Antec Sonata Re-Fit for the Old Rig...or Just an Evil Scheme - Overclock.net

*CyberDruid* · 07-03-05

I built my last PC in an okay case about three years ago and put it through some variations--at one point I had 12 fans running--and when I built the new rig I gave up the old one to the lil woman temp monitors and all.

Well the beast was so loud I had to tone it down a notch with a Heatlane Zen fanless cpu cooler by Heat Tronics but the PSU had 3 80mm howling away so...

I impulse shopped an Antec Sonata (w/ 380 True Power 2.0) from CompUSA tonight and did the old reload minus the fans and controller. With only the single 120mm Rear Exhaust fan ticking over it was really remarkable how the Sonata had tamed the Beast.

The SCSI drive is about the only audible sound--even the optical drives are quiet now--the roomy case layout begs for a watercooling setup

with a radiator over the rear exhaust. With the sideways HDD trays the cabling can be either invisible

or easily accessable depending how you screw the drives to the rubber grommet isolated tray.

It definitely took a few hours to finagle everything into place

--the PSU cables offer 4 SATA power connectors--but my old P4SDX is strictly IDE (with a SCSI card) so the 5 molex connectors just barely reached all the drives. If you were building from a more modern mobo the 4 SATA connectors would be right handy--but they tuck away behind the PSU and disappear--same with the PCI e power.

Really tidy once installed--unlike the last box where everything fed its masses of wiring into the airspace around the mobo--this box has a great big open area around the mobo and no wires to speak of dangling about.

I fired it up and got a boot error--the PSU power monitor was plugged into the CPU fan on the mobo and was only reading 960 RPM--I disabled it in BIOS and F10ed it. This time the IDE drives were not recognised--hmmmm --maybe I need to read my own FAQs?

I had the cables swapped master for slave. Fired it up again and watched the temps in BIOS.

I had just reseated the Heatlane on the cpu with AS5 and wanted to see how it was cooling. With only the 120mm exhasut and the single PSU fan chugging away at less than 1000 rpms the 2.4 Northy got right up to 62 degrees Celsius

--I usually can keep it around 42 with an AeroCool 4--and in the other box with many fans it stayed around 49 C Folding with the Heatlane Zen.

I let it cook for a while and it stablized at 58 C which seemed a little too hot for longevity of the old P4 (which had already been OCed must of its life before being put outto pasture as a glorified Internet browser) so I plugged in another 120 (a real Howler from Mad Dog pushing about 67 cfm) and pretty much had an annoyingly loud PC again--but I persisted (for Science!) and watched the temps in BIOS for about 15 minutes.

With the case door closed and both 120 mm fans churning the CPU temps did not drop a bit. Glad to be able to toss the Mad Dog back in the bits bin, I dug out an 80mm Antec Smart Fan. I tie wrapped it onto the bottom of the Heatlane pushing air up through its convection tubing towards the PSU fan and temps began to fall in the BIOS monitor immediately--cooling 17 C total.

The 80mm is really too small for the job but it is the quietest fan in the bin...a 120mm Nexus is coming from CoolerGuys.Com eventually.

Overall I think the Sonata w/ 380 True Power 2.) PSU is a well designed case and certainly worth $80. It is well layed out with enough room to fit a pump and radiator (with shroud) internally

and still have room for at least 2 HDDs and Optical Drives.

I would not recommend adding fans to this case--unless they are as silent as the excellent fan Antec provides for the rear exhaust--it is about as quiet a fan as I you could hope to find stock. From observation and a few simple experiments iIwas able to determine that cooling was most effective when air was circulated less forcefully but more directly from the front bottom diagonally up and out the exhasut and PSU fans (as Antec designed it).

Jamming a large CFM fan in the front (sort of--it's directly behind the drive bays) doesn't really produce the expected results

--other than taking "the Quietest PC Case in the World" and making it loud like all the others...the SCSI drive surely needs a breeze which the Nexus eventually will provide.

My real motivation behind rebuilding my Old Rig (after all it's Her's now) into a quiet PC is to lull the lil woman into a sense of complacency so she forgets to turn it off--it's so darn quiet--then I can secretly fold through the night from her PC without all these annoying interruptions!

The only problem is the case has a lock...I haven't decided whether I should just keep them so I can lock her out of her own PC if she misbehaves(that's a bad idea--bad Cyber) or just give up and build my own second Rig so I can Network with myself--send myself AIM and P2P--maybe invite myself over for a LAN party...whew it's late, heh heh heh...getting a little wacky.