Good quiet case and psu for less than £100

[dodgybob]

I'm going to be building a socket 754 pc for use in my dad's office in a couple of months. The components are going to be the following:

£50ish sempron
£50ish or slightly more nforce3 250 motherboard
2x 256mb corsair value pc3200 (already own)
64mb radeon 9200se (already own)
80gb WD hd (again already own)
a spare dvd drive of mine and a cheap cd-rw (probably get an asus for £16)

I'll be sorting out the cpu and mobo nearer the time, particularly to take advantage of the (hopefully) reducing prices. Also will try and get a quiet aftermarket cooler as well.

The problem is the case and psu. I want an affordable case and good quality psu as this system will have to last a while even though it will mainly be an office/email machine.

I was thinking that the ideal case might be a sonata as they can be had for about £80 now and are meant to be quiet as well as being well ventilated.

However there may be a snag. My dad has previously had 3 hernia operations so the sonata may be too heavy for him to move if he has to and i'm away at university so i can't easily help him there.

So if i purchased one of these akasa which are reduced to £35 this week on scan's today only offer i was wondering if i could team it up with an aluminium case. Ideally something with a 120mm fan mount in the rear to provide decent quiet cooling.

I'm at a loss as to what aluminium case to go for if i went down this route and tried to stay on budget. I'm tempted to try a Lian-li pc7 plus and put a couple of quiet fans on it.

He wants nothing flash just something that will be quiet but above all reliable.

Any input either way would be very much appreciated

[Firelord]

I would say get a BioStar iDEQ 210P as it fits the bill perfectly (it includes the motherboard so your total would be £100 for case and psu + £50 motherboard = £150) as its £143 inc VAT at microdirect.

I have built 2 now and it is dead quiet and very fast. It uses the nForce3 250 chipset too

I built one for a uni friend and with a 2800+ A64 in there and 512MB (1 stick) of Elxir PC3200 it did 225MHz FSB all day long and passed Prime, 3D Mark and SuperPi as well.

I am in the process of building one for my dads office in with a 1GB of ram, 60GB HDD, Sempr0n 2800+, 9200SE and a DVD ROM.

With it being small as well it doesn't weigh much so will be easy to transport



BioStar iDEQ 210P Product page

BioStar Review -
Review 2

BioStar @ MicroDirect

[nimbu]

My op, Antec Sonneta, Nice case, and the PSU is pretty nice too., Can be had for around 60 notes +VAT, but that includes psu and a 120mm fan.

[Lu-tze]

have you looked at the antec super lan-boy? light weight aluminium, 2x120mm fans. i'm not sure how loud the fans are, but i'm sure they could be slowed down if he finds them too distracting.

[BenW]

How about an Antec SLK3700BQE? The silence freaks over at silent PC review seem to like this case. Couple it with 2x120mm nexus fans at 5 or 7v and it should be a near silent case!

[dodgybob]

Thanks for all your replies

That's a great suggestion firelord and I built a 210v as a basic pc for my mum. Unfortunately my dad is adament that he wants a full size case, which is a shame as I think it would make a nice setup.

He's also very conservative in his tastes and that rules out the super lanboy after he saw a picture. A new case being black rather than beige is about as far as he goes.

I asked him more about his lifting abilities and he can lift a 14kg tv fine so that puts the antec cases back into the spotlight.

He doesn't want a door on the case but that isn't an issue as he's fine with it being taken off after purchase.

To keep costs down I'm tempted by the SLK1650. It has the 350w sp and a 120mm rear case fan which at the moment is probably all the cooling he needs. Trouble is it only has a 80mm fan mount at the front. Would that be fine for cooling if he added an extra hard drive along the line?

The SLK3700BQE is a nice case but would I probably get a sonata at that point. They're not much more and have a single fan on the psu. Taking off the door shouldn't be a problem.

In essence I guess it boils down to how loud the 350w smartpower psus are vs. the 380w in the sonata and whether there needs to be a 120mm fan mount on the front for better air flow and possibly another fan along the line. Any thoughts?

Thanks for all your suggestions so far.

[BenW]

If you want the PC to be as quiet as possible you want the SLK3700BQU with 2 nexus 120mm fans (1 fron, 1 rear) at 7volts.

But then again i don't know what the PSU is like in it

[dodgybob]

If you want the PC to be as quiet as possible you want the SLK3700BQU with 2 nexus 120mm fans (1 fron, 1 rear) at 7volts.

But then again i don't know what the PSU is like in it

I have to admit that I really like that case and would choose it over the sonata if they came without a psu.

I think the SLK3000B is pretty much the same model without a psu with an extendable fan duct on the side panel. It's about £40 from kustompcs. What's a good quiet psu for <£40 to go with that option?

I think it all comes down to the psu, whether the standard 350w sp is really that much noisier than the single fan 380w in the sonata.

My dad isn't too obsessed about noise but he would like it at the same level or quieter than the old p3 450mhz he's running (2 fans: 1x psu and 1x cpu fan). Which is pretty quiet.

I just wish i knew how loud the SLK1650B was as it's a bargain at £50 for a good case. Just wish it would take a 120mm fan at the front (although I wasn't planning to fit one on the initial build)

Edit: The SLK1650 is off the shortlist, just saw a pic of the internals on newegg and the front intake is beneath the hd cage rather than infront. I really should have looked at it more before I considered it.

[Firelord]

Man your dad sounds like one fussy customer

I just put a new 210P in at a clients site yesterday with a Sempron 2800+, 1GB DDR400, 60GB HDD, 64mb 9200SE and DVD ROM and they loved it great performance at little price

[jimborae]

........

I think the SLK3000B is pretty much the same model without a psu with an extendable fan duct on the side panel. It's about £40 from kustompcs. What's a good quiet psu for <£40 to go with that option?

I think it all comes down to the psu, whether the standard 350w sp is really that much noisier than the single fan 380w in the sonata.

.

The SLK3000B is a great case, it's not exactly the same internally & imho is a much better than the Sonata & SLK3700 because it combines the best features of both cases. I paid £34 for mine from a company called media atlantic, see here

You only need to buy a fan for the front, the rear one has high,medium & low settings & you can hardly hear it on medium. I'd recommend the same Antec 120m Tri Cool fan as is mounted at the back.

To give you an idea how well it cools look at my sig, the second rig is housed in the SLK3000. It runs full load, 24/7, two instances of folding & is massively overclocked. The full load cpu temp is 38c at night & 44c during the day and you cant hear the PC running at all apart from the occasional click from the hard drive.

As for psu's there are quite a few decent 120mm fan psu's out there. The 350w psu in the 3700BQE is quiet until it heats up under full load (I run f@home 24/7) then the fans spin up & it becomes noticably louder.

[dodgybob]

Man your dad sounds like one fussy customer

He's pretty set in his ways, he was forced to jump up from first choice running on dos to windows xp about a couple of years ago because he needed to to be able to email for his work. He's used to older pc's with few fans where the noisiest bit was the hd grinding. Hell he originally used to run first choice on a 8mhz 8088 without a hard drive! He then "upgraded" to a 2nd hand 486 4 years.

Hell, in about 10 years a sff pc might just be mature enough a concept for him

[5cupa]

can defo recommend the antec sonata running 2 of there v2 120mm fans at 7v. very quiet nice easy to install case. if i had to fault it i would say shame it wasent all alu insted of plastic case door etc, but at the price it gets my thumbs up

[dodgybob]

Thanks for the input jimborae

I think i've decided on the final config of case and psu, £90 shipped:

Nexus NX3500 Ultra Quiet PSU
It makes the silentpcreview short list of good silentpcreview.

Antec SLK3000B Case Black
Yep, that seems a great case for the price......just got to take the door off.

I'll see how quiet that setup is before trying different case fans. As it's going to be quite a low power setup I'm going to stick with the stock fan in the antec initially unless I find the components get too hot.

[dodgybob]

can defo recommend the antec sonata running 2 of there v2 120mm fans at 7v. very quiet nice easy to install case. if i had to fault it i would say shame it wasent all alu insted of plastic case door etc, but at the price it gets my thumbs up

It is a really nice case, but I think that the SLK3000B just edges it out when teamed with a good quiet psu.

Yeah they are both a bit plasticky on the front, but it's not gaudy unlike some of the horrors that lurk in store these days.

Waiting for people to tell me i'm wrong now

[jimborae]

You are not wrong

[prehensile]

Speak of the devil, here is a roundup
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/oth...y/atx-psu.html