And I'm wondering if a P182 would be quieter, but I don't like the look or the door.
P182 is very probably the quietest case outside small cases with low performance components.
Main reasons for that are damped (that heavy multilayer construction) panels, soft HDD mountings, straightforward airflow without air&noise leaking holes everywhere... and door which blocks direct noise escape path muffling component noises before they escape to your ear.
It's rather impossible to find quiet high performance components so if actually quiet PC is your goal instead of "Can't hear car's engine noises in artillery firing range"-quiet I would recommend steering clear of magpie nests like 900/1200 which fail in about every aspect of quiet PC case.
Already that CPU with overclocking requires very probably much above quiet fan so better to be able to damp its sound by that 3-5dB possible with damped case.
My previous case was leaky front CM Stacker and there just wouldn't have been any way to make it really quiet despite of damping/sound absorption mats without specifically silent (&lower performance) components, entirely because of noise leaking open front. After nearly half year of first thinking and then studying I went for Lian Li A71... which unlike (internally lot smaller) Antec P182 just requires hours and hours of work in cutting and installing damping mats for realizing silencing potential.
Now as after-thought I should have gone for it lot earlier. Also because of light aluminum construction it's even lot (~5kg) lighter than steel cases despite of damping mats installed to nearly every surface.
That door also helps nicely to contain noise of intake fans (so it's possible to increase their speed some) and surely does same for noise of graphic card or CPU fan (if later would have noisy fan) so for PC meant to be quiet without silent components I would definitely recommend having door. Before Stacker I had Chieftec Dragon maxi-tower and already its flimsy plastic door helped surprisingly much to noise of optical drive.
In Lian Lis you can even change door's opening direction so it won't be opening to wrong to side.
Here's what its inside looked during building: (only rational use for Akasa: in places where you don't want thick mat)
In A70 without door especially intake fans would be important to keep as quiet as possible because their noise can travel directly to your ear. So in that I would keep it mandatory to at least replace intake fans with good fans like Scythe SlipStream.
Quite a lot more expensive... for acoustically lot worser HDD mounting than original A70!
Aluminum is more sensitive to vibration than steel so I would keep it as top priority to minimize conduction of vibration to case structure.
(damping of strong vibrations woudl require awfully lot of additional mass)
If I was to buy a case now I'd take a good look at this Zalman
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-025-ZA&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=736
Its not great looking but seems to have good cooling, plenty of space and practical.
- Acoustically questionable plastic HDD trays... also thermally decoupling drives from case making HDD cooling rely to Holy Spirit because bottom leaks so much that you can be sure negative pressure cooling doesn't work well or at all.
- Exhaust fans have way too restrictive penny pinching meshes directly in front of fan blades creating more turbulence noise for less airflow.
- All those plastic parts.
Okay... some of these can be fixed but still I would prefer starting point with least to fix.
I know people are generally getting 3.8 - 4.0, but the extra 200-400mhz seems to suddenly shift the power requirements up considerably
It's not about the clock speed but about the point where you have to start overvolting. (power consumption goes to square of voltage)
For as long as you can go without overvolting power consumption rises very linearly, or actually not even that much because part of consumption consists from leakage currents which depends only from temperature and not clock speed. But as soon as you need to overvolt more than marginally power consumption starts rising fast:
30% overclocking rises power consumption only that much but if you had to rise voltage 20% for achieving that you've doubled power consumption. (10% overvolting would make total rise nearly 60%)
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