2
- Radeon 9700 Pro (Zalman passive)
- Maxtor 200gb HDD
- 1gb PC3200 DDR
- AeroCool deep impact DP-102
- Zalman 400w PSU modded with panaflo L1A
- pax.mate (shut up, I like the stuff)
- eggcrate foam
The blue cold cathode was inherited from the old box. It works well in that location on the Super Lanboy because you can't see it directly, and the aluminum edge of the case reflects the light well. Nice diorama effect. The rear 120mm fan is also blue LED, like stock front Antec 120mm fan.. but you can barely see it due to the overwhelming brightness of the CC.
The Heatsink Design Of The Future: DP-102 heatpipe, vented directly out the rear of the case. This is a P4 running at 1.65 volts (up from 1.525) to achieve the 3.2ghz overclock, so it does get toasty. 48c at idle and 66c under load. The provided aerocool "golden" 80mm fan is running at stock speeds, which is ~2400rpm. A nice, quiet 80mm fan, and in that damped internal location I don't need it to be ultra-quiet anyway.
The rear-mounted 120mm aerocool runs at about ~1600rpm stock, and is the loudest component in the system.. but this airflow is really important due to the overclock. In order to combat noise, this fan is hooked into the 3-pin CPU fan header, and is controlled by ABIT's BIOS FanEQ feature: when the cpu gets over 62c, the fan goes up to 100% speed. At lower temps it falls back to 60% speed, so ~1000rpm (these values are all set in the BIOS screens). One interesting side effect: at low speeds/voltages, the LEDs don't light! So I can tell if the system is working hard by looking at the fan.. if the fan LEDs are lit, the CPU temp is >62c.
I converted the front fan to a 3-pin connector and hooked it into the motherboard through the case fan connector. It's running through a Zalman 56ohm 3-pin speed reducer, so it's really very quiet. The front "cheese grater" area, directly behind the fan, was snipped for increased airflow and reduced noise.
I used the blue mcmaster-carr hard drive grommets instead of the stock black Antec gromments provided in the hard drive mounting trays. This Maxtor is a noisy drive, purchased just before I got the SPCR religion.. not recommended. Decoupling helps, but there's only so much you can do with fundamentally noisy hard drives. Anyway, I re-used the black Antec drive grommets to decouple A) the front fan to the case, B) the power supply to the rear of the case C) the fan mounted to the DP-102 heatsink. Handy little items, particularly if you use scissors to cut them in half along the middle indent!
I also built a little hard drive "isolation chamber", lining the bottom, top, and rear of the HDD area with eggcrate foam. Dtemp reports hdd temps in the mid 40's when defragmenting, as I recall. You can't really see it in the pics, but I also used eggcrate foam and pax.mate to line every surface I could.
This is a very well ventilated case, even stock.. my only airflow mod was to snip out the front fan grill, but I doubt that made a big difference. Running with the cover off offers only a +1c improvement in temps.