Testbed and Methods

I tested the system cases as they were, i.e. without changing the default speed of the preinstalled system fans. The tests were performed in a closed and fully assembled case and at a constant ambient temperature maintained by an air conditioner. I 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 cases:

• Intel i955XBK mainboard
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 3.2GHz (Smithfield core)
• 2 x 512MB Samsung DDR2 SDRAM
• ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition 256MB graphics card
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200GB hard disk drive
• Seasonic SS-401HT power supply

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 Intel Desktop Utilities version 2.1 which are 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 20°C throughout the tests.

As for the noise factor, I’ll give you my subjective opinion about the noisiness of the preinstalled system fans below. We received the cases without power supplies, so there was nothing else in them to produce noise.