A while ago now RamblingEpic‘s PC started making what can only be described as God-awful noise! It took us a while to narrow down what was causing the issue as it’d come and go, but eventually we noticed that his PSU had split up the side. His graphics card heatsink was also full of dust and the case was an old, kinda crappy one with no fans. It’s been something he’d made do with for a long time until this happened recently.
He’s a no frills kinda guy, so when I’d finally talked him into letting me replace the case and ESPECIALLY the split PSU currently being held together with electrical tape, he had a few requirements. I’d hoped initially for the Antec 300 or something like it, but he preferred no LEDs, no fancy bits in general, just ‘plain & simple’. After recently having a very good experience building with BitFenix using their Shinobi case, I started looking at their budget cases. RamblingEpic set his seal of approval on the Merc Alpha case and away we went!
The job of swapping cases and replacing the old power supply unit took around 2hrs total, mostly due to having to rewire and cable-tidy everything I could. The old PSU was a 400W so we’ve replaced it with a Corsair 430W Builder Series, the same one I used in my server build last month. Altogether, this little mini-project consisted of the following:
Components
BitFenix Merc Alpha Case
BitFenix Spectre 120mm Fan – Black
BitFenix Prebraided Molex to 3pin x3 fan adapter cable – Black
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply
The Swap
The original case used was generic from a prebuilt system as was the power supply unit. When the unit cracked up the side, it started fibrating at creating a heck of a lot of noise. The whole thing wasn’t helped by the graphics card which has yet to be replaced, but has since been cleared out completely & makes LESS noise than it did before leaving just the PSU to deal with. I’ve had the heatsink and fan off the graphics card completely, cleaning and checking for anything loose that may be coming into contact with the fan as it spins and although it’s reduced the noise a lot, it’s still not gone completely which is annoying.
The BitFenix Merc Alpha case comes with vents in the roof of the case as opposed to the Beta which does not. We figured this will let any excess air leave through the top of the case if not exhausted via the included fan at the rear. We installed the extra 120mm fan in the front again to set up push-pull to get airflow over the hard drive in the lower section of the case. The installation’s just as easy as in the Shinobi; snap the front panel off as shown above, slide in the fan & secure with supplied screws then connect the power connector, in this case the BitFenix Alchemy black braided molex to 3pin x3 fan adapter bought for this project.
The longest part of the entire process was stripping down the components from the old case, untangling cable-mess!
The case is ultra budget & only cost £31.99 from Overclockers! As I’ve found before, the Spectre fans are extremely quiet and do the trick nicely. The noise issue from before is almost gone; there’s definitely NO rattling from the power supply anymore and we don’t have to worry about airflow anymore. At some point, RamblingEpic will be treating himself to a new graphics card and then the noise issue will be totally gone, but for now the Corsair CX 430W and the BitFenix Merc Alpha have done wonders – a job well done! 🙂
Wow player? Now you’re talking!