During the past week or two, I’ve bought a new case, six case fans and two 36” rounded IDE cables. All of these going into the new and improved erwin. His shell is now comprised of a full server tower with some pretty awesome, strategically positioned, cooling fans. I’m trying something different with this case. Instead of the traditional front to back airflow, I’ve got Erwin’s airflow going the opposite direction and it seems to be working much better. I’ve got one 120mm fan in the back top behind the hard drive bays taking air into the case and blowing past the drives. On the bottom of the back, there are two 80mm fans blowing into the case, across the motherboard and over to the front of the case where three 80mm fans work as exhaust to complete the cycle. Right now, the case temperature is 75F (26C) and the CPU temperature is 91F (32C). I’d say for a system with an Athlon XP-M 2500+ processor and four 7200rpm hard drives, that’s pretty good.

One surprising thing to note is that the whole thing is no louder (and possibly quieter) than the old case which had only two case fans and fewer hard drives.