Testbed and Methods

We tested the system cases as they were, i.e. without changing the default speed of the preinstalled system fans. The tests were performed with a closed and fully assembled case and at a constant ambient temperature maintained by an air conditioner. We also took care to lay out the cables and wires in such a way that they didn’t hinder free circulation of air inside the case.

The following system was assembled in the tested PC case:

• ASUS P5WDG2-WS mainboard
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (3.46GHz; Presler core, Hyper-Threading off)
• Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler (1200rpm)
• 512MB DDR2 SDRAM
• ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB graphics card
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200GB hard disk drive
• Seasonic SS-401HT power supply

We’ve changed the hardware stuffing a little. We’ve spent some time searching for a proper replacement to our late Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 3.2GHz on the Smithfield core, but now we can claim that our system is far ahead of any regular user configuration as well as of a lot of overclocked ones in terms of CPU heat dissipation. This should suffice for testing CPU coolers as well as system cases.

There were four test modes:

• Idle
• CPU Burn : two copies of the CPU Burn utility running
• HDD Burn : two file sets (a 7GB folder with many small files and a 40GB folder with movies) are being copied simultaneously from one partition to another
• VGA Burn : Unreal Tournament 2004 is running with the maximum graphics quality settings

The temperatures of the CPU and mainboard were read with ASUS PC Probe which was supplied with the mainboard. The GPU and graphics card temperatures were read with RivaTuner. The HDD temperature was reported by HDD Thermometer. The temperatures were read only after they had fully stabilized. The ambient temperature remained constant at 22°C throughout the tests.

As for the noise factor, we’ll give you our opinion about the noisiness of the preinstalled system fans below. The system cases shipping without power supplies, there was nothing else in them to produce noise.