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wdfx

I bought this case a couple of years ago after this article was linked here.

I love it. It's beautifully engineered. Top quality. It sits at the corner of my desk proudly silent.

I'm likely about to upgrade the pc within but the case will remain a strong feature of my desk.

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Do you use it as a gaming PC (or for other high GPU load activities)? And if so, what's your take on noise under load?

Edit: I guess this is a senseless question if the case really only uses passive cooling. I was assuming there would still be fans somewhere.

I despise my current PC's fan noise and I'm always on the lookout for a quieter solution.

It's a dev workstation for me.

Currently inside is an i7-9600 which I limit to 3.6ghz and a cheap 1050ti.

The CPU is technically over the TDP limit of the case but with the frequency limit in place I never exceed about 70degC and due to my workloads I'm rarely maxing the CPU anyway.

There is zero noise under any load. There is no moving parts inside the case at all, no spinning HDD, no PSU fan, no CPU fan, no GPU fan.

Did you have no success upgrading your fans (Noctua etc)? Still too loud? How about water cooling?

Just last week I moved from using a Noctua NH-U12S to cool my 5950X, to a ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III Pro 360 AIO liquid cooler (first time using liquid cooling), and while I expected the difference to be big, I didn't realize how big.

Now my CPU idles at ~35 usually, which is just 5 degrees above the ambient temperature (because of summer...), and hardly ever goes above 70 even under load, and still super quiet. Realize now I should have done the upgrade years ago.

Now if I could only get water cooling for the radiator/GPU I'm using. Unfortunately no water blocks available for it (yet) but can't wait to change that too, should have a huge impact as well.

It's an HP OEM (because I moved countries during the pandemic and getting parts where I settled was ridiculously more expensive).

The CPU is AIO (and the radiator fans are loud). The GPU has very loud fans too, but is not AIO.

It's four years old at this point and I might just build something else rather than try to retrofit this one to sanity (which I doubt is possible without dumping the GPU anyway).

I bought my current gaming desktop off a friend as he didn't need it anymore when I was looking for an upgrade. It had an AIO cooler. The pump made so much noise and it seemed like I had to fiddle with fan profiles forever to get it to have sane cooling. I swapped it for a $30 CoolerMaster Hyper 212 and a Noctua case fan. It cools well enough for the CPU to stay above stock speeds pretty much all the time and is much quieter than the AIO cooler was. I'm not suggesting this CPU cooler is the best one out there, but just pointing out its not like one needs to spend $100+ on a cooler to get pretty good performance.

The GPU still gets kind of loud during intense graphics gaming sessions but when I'm not gaming the GPU fans often aren't even spinning.

Honestly at this point it's not so much about money as it is about whether or not this particular case/setup/components combo is salvageable with minimal effort.

The CPU fan is rarely an issue (it mostly just goes bananas when IntelliJ gets its business on with gradle on a new project XD).

The GPU is the main culprit and I'm not sure there's any solution there that doesn't involve just replacing it.

Depending on the fans it may be possible to re-oil the bearings.

Interesting idea. I feel like the fan noise from my GPU is just air moving, but maybe not.

> I guess this is a senseless question if the case really only uses passive cooling.

Are there senseless questions?

It can be used for gaming if your demands are met by a Nvidia 1650.

MonsterLabo built passive cases that could cool hotter components, seems defunct though, sadly.

A 3050 6GB would work too.

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