Have been eye-balling this case for a friends build. Looks stunning and well built, but wonder would the temps drop with after-market fans instead of stock Corsair ones. I replaced all the Corsair fans in my 800D and it made between 5-10 degrees difference.

any point in having quietness as a markable category? I know it would cause all sorts of problems for you testing...

I like the build quality of the corsair cases and some of the design features of this, but the R3, at ~£40 less, represents much better value to me. Plus the front door of the fractal also looks great and despite not having USB 3 has a much better IO panel imo. Goddamit though the rubber gromets on the R3's cable routing holes are abysmal.

I think additional fans and probably a fan controller are necessary though to strike a good balance between noise and cooling with these 'quiet' cases.

I actually had this pegged for my next case. Selling point? That the H100 fit so snugly on the top.
I'm guessing I wouldn't be alone in this...is there *any* chance of a test on temp/noise with the H100 installed?
Pretty please with cheesecake on top :)

You're better off buying a 650D, only £20 more and it looks much nicer.

R3 has a model that comes with a front USB now.

Also prefer the look of the R3 generally.

am i the only one seeing that the highlighted rows in the graph are not those of the corsair??

I have the Carbide 500R, which costs a lot less than this and seems to be a much better case.

I find the R3 build quality too poor.

the 550D on the other hand looks set to replace my p182.

I do like my r3 but I wish the front was made out of metal instead of plastic like the 550d.

for those of your that are concerned with noise, SPR has done a review too:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1255-page8.html

Pretty much answers my question from the hardware forum - will place my order for one monday, Dark Rock Pro to go with it and i should have a pretty much silent case which is exactly what i want

Originally Posted by teacherboy
Pretty much answers my question from the hardware forum - will place my order for one monday, Dark Rock Pro to go with it and i should have a pretty much silent case which is exactly what i want

Just on a side note, I have an r3 and a gelid tranquilo which are designed for 'silence' but the fan noise doesn't bother me that much, its the hard drive and the optical drive I hear the most.

I would recommend a ssd and a 5400rpm drive if you want quiet.

I have always found reviews of cases that don't have many stock fans a little weak in terms of cooling reviews. I have the 550d and it didn't cool great stock, with panels on. I know have 6 fans in it. 3 front/bottom, and 3 top/back with the side panel closed. I get great cooling. If I had a less powerful system, or one with less heat, I could remove those fans and put on the panels and have a quieter system. I personally thing the highlight of the 550d is modularity.

Originally Posted by fdbh96
Just on a side note, I have an r3 and a gelid tranquilo which are designed for 'silence' but the fan noise doesn't bother me that much, its the hard drive and the optical drive I hear the most.

I would recommend a ssd and a 5400rpm drive if you want quiet.

Enabling automatic acoustic management on the HDD is also a good idea, if you still can. Bloody patent trolls.

I like the look of this.

Not everyone wants to run heavily overclocked kit on benchmark runs all day. For those of us using stock clocks for normal gaming it is a nice looking well built case with adequate cooling.

Nice to see dust filters everywhere as well.

Bought one today for £105(ish) from Scan on their today only offer, plus the dark rock pro and free delivery - thanks Bit-tech ;) - pics/impressions etc to come later in the week :D:D

Just built a system for a friend using this case. It's a very well built case, the stock fans are very quiet it would have been better if they were 4pin instead of 3pin to be controlled by the mobo (maximus gene) as there was enough sockets.
We installed two additional 120mm enermax T.B quiet fans.
With all removable panels in there place and putting our msi 7970 3gb 1010ghz O.C on maximum specs with crysis 2 / dirt showdown gpu temps were 70-80'c with fans on auto. Not to bad for a quiet case with the fans covered.
Idle temps for the gpu were 37'c and web browsing and light windows 7 work we saw the temps rise to 42'c.

If we were to order all the bits again I'd invest in 5 quiet 120mm pwm fans, get a splitter for the two front fans. Saves using molex plug converters keeping things even tidier.