Silencing PC - need suggestions

[Yeis20]

Thank you all for such a wealth of information for silencing PC's - I love this site! I recently went out and picked up the Antec Sonata case go go along with a bunch of other upgrades I have made over the last few months.

Upgrqades:
a7n8x - nfs 2.0
athlon 2600 - athlon 3200
ocz pc2700 rev 3.2 (1 gig) - ocz pc3500 (1gig)
radeon 9500 pro - HiS radeon 9800 pro IceQ
Thermaltake volcano 7+ - Thermalright SI 97
Beige no name case with antec 80mm fan - Sonata case
SWapped out the 380 Sonata PSU with my truepower 430

Fans I have in current rig:
120mm fan (came with case)
92 mm SilenX fan (on thermalright si97)

Also have a SilenX 120mm that I want to install where drive cage is - mounting screws that came with fan did not fit and grommets can not be used due to makeup of fan.

Onto my question:

the silenX 92mm does not seem to move much air - should I chalk it up as a loss and move to a different fan?

Should I install the silenX in the case in the front or replace the default 120mm with it and stick with the single 120mm fan setup?

System used to be very load and I must say that the sonata made a TREMENDOUS difference in noise. Happy with the change for now, but might get exotic and do some additional silencing in the future.

Thanks all for the info in advance

[tay]

Onto my question:

the silenX 92mm does not seem to move much air - should I chalk it up as a loss and move to a different fan?

Are you having a problem in temps? The Nexus 92mm fan is considered the best and should move more air than the silenx, while the 92mm L1A is noisier and faster yet. I'd probably just get an L1A and a zalman fanmate or use speedfan to slow it down.

hope this helps

[Interitus]

As a Sonata owner I can tell you that adding the front fan won't help much. If you do the mods listed by Tom Brown here on the forums to open up the Sonata's front bezel, for me it seemed to equal the effect of using a front fan. All the front fan really did was cool the HD's a little. In fact it made overall case temps a bit worse, so I don't use one. It won't help your air intake much.

What I did was open up the bezel. This resulted in a tad cooler drive temps, but not by much. My second step was to tape up the "Antec" holes on the side panels. This brings all the air in through the bottom of the case, further cooling the drives. Side effects of this were slight increase in CPU/Board temps, but no more than 1-2C. In my opinion this is a much more viable method of cooling the drives. It cuts down the noise of an added fan to the cage, while at the same time offering a more natural airflow through the case. Cutting the fan grills away helped noise a tad as well. With the bezel mods you will probably notice a bit more noise escaping the case, but it's worth it to me as I think the added fan would create more noise than the bezel mod.

If you're looking for a quiet fan for exhaust, I'd reccomend the Globe 120mm or the Panaflo Blue FBK model, however the Panaflo is a 120x38mm solution. I use the Panaflo, however I'm going to try out the Globe actually IN the case to see how it performs. In all honesty the Sonata stock exhaust shows trivial temperature improvements from 5v-7v so I think the Globe should do just fine while reducing noise a bit more.

[burcakb]

Whether you can do without a front fan or not mostly depends on what hdd you have. I couldn't do with two hot seagates, I can do with one cooler samsung.

Nexus as an exhaust fan also might do, but you really need to get your front bezel open and discard the filter. Nexus doesn't cope well with pressure.

[Yeis20]

Not having temp issues - CPU is 47c after a night of folding

SilenX fan 92mm is pretty damn quite. My Antec truepower 430 seems to be my "noise" component right now so not sure swapping out standard sonata 120mm fan would make a difference.

I will look into the bezel mod - thanks for the tip!

[Interitus]

Pardon me for the assumption. The bezel mod will definitely cool your single drive or possibly two cooler running drives just fine. A fan might be in order for multiple warm running drives.

Thanks burcakb.

Just a thought...

I think it's a general concensus that the "Antec" holes are there for easier cooling of the 380S PSU that Antec provides with the case. For me sealing them up helped the drive cooling more and definitely helped with dust problems inside the case. Also, a neat thing to do is use colored tape of your preference. I use blue ducting tape so now the Antec holes appear blue on the outside of the case. If you're looking for a cheap solution to the Antec 430, I use per my sig a Coolmax Taurus 400w PSU. It's a single 120mm fan PSU that can be had for very cheap. It doesn't have PFC, however that's not important to me like it is to some here. It's definitely a very quiet solution. It has an adjustable fan with settings on the rear of the PSU for Auto, Low or High. At Low it's very quiet. I keep it set on auto because even with 30-33C case temps it never ramps up.