After 4 years with my trusty old Lian Li PC-6099 (image) case it's time to find something more suitable for the current inventory. The new high end components put higher demands on the case cooling, most noticably the passive motherboard cooling, and also the custom coolers I installed on the cpu and gfx card depend on a better airflow than this older case provides. It was a work of art at the time, but the quadruple 80mm fixed speed fans make too much noise compared to the effect.

After several months of waiting and watching Lian Lis product lineup, considering cases such as the excellent PC-V1100BplusII and PC-S80 I finally found a case I think is just what I need. Lian Li PC-A10B is an extremely stylish case with an excellent airflow design which while it isn't specially noise dampened as such, should allow me to run with all fans at minimum speed and thus become practically silent. If there's still some resonnance or something I'll consider adding pads on the side walls.

It's also getting great reviews over at Overclockers Café and Case.Closed, which is no disadvantage either :)

I also took the opportunity to add a card reader to the system so I don't need to get the portable reader from the camera backpack each time I want to read the CF cards. This excellent Sunbeam I/O panel adds e-sata, usb, and audio connectors as well as fan controls to the package.