Continuing with my tradition of off topic posting here, I thought I would post some notes on my new computer case and assorted goodies that I posted about recently. I have finished of transplanting everything across now and it is almost completed!
The removal of components from my old case and the basic installation of the motherboard and power supply in the new case took over 5 hours! Part of this time was spent installing the Zalman passive heat sink on the north bridge chip. The base of the cooler is a tiny bit smaller than the chip (enough to get away with anyway) which meant that it was a right pain to line everything up with a somewhat random method of setting up the heat sink attachment legs used! A significant amount of time was spent trying to literately prise my existing heat sink off my CPU. I am convinced that the retaining bracket has shrunk since I installed it and because of this I now have several screwdriver sized chips near the top of my motherboard. I had also decided to remove the grills covering the exhaust and intake fans as well with the aid of a trusty Dremmel and pictures can be seen here.
The next stage was to install the components and wire everything up. This took quite a bit longer than I had anticipated as I had picked up some plastic spiral wrapping for the cables to keep it neat and improve airflow. When I say a bit longer I mean 7 hours plus to connect everything up! Despite my careful attempts to keep everything as neat as possible it still seemed a bit untidy. This is not helped by the size of the case and the separation of the PSU which meant that some power cables had to take a more direct route than I would have liked. I did have to deviate from my original plans slightly as I removed the lower chamber fan as it just would not fit as well as a few other unforeseen issues such as my sound card being right in the way of the SATA headers.
The artic cooler graphics card heat sink was installed before the system transplant and I must say for the price it is a fantastic piece of engineering and the build quality and noise levels of very good. The only downside is that you need a heck of a lot of Artic Silver to cover the GPU and 8 RAM chips, not to mention patience when apply the Artic Silver. It does keep my GPU temperature at 35c at idle though compared to the 50c plus temperatures it used to sit at. One piece of advice that may seem obvious as you read this but could have saved me a lot of time – when removing a heat sink (GPU, CPU, Northbridge etc) always twist the heat sink clockwise or anti clockwise as you look down onto it rather than trying to lift it off. It only occurred to me to try this after 20 minutes of bending my graphics card into a banana shape and it seems to work just a bit better for removing heat sinks!
So how quiet is it now then? Well it is pretty quiet – definitely a lot quieter than my old PC. I am still running with my original power supply which is one of the 2 noisiest items in the case. The CPU cooler does have an annoying high pitched whine to it at times and a 92mm Acoustifan is on its way to replace it. This may in turn be replaced by an Akasa amber fan as the specs of those look really good (18db @12v and 44.8 CFM). On the whole though I am quite happy with the noise levels considering I did not change the PSU out. With a silent PSU and the CPU fan replaced I think it really would be near silent, but given the time it took to wire the PSU in originally I think I may leave it for now.
I am very impressed with the cooling abilities of the case though. The system temperature measured at 2 places in the case using the fan controller is 25 – 26c with the intake and exhaust fans on low speeds. The CPU cooler is barley warm to the touch and cools the Northbridge heat sink effectively at the same time. The power supply also cools the HDDs without the need for a lower chamber fan. One observation worth noting is that the complete setup is heavy – I mean really heavy!! The soundproofing material was nearly 3 kilos and the empty case alone is 14kg if I remember reading the specs correctly so I am not going to be moving it around in too much of a hurry.