The quest for silence

Swallowtail · **4th August 2008, 12:00 PM**

Two more steps down the path on the elusive quest... and I'm stoked with the results.

On the weekend I fitted a Scythe Ninja Mini and a Corsair 520W PSU to my Antec Fusion.

Scythe - this thing is awesome. It could be made to measure for the Fusion, it fits perfectly. I am not running a fan on it, just a single 12cm case fan which on this case is close enough to make the heatsink fan redundant. CPU temps are fine - hitting late 30s / early 40s.

Corsair PSU - super quiet, great modular cable design. Very nicely built too. Only complication here was I had to piggyback three cables onto the main power cable bundle to run the Fusion's IR so it can be turned on from the remote.

End result is SUPER quiet. The noisiest thing from the front is the hard drive, from the side you can just hear the 12cm stock Antec fan (on low), and from the rear you can just hear the PSU fan, from my chair I can't hear it at all unless it's completely silent in the house.

100% recommend these items for anyone looking for the sound of silence!

vlad · **4th August 2008, 12:06 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Swallowtail

The quest for silence

Nice

Firstly, I was under impression that you are going to talk about WAF

Swallowtail · **4th August 2008, 12:43 PM**

LOL... not going there!

Schnapper · **4th August 2008, 12:49 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by vlad

Nice

Firstly, I was under impression that you are going to talk about WAF

LMAO!!!! That's a classic!!!

As for the quieter components, if the loudest thing is the stock antec fan, do what I did in my gaming PC and change all the stock antec fans!!! They are noisey!

Swallowtail · **4th August 2008, 01:23 PM**

To be honest with the only fans being the Cosair PSU's and a single Antec 12cm on low, it's pretty good at the moment. The Antec fan is a good one, not at all noisy.

The Zalman CPU fan I had was quiet, but having no CPU fan at all is quieter!!

syrilion · **4th August 2008, 02:57 PM**

I am finding the ANTEC fan psu not too bad. I disable the case fans because the work done in my HTPC dosen't require them to be used. That's one way to keep the noise down!

Swallowtail · **5th August 2008, 10:45 AM**

Just be aware that the Fusion case is designed for airflow to have at least one case fan running - if you turn them both off you will have hotspots. If you look at the design of the case, the PSU fan ONLY cools the PSU and optical drives area, the rest is pretty much isolated. Whilst your CPU may be reading OK due to its HSF, you will likely be getting warm spots in other locations.

syrilion · **5th August 2008, 10:53 AM**

Fair enough. On my first machine I disabled most of the fans because of the noise. I did not seem to make any difference to the performance, so I have done the same with the Antec case. In fact the Antec case has much better passive cooling than my first case, which was just an el cheapo mini tower case on it's side. It's still noisier than the Antec case.

My next step is to muck around with the cpu fan settings in terms of fan speed and at what temp it kicks in.

I can't help but tinker!

Swallowtail · **5th August 2008, 11:06 AM**

The Antec cases are generally very well designed, and yes passively cool much better. My main PC is in an Antec case that dropped CPU temps by a consistent 10 degrees when I bought and fitted it (no other changes, just the case from an el cheapo special to an Antec).

Your best bet for heatsink in the Fusion is the Scythe Ninja Mini - PC Case Gear sell them, and as I mention above you can run it without a fan - just run one of the case fans. If you google "scythe ninja mini antec fusion" you should find the review that silentpcreview did on it in this case.

Running that with no fan and just one of the 120mm case fans will be much quieter than a normal hsf mounted on your celeron, and will give much better results too.