I've built few a systems into these cases now,for the money it's a cracking little case.
You'll be resricted to very low cooling potential,low profile coolers as standard ones wont fit in this case due to the height of it (69mm)
For this reason I'd suggest you stick to embedded boards such as E-350(Zacate) or Ion boards.
I had a Gigabyte H67N m-itx board and i5 2500k lying around waiting to go into another build I tried in this case.
The retail hsf supplied with the i5 was just a touch too big to get the top of this case back on (I don't know if the i3 coolers are smaller or not)
Trying to find coolers for other platforms to fit this case is something of a nightmare if you go with a standard m-atx/m-itx board and cpu setup.
The psu does have a small amount of whine to it,but it's certainly not bad by any means.
I've not had any complaints about the noise from people I've built them for.
Slimline optical drives all make noise on spinup and searching,while streaming(i.e. playing the media) they arent too bad though.
Noise is a subjective and personal issue,we are reading an enthusiasts site here,a lot of which are very noise intolerant and biased.
If you feel you need a system with more power,I'd look at a different case as the height of it really restricts what you can build into it.
