A friend of mine is thinking of buying one of these. It seems pretty decently equipped for the price. My only worry is the case - it has lots of large fans. Has anyone heard one of these things in action? Is it going to be too noisy for a desktop?
The nice thing is, you can turn them all down to low speed, and they should still move lots of air, being so huge and many.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?BB-I5754G
Its going to be a dual boot with winxp, and I'm assuming that on both that and Debian it will scream along.
Peter
On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 06:04:09PM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
A friend of mine is thinking of buying one of these. It seems pretty decently equipped for the price. My only worry is the case - it has lots of large fans. Has anyone heard one of these things in action? Is it going to be too noisy for a desktop?
Well, you don't have to have all the fans connected.... even so Antec make great cases and tend to use reasonable fans. If they are too noisy just replace them with some quieter models. Even so, large fans are quieter than small fans (generally) as they spin more slowly to move the same amount of air which reduces noise levels.
I'd rather have an Antec case with a load of (at very least) half decent fans than something cheap and nasty with 1 or 2 very cheap fans that make loads of noise and break after a few months.
Adam
2009/11/7 Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk:
Well, you don't have to have all the fans connected.... even so Antec make great cases and tend to use reasonable fans. If they are too noisy just replace them with some quieter models. Even so, large fans are quieter than small fans (generally) as they spin more slowly to move the same amount of air which reduces noise levels.
I've used Antec cased and coolers many times and have always found the cases to come into the"pay a little more get much better quality" bracket. The fans being quieter than average, you would need to spend a lot more money to get a significant reduction in noise. And as Adam said you don't need all the fans connected. If your machine has good airflow around it and runs within the processor/memory manufacturer temperature tolerances you may well not need any case fans and are just able to rely on the power supply and processor coolers.
Cheers, BJ
John Woodard wrote:
If your machine has good airflow around it and runs within the processor/memory manufacturer temperature tolerances you may well not need any case fans and are just able to rely on the power supply and processor coolers.
Although I find that running without a front intake fan and multiple drives can allow the drives to run a bit close to the limit (usually between 55-60C) and if running say 3 drives in a raid 5 array then you can easily go over. So if you elect to do this then watch the drive temps carefully with the smart tools.
Another quick and cheap case quietening tip (even more so if you are putting multiple drives in) is to obtain some "Dynamat" self adhesive sound deadening sheets (designed for use inside cars). I find that a bit of this stuck to the inside of each case panel (you don't need to cover the whole thing just a bit half the panel's size stuck to the middle) removes that biscuit tin quality present in even some of the good cases, quietens down good fans even further and lowers hard drive noise. It also stops case resonance with things like optical drives.
£15-20 gets you 4 sq ft which should be enough to do two computers so well worth it in my opinion.
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Adam Bower -
John Woodard -
Peter Alcibiades -
Wayne Stallwood