I put together a pc back in 2014 that was a small ITX build. I picked all the components which were pretty high-end at that time. Gigabyte Z97N motherboard, I5-4690 3.5ghz CPU, Nvidia GTX970 GPU, 8G ram, Samsung 256G SSD, and slot DVD-RW drive. It's been a good reliable pc however one thing always bothered me. I had picked a new case from eVGA called the Hadron Air shown here: Hadron Air I thought it looked good and was a very small case with a built in 80plus gold power supply. What I didn't know at the time was that it is a 1U size server type power supply like this: 1U power supply. This is probably a good reliable power supply but since it's made to be in a noisy server room its not good for a pc that is near your ears. This power supply puts out a high pitch whine due to the tiny fan it uses. Most times I could ignore it but sometimes it just bothered me like having ringing in my ears.
I did some research and the consensus was there is no quiet 1U power supply unless its low wattage, and since I couldn't fit a regular ATX power supply into the Hadron Air case I had no other choice but to replace the case.
After some research I decided on this case from Thermaltake: ITX Case. One thing that sold me was the large 200mm fan which is slower moving making it very quiet and the dust filters on the input in front and on bottom. I combined that with a super quiet 430W ATX power supply also from Thermaltake: power supply. I decided to update my ram at the same time so I bought 16G ram from patriot: viper ram.
It only took about an hour to install the power supply and move the other components into the new case and connect/cable tie the cables. This new case was a pleasure to work with since all four sides are removeable allowing access to anything with ease. I then installed the new ram, and fired it up for the first time. I was and still am amazed how quiet it is. I had to verify the case fan and power supply fan were really working because I couldn't hear them. The only fan noise I can hear is coming from my nvidia geforce. I also like the layout and airflow of this case, its just an overall well designed case.
Overall, I'm happy I finally decided to do this upgrade as it makes using this pc a much more pleasent experience and I didn't want to replace the whole thing just because of noise. I also learned that size does matter, at least when it comes to fans.
