Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 Case Review: You Asked For It, You Got It
by Dustin Sklavos on November 27, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- quiet
- ATX
- Nanoxia
Noise and Thermal Testing, Stock
The Nanoxia Deep SIlence 1's cooling design introduces a few minor wrinkles into the usual testing procedures. I can't complain about the inclusion of an analog fan controller or the switchable chimney in the top of the case, but it does increase the amount of time spent testing the case. To simplify things, I opted to test the DS1 with the fans turned all the way down and all the way up, and with the chimney opened and closed at both fan settings. Even at their lowest settings, the fans do still spin, but I found myself incredibly surprised by some of the results and you may very well be, too.
Ambient temperature during testing was between 22C and 23C.
Temperatures with the fans turned all the way down are pretty poor, but if you max them out the DS1 easily beats the Corsair 550D and BitFenix Ghost. Pay special attention to how the DS1 ranks against the 550D, because if Nanoxia can get it out here at their targeted MSRP, they're going to be undercutting Corsair. What's really surprising, too, is that the DS1's load thermals with the fans all the way up are actually competitive with performance-oriented cases.
Fan speeds are reflective of the differences in thermal performance we saw. With the case fans on high, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo and GTX 560 Ti's fans don't have to work nearly as hard.
And here's the haymaker. Even with fans turned all the way up, the DS1 is still quieter than every other case. There's an audible difference between low and high that's unfortunately beneath the noise threshold of my sound meter; at low the case can really only be heard in a silent room in the dead of night. That said, the fans Nanoxia includes with the DS1 are very efficient, as is the cooling design of the case. More powerful (and louder) fans could probably easily shoot thermal performance to the top of the charts.
I'd also like to point out that the DS1's chimney has a very negligible effect on thermals and noise, which is both good and bad news depending on your perspective. It's good news because it means that keeping it open won't appreciably increase the noise the case produces, but bad news because it doesn't actually contribute in a meaningful way to case cooling.
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Grok42 - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Sounds like an interesting concept. Can you give an example of a case that does this? My pet peeve are external bays but I also think internal ones could be designed better and have been trying to find someone doing something new in this area.Death666Angel - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Don't you guys have import in the US? I can buy stuff from all over the world and have it shipped to my door step in Germany. :Dkaragiosis - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Just a small errata. On the noise level chart (overclocked) the labels for the fans at low and high speed should be swappedDustin Sklavos - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Nope, it's correct as posted. The higher fan setting for the case improves airflow so much that the CPU and GPU fans don't spin as high.dehemke - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
Where are the Antec Performance One series in the comparison charts?This thing looks like a P18x/28x inspired design, I'd like to see how well it stacks up against those.
I'm still running a jet black P180 and a Mirror finish P182, but I had to do some modifications to get them to play nicely with the new longer PSU's and video cards.
Is this the right successor?
jjwa - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - link
I am still running my main rig in a P180 :). It rocks. And it's used for gaming, playing server and everything else at the same time. While overclocked. The only problem I have now is that I have put so many HDDs into it (replacing the upper stock HDD cage) that I reduced it's air intake too far :(.mascotzel - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
What is the high low significance in the review?Galcobar - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 - link
It's explained in the first paragraph of the Noise and Thermal Testing section, just above the charts.mascotzel - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
so why are the fans on low noisier than the same fans on high in the charts?flyingpants1 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
In my opinion, the only sources of noise in most modern computers should be two 140mm+ fans: The CPU fan and the PSU fan. The 140mm CPU fan on a 120mm heatsink can be ducted to the rear exhaust port - no need for case fans. SSDs make no noise. Hard drives make no noise when idle, and when running they require no active cooling, see the Google hard drive study. Integrated GPUs obviously don't need extra cooling.It's possible to eliminate the PSU fan by using a fanless PSU, but this limits your GPU choices. As for high-end GPUs like a GTX680, one could easily imagine an aftermarket GPU heatsink with a 140mm which spins at inaudible speeds on idle.
Combine all that with a quiet case and an inch of soundproofing stuff, and your computer will be literally inaudible by human ears when idle.