AcoustiProducts AcoustiCase 340

AcoustiProducts is a UK-based company that offers a wide variety of products with a single focus: reducing the level of noise produced by your PC. Noise is an important ergonomic component of the PC user experience – high levels of noise have been shown in studies to cause impaired concentration and increased amounts of stress while working at the PC, and a constant source of background noise can interfere with getting restful sleep. AcoustiProducts’ offerings allow you to retrofit your PC with quiet-operating cooling solutions.

Among the items sold by AcoustiProducts are “AcoustiFan” quiet case fans, “AcoustiPack” acoustic damping materials, rubber case fan mounting grommets, and “AcoustiFeet” highly-compliant (“squishy”) adhesive feet for decoupling the PC from the desk. AcoustiProducts also offers “AcoustiCase” PC cases with the compliant feet and acoustic damping materials pre-installed, though the AcoustiFan case fan is sold separately. In the United States, one of the most notable distributors of AcoustiProducts items is QuietPC USA.

At QuietPC’s request, we’re having a look at the AcoustiCase model 340, which is a rather generic-looking mid-tower case that’s outfitted with several other AcoustiProducts items, including AcoustiPack foam damping materials throughout and AcoustiFeet decoupling feet underneath. QuietPC USA also supplied an AcoustiFan “Dustproof” 120mm case fan (not included), as well as a set of “Ultra-Soft” elastomer studs for mounting the fan to the case.

We like to think we’ve got a fairly stringent standard of what ‘silence’ in a PC means – it needs to disappear beneath the noise floor of a quiet room, which usually means <25dB total noise output. One thing we’ve learned after evaluating many supposedly “silent” products is that there are lots of pretenders out there – manufacturers who unscrupulously brand products as ‘silent’ when they can only reasonably classified as ‘quiet’ – not ‘noisy’, but still audible. However, AcoustiProduct’s specialist niche likely counts in their favor, since silence is what they do. Does the AcoustiCase 340 make it appreciably easier to build a silent PC? We’ll also see how it performs both thermally and acoustically with the supplied AcoustiFan 120mm case fan.