can anyone suggest a mid-tower that is tool less, a filtered intake, and plenty of large extremely quiet fans and the motherboard that has extreme overclocking capabilities without paying for a bunch of PCI express slots I'll never use?

Any help at all would be much appreciated,

Bob 

Bob,

The best computer cases out there are made by LIANLI. Check out the following link. These are the cases that I use when building systems for clients. I think you'll find exactly what you need here.

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/contact_us/index1.php

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, we make it better!

"What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you." - Anthony de Mello

Although I can hardly see how a case can enhance your speech recognition performance, I also vote for Lian Li.

I used to use Antec cases. They are mostly fine (especially the 900 series), but all have a front panel audio noise issue. It is clearly an insulation problem and it's incredible that the company never addresses such a consistent major issue over these many years.

I switched to Lian Li the first time this year when I built my current system. The first thing I noticed after the the system was finished was the clean front panel audio. It makes the Antec cases feel filthy.

On the other hand, because I never use front panel audio port for speech recognition, the impact of the front panel quality is minimal for me.

Concerning the motherboard, I'm not aware of one which has extreme overclocking capability yet very few expansion slots. Motherboards that have extreme overclocking capability tend to also have many expansion slots. You may need to look harder to find one that is an exception to this rule.

However, after a certain price point, I don't think you're going to save much for not requiring a few expansion lots. At the end, it is probably not even worth your mental exercise over this. So my advice is: forget about it.

But again, why overclocking if you are not a gamer? With the newest CPUs, you don't need overclocking unless you are a gamer. For speech recognition, the CPU speed makes very little difference after be certain point. Even a midline i5 Sandy Bridge processor is plenty fast. Your speech recognition performance is largely determined by your dictation skill and your audio setup (mostly the microphone quality, but also the sound card performance to a lesser degree).