U$S450 in parts

Pah, you think that's bad, I bough a Mac Mini and a bunch of add-ons to it for CND$1200.00 (US$900.00) just to use the internet and moo.

And I thought spending ~$700 on my new PC last year was a lot. You gotta look around for good deals. Soltek small form factor (shoebox) PC, Athlon XP-M 2500+, 1GB Corsair RAM, GeForce FX5900XT, 80GB Seagate HDD, some various other parts, and an IBM G78 monitor from work I got free. I'm not as much of a gamer as I used to be, but the improvements are worth it even for regular desktop use.

I still find ways to fill up the memory and make it start swapping, though. Of course doing the same things (mainly working with extremely large bitmaps) would drag my old PC to a crawl, now I just have some HDD noise and the occasional pause when switching from one to another.

I'm considering a different graphics card though. Even though it's relatively quiet, the GPU fan is still the loudest part in the PC. It's a hum while everything else is a whisper. I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little bit of performance for something quieter. If anyone has any recommendations for a quiet GFX card that has decent performance (compared to a FX5900XT), it'd be appreciated.

I'm not about to buy a new case and motherboard because the fan on the graphics card is noisy.

Well if I pulled the existing motherboard out of this case into a new one, I would then have a very expensive paperweight until I found (and bought) another microATX board that fits the specific size and connector locations of Soltek's own board. So I'd either buy a new motherboard (for either case) or have wasted equipment. No matter how you spin it, a new case is not going to be more inexpensive overall. Not to mention unless this new case can do magic it's not going to make the fan very quiet.

Pah, I'm just going to go ask on SDF.

That's the difference between quieter and quiet. Even with the noisy fan, my main system is still much quieter than most of the computer's I encounter regularly. When one of the optical drives is spinning idle after putting a disc in it's louder than the fan's idle speed. And after doing some repairs on a computer at work, including putting a new HSF on it (the bearings on the old one rattled like you wont believe), it was way quieter, but still the typical noise level of most PCs.

When I first put this computer together, before I had the graphics card, you could not tell it was on unless everything was dead silent. Although I love being able to actually play games at decent framerates and quality settings, I would love to go back to the old noise level (or lack thereof) much more.

I have absolutely no problems giving up performance to get that so long as I still can play most games, at reduced settings. Even if I had an ATX system (my last computer was a Baby AT, actually) I'd rather fix the problem completely than patch around it.

I'll see what I can dig up about the insulation and it's effects on a SFF case, especially with regards to heat and airflow, since the intake side of the case is already pretty restricted by the size of the card a few millimetres away from it. I'm still thinking a quiet card will be more effective and a safer bet. I already know about the fanless FX5200 shown on that site (don't ask me about ATI, their drivers are abysmal at best), but I don't have issues with the card having a fan if it's as quiet as the rest in the case.