Daniel Blaisdell

Over the weekend I rebuilt my computer into the Antec 900 case. The parts arrived on Tuesday but with work and TF2 matches I couldn’t risk being down during the middle of the week. This case is a definite improvement in cooling over the Sonata III that I originally purchased for my system.

When I initially was putting this system together I didn’t expect to do any overclocking. The hardware was already pretty fast and would play any games out now and rocked my primary concern of Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat. Then I tried overclocking just to see what performance gain I could achieve and was pleasantly surprised that I could take the processor to 3.6GHZ on stock cooling.

This got the itch started and I began adding on parts to bring the temperatures of the hardware down to reasonable levels. First I replaced the cooler with an Arctic Freezer Pro 7 CPU cooler and finally replaced the case completely to increase overall airflow.

The Sonata III had 2 120mm fans running at full 2000 RPM and was removing 79 Cubic Feet / Minute of hot air from the case. The problem was, the intake fan was 4-5 inches inside of the case and it struggled to replace the hot air with cool air from outside the case. With both of these fans running at 30DB each, it was loud and wasn’t doing a very good job of cooling the system.

The tables for fan speeds are only estimates due to the fact that I use SpeedFan to automatically monitor temperatures and adjust fan speeds based on my desired temperature specifications.

The Antec 900 case has two fans in the same positions as the Sonata III, but adds 4 more fans to the overall system, including a huge 200mm exhaust fan situated directly above the processor. I am not going to include the internal fan in the same position as the Sonata III because it doesn’t directly intake or exhaust outside air anymore.

Overall The Antec 900 case is great for anyone who wants to build an air cooled overclocked system. I would recommend it to anyone that’s interested in keeping the airflow high while keeping the noise levels down.

The memory is slightly overclocked, but now that there is enough air flowing over the head spreaders it’s not flaking out like it was in the Sonata III.