Had the final case for the system delivered this Friday. Only4Pro was the first place I noted to have got a shipment of the Silverstone LC11 case, and I managed to order one before they ran out.

Transferring the innards to the new case was surprisingly straightforward. Although it is compact, it's fairly nicely laid out. I had one bigger problem, though - the button in the aluminum fascia for the DVD player eject was too "tight", and I could not align the drive so that it would have worked - ended up being a matter of half a millimeter. However, on Saturday I bought a new set of stuff for the workroom PC (which I'm using to type this), and got a different model DVD drive. Still a tight fit, but now it worked out.

I also replaced the stock heatsink and fan with a Glacialtech Silent Breeze in hopes of quieting down the machine. It's still fairly loud with 3x 80mm fans rotating at 2100 rpm, but I'm hopeful that I will be able to slow the fans down without creating a heat problem. Even now, it's an even hum, and not very disturbing. Surprisingly in this case the Samsung hard drive is quieter than in the Antec Sonata, even though it's now directly connected to the metal case structure, so in fact regardless of the hum, it's less noticeable than the Sonata was.

The new workroom PC worked out pretty well, too. I was pondering using the old CPU and getting something less powerful for the HTPC, but as the Athlon XPs, Semprons etc all seem to generate about the same level of heat, and apparently XPs are starting to be difficult to find, I got a new Athlon 64 and Nforce3 mainboard instead. Reused the Radeon 9600 Pro I had taken out of the HTPC to reduce its heat output, and found that the new ATI driver works very well even on a x86_64 system. Quite enough of performance for what this machine is intended for - even capable of gaming, or what gaming there is under Linux, anyway.