Quiet Cases for your PC

There is an entire sub-culture/sub-industry dedicated to making PCs quieter. This is especially true for PCs destined for use as "media PCs" in your living room, the last thing you want to hear is fan noice while watching television.

Here is a sampling of sites dedicated to making PCs quieter:

• http://www.buildsilentpc.com/
• http://www.endpcnoise.com/
• http://www.quietpcusa.com/
• http://www.silentpcreview.com

Browse these sites and follow some links and you'll get to see some pretty interesting cooling and noise reduction solutions built by folks with way too much free time. For me, the Antec mid-tower case solution was good enough and much more time efficient.

Antec Sonata mid-tower PC Case

By Jay Truesdale

The Antec Sonata mid-tower PC case is advertised as being a "quieter than normal" PC case, and it looks good too (see links below). It has received good reviews from many places. One major drawback is the price: $120 (note custom Antec power supply is included). I've seen it mail order for $85, but then there are shipping costs.

I noticed that this case is on sale the week of January 4, 2004 at Best Buy for $80 after rebates. The inventory function at the Best Buy web site is seriously broken as no units were reported as in stock for the entire St. Louis area. I made a couple of phone calls and found one - and had the store hold it for me.

Here are some on-line reviews that have decent pictures which do a better job of explaining this case than I could here.

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/reviews/other/sonata_1.html?

http://www.a1-electronics.net/Cases/2003/Antec_Sonata_Apr03.shtml

http://compreviews.about.com/library/weekly/aafpr-sonata.htm

My previous case, a mid-tower from PC Power and Cooling (my particular model is no longer in production), had a number of things which contributed to making it a nosier than desired case, although it was quietier than some cases I've heard. I have several PCs in my home office and when they're all running it gets noisy in the room.

I agree with almost every thing the above reviews said. It was a very snug fit to put my full-sized AT motherboard into the case. It was a challenge to get a couple of the motherboard screws in. Needle nose pliers and lots of patience are good to have. It took me much longer than expected to re-pot my system from its existing case to the Sonata, about 3.5 hours. Some of that time was spent on the motherboard manual figuring out how to use some of the case features that I did not have before like the front mounted I/O ports. I'd like to thump the bonehead who decided to put connectors in between the PCI slots! Hopefully this will be the last time I have to deal with those. Cable management was a challenge, especially for the power supply cables. I ended up with something like in one of the pictures - a large wad of cables stuffed into the upper 5.25" drive bays. Rounded IDE cables would make things easier also, but it wasn't all that bad routing the IDE ribbon cables as my previous case was similiar in layout. Now I just have to figure out how to safely remove the finger prints from the shiny case finish. I was able to dial down my cpu fan speed control to the minimum and still keep the CPU well below the suggested operating temperature for my particular AMD Athlon. I hooked the exhaust fan up to the special power supply lead so that the supply can control the fan speed. This case is quieter than my previous one and would be even more so if I could put it under my desk (I have it located on the top shelf of my computer desk to keep my daughter out of it - she loves to press reset buttons).

Note that there was a problem with the labeling of wires for the front panel Fire Wire port - see the Antec web site for the details if your Fire Wire port does not work.

02/2004 - Follow up on cleaning the case. I emailed Antec tech support asking what cleaner would be the best for the shiny black case and they said to give them a call instead. I called and left a message and a few hours later they actually called me back. They said either Windex or Formula 409 would be fine for removing fingerprints from the case finish. I used a little Windex on a rag and the case looks great.

Discussion

Let us know how the rebates work out. I avoid BB like the plague after their DMCA repeat this past Day-After-Thanksgiving-Sale stunts. That, and the fact that MS does all of their IT work. I choose not to support them by taking my business elsewhere. Did you get a quote from KSPEI? -- Mike

Mailed rebate 1-7-2004, received check 3-16-2004, that's about 10 weeks. Yes, I did try KSPEI, $120 + shipping. Best I found elsewhere was $85 at Provantage + $20 for UPS Ground for about $105 total. -- JTruesdale