Here is my Castetek 1016-B case. It cost about £35 from CCL
Computers. I had a 120mm fan mounted onto a copper plate which had been
sprayed black and glued to the remains of a couple of blank drive bay covers.
Although it provided excellent airflow for my system (XP1600 with 256MB Samsung
PC2700 overclocked to 179MHz*10.5=1.88GHz) it was damn noisy as you can imagine.
This is shown below.
I tried wiring in a few resistors. At 12V is consumes about 6W so that's about
0.5 Amps. I figured this means it has a resistance of about 12/0.5 = 24 Ohms.
With about 6 Ohms of resistance in front of it, it still whirred like a jet
fighter. I decided to ditch it for a couple of 80mm - one in the usual place
at the back of the case about half way up, about level with the CPU socket (Casetek
included a nice plastic clip to hold an 80mm without screws - you can see this
next to my Thermaltake Heatsink below) and one in the same position as this
120mm fan. I didn't want to use the standard fan mount at the bottom of the
front of the case as the airflow through the metal front of the case is always
so limited and in my experience, the turbulence here means the airflow causes
a lot more noise than normal. So I decided to mount my fan in the same place
to get maximum airflow and show off my shiny metal fan grille as well.
The 120mm hole was clearly too big for an 80mm fan so I was going
to have to re-make my mounting bracket for the 3 empty drive bays. This had
been a messy enough job before, attaching a metal plate to the remains of the
bay covers - I did this as they already had the correct fitting for the case,
which was one I've never seen before: You pull off the whole front bezel thingy
for the whole case - then you insert the bay covers behind the front cover;
not like you'd get on a normal beige box. Pictures below illustrate my previous
"messy work" and the fixing for the bay covers.
