A few quick pictures of my new system, will take better ones soon: As you can see the Ninja 3 JUST fits under the sidepanel... The Aux. power connector is located in a poor position, cannot use any fans thicker than 25mm. The filters actually work, I was expecting them to do nothing because it's pretty much just screen door mesh. http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2213269 Specs: -Intel 2500K @ 4.2Ghz -16GB Corsair vengeance DDR3-1600 -OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD -Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Gen. 3 -Scythe Ninja 3 (hate the stupid tramp stamp tribal flame, will try to strip it) -Corsair HX650W PSU -Lian Li PC-A04 -Pioneer DVR-219 -Windows 7 Professional -Dell U2412MB Ultrasharp IPS Rev. A02 -No graphics card yet (Intel HD3000), thinking of a 7xxx Currently at 4.2Ghz, mild OC using the Asus CPU Level Up in BIOS, running at 40C on all four cores with fans at 500rpm (inaudible), full 100% load using Prime95 is around 65C. The Ninja is passive right now, probably won't feel the need to add a fan to it anytime soon. I will be changing out the top fan to a ball bearing or a Scythe Gentle Typhoon soon however, the sleeve bearing is driving me nuts with the whirring. Cable organization is a terrible in the case, the space in between the sidepanel and the mobo tray is too narrow for the ATX cable, couldn't even hide that. Thinking of swapping fans so the cables aren't tucked in yet. I cut down one of the SATA power cables and modified the length to make it fit better in the 5.25" bay area, have provisions for my Blu-Ray burner, as well as a 3.5" data drive. Did I mention the SSD is FAST? Like holy crap fast. Before installing any programs (standard Windows installation), boot up was around 14 seconds (no optimization), currently it's at around 22 seconds, with 77 processes. Not too bad at all. I wished I could get rid of the BIOS alarm at the beginning of each boot, I have the top fan plugged into the chassis connector instead of the CPU since the BIOS fan controller won't let me reduce my speeds below 1000 RPM. I may close off the front intakes seeing as they do nothing at the moment without a GPU and force some cooling across the VRM via the vented PCI slots and the 80mm hole in the back. Brendan
Just picked up two 80GB Raptors for a measly $15, RAID 0 stripped setup! Never had Raptors before, couldn't justify the cost, so now since they're dirt cheap decided to buy a couple of them. Unfortunately, the performance simply isn't there when compared to my ancient Intel 330 SSD, even in RAID. In addition, there was indeed a high pitch whine (even after suspending them!) and some users on here pointed out stripping the Icepack helps alleviate this issue. You know what? It does! Right now they're pretty quiet, and I have them set to spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity, so no extra noise. I used four loops of thin fabric elastic (black of course) from the sewing section at Wal-Mart per section (think that's a lot of redundancy). Had to redo all the cables to install the cage I took out unfortunately LOL. Some pics (also included my first attempt which still had the Icepack installed):
