Airflow, are there ratings for this?

[Ghost9]

I'm building a pc for the first time. No i'm not looking for step by step help as there are links stickied for that, but what I'm looking at now is what type of case to get. My system is going to be a hardy gaming machine, possibly with SLI, but one of my major goals is cool and quiet as possible. I know airflow is an important factor in this and a case can really dictate that, but I have not seen anything in descriptions regarding this.

As I don't think i'm quite ready to jump into the big leagues of water cooling, does anyone have any suggestions on how to pick the case with the best airlow? Do they rate that somehow?

 

[Mobius]

No. No they don't.

You just have to do what the rest of us do, and read reviews.

If quiet is important to you, avoid any case with 80mm fans. You want 120mm ONLY, and a passive, or 120mm PSU, a passive CPU cooler like the ThermalTake Sonic Tower (et al), and a passively cooled video card too.

The problem is, you say "hardy gaming machine" - but the very definition of that is a howling box with 13 fans installed. Quiet machines are either water cooled, or not capable of any overclocking at all, and not filled with top-end graphics cards.

t doesn't matter if you buy the quietest box in the world, if you put a bunch of noisy components inside it, it will still sound like the bloody great big whiney box it is.

Start reading boyo!

 

[Ghost9]

If quiet is important to you, avoid any case with 80mm fans. You want 120mm ONLY

good to know.


I know i'll have to deal with noise for a gaming machine, but i'm looking to reduce it as much as possible. My pc right now(which has 4 case fans in addition to the 2 psu fans and the cpu fan and tiny noisemaking mobo fan and the loud vid card fan) sounds like a vacuum and it's getting on my nerves so I'm trying to figure out the best noise/cool balance.