Thread: Antec p183 and the Antec CP 850

I am looking for a very quiet, very efficient, case and power supply. Is the Antec p183 and Antec CP 850 a good combination?

I don’t need that much power, in fact I worry a bit from what I have read that power supplies get less efficient if you don’t use that much of them. The overall config is i7-920, 12 gb ram, GeForce gtx 260, 1 SSD, 2 620 7200 rpm HDDs.

But the biggest priority is quiet, both for the case and the PSU.

Thanks

I have a p180 and a neo power HE 550 running a core duo rig with an intel motherboard and passive 7950gt, which is very quiet.

The p180 is pretty similar to the p183 apart from a few much needed upgrades like being able to run the sata power cables direct from the psu bay to the bottom hdd bay. Most important very quiet case. I would recommend getting an antec power supply as the atx connecter needs to be pretty long to go through the slot in the top of the bottom mounted psu chamber and to a standard motherboard position at the top - as far as i know all antec psu's will accomplish this.

The antec tricool fans have been excellent on low speed and are still respectable when turned up.

I bought an Antex P182 case (again, very similar to the P183) based on the article about it at the Silent PC Review web site. I'm quite pleased with it. I'm running a Core i7 920 with 12GB of memory and a passively cooled Asus EAH4350 video card.

I've covered the rear vents around the power supply and removed the fan from the lower chamber as described in the Silent PC Review article, so that the PSU fan draws air through the lower chamber to cool the hard drives. I have 3 hard drives and have never seen temperatures over 40C. I use an Enermax 82+ Pro power supply and its cables are long enough to reach everything they need to. I chose a 525W model because it's most efficient at half load and that's about what my system uses.

In the upper chamber I use a Thermalright HR-01 with a Scythe Kama fan to cool the CPU, along with front, rear and top fans to draw air through the case from front to top/rear. All of the case fans are the 3-speed Antec fans that came with the case, and they're all set to "low". The highest IHS temperature (i.e., the CPU case temperature) I've seen is 66C after running Prime95 for six hours, and the GPU temperature seems to sit at around 50-55C. Mind you, I'm not an overclocker, nor do I run games (as you probably guessed from my choice of video card!)