I currently switched to the Antec Three Hundred and thought it might be quiet enough for me to leave my computer on while I sleep and it isn't. I am thinking about the Antec Sonata III but I think it's just plain ugly.
I think it's just the amount of open vents and the noise of the fans. My buddy has the Sonata II case and it's quiet enough.
coolermaster cosmos 1000 That's the one that I have and it's very quiet. It has sound deadening material inside. Airflow is not that great though.
i have an antec solo and that has sound dampening sides as well, very quiet. i also have some low rpm yate loons and nexus fans, which as also whisper quiet. the corsair PSU is inaudible. the hdd's are fairly quiet when they seek. have you tried swapping out the fans? the antec fans that come with antec cases are not quiet. and the claim that one case is ugly when you have the 900. That is not a looker either....
just giving you some options here,... a couple of Yate Loons, some dampening material from Home Depot, maybe a cheap fan controller > spending $100+ for a new case
I don't think it's possible to make a 300 quiet, the whole front of the case is a grill and so is half the top. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article75-page4.html for some good cases.
Any case will be quiet if the fans run slow enough. The trick to keeping the computer from overheating even with slow, quiet fans is to have a case with lots of vents. The Antec 900 excels at this. If you want it to be quiet even with a couple of loud-ass video cards in it, you're going to have to replace the video card coolers too.
I have an Antec P182 and I love it. Very quiet. But you can have an almost silent rig with any computer case.. switch to a water cooling set up with a passive radiator, and wrap your hard drives in rubber bands
Hard drives mounted to rubber-insulated rails is fine, but actually covering the drives in rubber bands (if that's actually what you meant) will make them overheat. Not a good idea.
The drives are suspended by the elastic bands. This is a common practice on SPCR. Hell even the Antec P150 came with them already integrated.
Ah, okay, I've seen that before. Not the most secure mounting, but I guess it works. I've found that the rubber-grommeted mounting rails that Dell cases use are about as close to silent as I'd ever care about, and you can move those cases around without securing the hard drives first.
I run my 120mm fans at about 1100 rpm. It's damn quiet. Use 2 case fans MAX (intake, exhaust) 1 fan for cpu, and the one in your PSU. Any more is a waste of extra noise.