Super quiet Lian Li case mod

[Katana Man]

In my never ending quest to get a quiet running computer, I've had some great success lately, that I'd like to share. This case mod dropped my temps by 5 degrees and at the same time, it also dropped the overall noise level. :)

Using one of my Lian Li PC-60USB cases, the first thing I did was to add a 4th 80mm fan in the rear. I cut a hole using a hole saw (http://www.caseetc.com/cgi-bin/caseetc/T-021.html?mv_pc=334) with some saw lubricant (http://www.caseetc.com/cgi-bin/caseetc/T-182.html?mv_pc=506), and the cleaned up the edges with a dremmel.

Then I replaced the stock fans with 4 of the Silencer 80mm fans (http://pcpowercooling.com/products/alarmandaccesories/silencerfan/index.htm). These fans are similar to the Papst fans (http://www.plycon.com/papst803.htm) but cost half as much. The Silencers put out 28 CFM and only 20dB(A).

As you can see by the picture, the 2nd 80mm fan barely fits, but the installation went smoothly. I also dremmeled out the built in case grill on the original one. This reduces noise a teeny bit more. Yeah, there are a couple of scratches, but this case is not for show and tell, it's for practical daily use.

To cool the CPU quietly, I am using a Panaflo 92mm 42CFM @ 27 DB fan (http://www.plycon.com/pana92l.htm) with a 92mm to 60mm fan adapter (http://www.plycon.com/fanadpt.htm) on top of a Vantec CCK-6027D (http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/vanteccck6027d.html) heat sink.

I used to run the 2 front stock fans on the medium speed. Now I run all 4 fans at full speed and it's even quieter.
So anyways, I thought this might be useful to some of you.

[Katana Man]

More pics:

[Katana Man]

A pic of the replaced front fans:

[The Overclocker]

do me a favor and get some finger guards, your will thank me later.

nice mods, i think virtual-hideout did a feature on adding a second fan to a lian li. they had the same problem with the fans not fitting

[Warlord2]

nice mod

can you hear your hd over the fans now?

I have a bunch of 92mm at 7v and was wondering if it would be quieter to put in some of those fans instead

I shouldnt be complaining sence I have a nice system already but I would like to make my computer quieter thin my DELL that I have:D

[TruckChase!]

Cool man :)

Being able to hear the hard drive... boy, it's been years.

[Ozzman]

**** i cant hear anything in my system that mofo is ****ING loud but i always have a heaset on so its not to bad might go water cooling later on..

[Katana Man]

Yeah, I can actually hear the one of the hard drives now. It's a 10,000 rpm SCSI and it has an annoying high pitch to it, like when you turn a TV on.

However, I can not hear my primary hard drive since it does not make any noise. It also does not produce any heat either. Can you guess what it is ? :D BIG GRIN

[nikhsub1]

That is a nice mod, however, I would have made a blow hole at the top center of the case instead of 2 at the rear. Just my .02

[Christoph]

Originally posted by Katana Man
Yeah, I can actually hear the one of the hard drives now. It's a 10,000 rpm SCSI and it has an annoying high pitch to it, like when you turn a TV on.

However, I can not hear my primary hard drive since it does not make any noise. It also does not produce any heat either. Can you guess what it is ? :D BIG GRIN

DOB??

[Katana Man]

DOB? what's that?

I'll give you another hint: The hard drive has no moving parts.

[Crappy]

I did that same mod on my PC-60 about 2 months ago when I got the case but I replaced all the fans with Panaflo 80mm High fans and did the 7volt mod to the ones in the back.

Only fan noise I hear is from the Panaflo 120mm on my rad, but soon that will be changed over to 7 volts too.

http://home.nyc.rr.com/hardware/01.jpg

[Christoph]

Originally posted by Katana Man
DOB? what's that?

I'll give you another hint: The hard drive has no moving parts.

Dead out of the box.

If you're not talking about a RAMdrive, then I'm upgrading to whatever it is that you have as soon as I get my watercooling system happily installed.

[Katana Man]

Very close. It's a solid state hard drive. It is only 1.2 gig, but I use it as my primary drive with my OS on it. The thing is great:
No moving parts
Shock resitant
No heat
No noise
.048 ms access time!
Burst Read/Write Rate: 40 Mbytes/sec
Write Endurance: 28,000 years @ 100 MB/day write cycles
It acts just like any other SCSI 160 hard drive. No drivers, just plug it in format it, and use as normal.

To give you an idea of how fast it is, after the computer does it's post, my Win98 boots up in 5 seconds.

In the future, all hard drives will be replaced with solid state hard drives (or something similar). Our kids will laugh at the fact that we actually had to wait for programs to load, and that it made noise when it loaded :)

Solid state hard drives currently go for about $5,000 for a 4 gig drive. You can get them up to 75 gig :p

If you want to learn more about them, do a search for "solid state disk" or "solid state hard drive". I bought mine here:
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_sw.html
http://www.bitmicro.com/edisk.jpg

[Katana Man]

Now if I take this one step further and add a 120mm blowhole then I'll have too many fans blowing out and not enough in. I really don't want to add another fan on the side, because I want to dynamat it.

So if I add a blowhole, I'd need another fan blowing in right?

[phiber]

the super case quieting mod would be to watercool
it quiets it down VERY MUCH!

[Christoph]

Originally posted by phiber
the super case quieting mod would be to watercool
it quiets it down VERY MUCH!

Yes, but not super-cheap. It's always nice to see a cheap mod that yeilds a significant improvement.

[phiber]

Originally posted by IdeaMagnate


Yes, but not super-cheap. It's always nice to see a cheap mod that yeilds a significant improvement.
whoops....thats true....