Once you start up/down the upgrade path...there's no turning back...how long will that creased and tacky molded plastic front bezel last? ;-)
Are you running the bottom 80mms as intake?
What filters are you using? And what sort of mesh?
I may resort to the DEMCiflex kit for the XB. Still playing around with a few washable furnace filters and uh-oh, pantyhose. Which is why the DEMCiflex filters are so sexy - similar tech as ladies stockings. ;-) And if you're recording, double as great mic pop filters too.
With less restricted airflow, directed where it needs to be compared to most cases, the XB fans can spin lower and hence quieter. Multi-level computing FTW!
Swapping out parts is more fun in the XB, plus the option of running in testbench mode. Don't expect I'll be returning to any of the airflow torture towers too soon.
As I stated in another post:
I'm autistic (Asperger's) and my favourite looking aircraft of all time is the Republic A10 Thunderbolt II so don't ask me about aesthetics. I just don't care.
The two 80mm after much internal debate I decided to run as intakes. Believe me I spent a couple of days discussing the merits and demerits of this with myself.
What decided me in the end were two arguments:
Using them as an intake would cool any 2.5 inch drives I may install (I now have four SSDs of various capacities in there). I also wanted to have a bit of overpressure in the bottom half because my desk gets messy and I didn't want the the holes in the bottom of the case sucking up dust from under the case if I used the fans as an exhaust.
The filters I have on the 80mm and 120mm Noctua fans are 120/80mm Aluminium Mesh Fan Filters from Watercooling UK. The 200mm is a clear plastic mesh cover. I cannot remember where I got the plastic mesh sheeting which I cut to cover the intakes at the side and back.
The one time I used ladies tights was when I was asked to guest lecture in computers at the University of Tartu in Estonia and decided (stupid as I was) that driving up through the Soviet Union would be a great adventure.
We had a diesel engined car at the time and the tights were to filter the diesel we bought there because it's pretty dirty and would have clogged up the engine (put one of the legs of the tights into the leg of the other, push them into the tank opening and then put the hose of the pump into the leg.
What I had not reckoned on was the absolute abysmal state of the roads and with a very front heavy Renault 19 we were risking breaking the front axle all the way up there and back.
I also have the CoolerMaster HAF XM tower for the system I built up as a backup and which will become my NAS; which, although it will have a number of drives (56TB worth) appearing as one drive will not be in any kind of RAID.
To my mind the HAF XM is the best tower BY FAR with regard to not wanting to pay a ridiculous amount of money.
The best argument for it for my purpose would be the four 200mm fans (side, front, two in the top, with the ability to mount two 120mm fans to the drive cages).