Any cases much quiter than antec 900?

[tiaza]

Hi, I'm in the process of making a new PC and I'd really like to improve on noise this time. Do you think it's worth replacing my antec 900? I was looking at 'Coolermaster Cosmos' case or anything quiter for less than £150.
Thanks!

[lego batman]

Quite a lot of cases will be quieter than the 900 - it's more designed for high airflow than low noise.
Take a look at Fractal Designs cases such as this and also check SPCR and their forums for in-depth noise analysis.
If you list your components you will probably get more tailored suggestions though.

[Pob255]

I'll start off buy refering you to the answers I gave to an almost identical question on the ebuyer forum

Right, start off by locating the main source of the sound.
http://tv.hexus.net/show/2008/11/Pac...re_s_the_noise
great little video for it here

Run through your different fans, stopping them to locate the worst offenders.
Then when you've located the problem you can look into ways to fix it.

Please take the time to locate the biggest sources of noise, if your stock cooler is running at 100% all the time then changing your case is going to do nothing. (well very little at best)

[crossy]

Hi, I'm in the process of making a new PC and I'd really like to improve on noise this time. Do you think it's worth replacing my antec 900? I was looking at 'Coolermaster Cosmos' case or anything quiter for less than £150.
Thanks!

Have you tried looking at http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/pc-cases? They've got a reasonable range of cases (and case-quietening kits) and are quite happy to give pre-purchase advice (within reason of course). May be slightly more expensive than the box shifters, but their after-sales matches Scan's. What I'm thinking is that you might be able to hold onto your A900 and just replace a few components to get the noise level down. Actually I did that (twice) with my old Coolermaster ATC-210VX - replaced all the fans with "better" ones when they became available - at the end it was only about 25-30% as noisy as it was "out of the box".

I've just finished my new build and I ended up downgrading from the (aluminium) ATC-210VX to a Coolermaster HAF 932 (I wanted plenty of elbow room - and a steel case was all I could afford). The 932 comes with 3 230mm fans and a 140mm one, and as a result is quite quiet - especially when I switch my mobo to "Quiet" mode which switches off the 140mm fan. The 932 is just over £100 from Amazon, but be warned - it does look a bit ugly (pictures make it look worse than it is). The old ATC is a better looking box by miles, but since it's only 2/3'd the width of the HAF it's a bit restrictive for modern quiet coolers. The HAF on the other hand has so many fan mounts that it'd be a piece of cake to replace the bundled fans with really quiet 120/140mm alternatives.

If it'd be helpful I could always do some sound recordings of the HAF 932 and get them to you - actually was planning to get that done for a blog posting anyway, so maybe I should get off my butt, write that posting and just point you at it.