Thermal Performance

We are talking about two modder-friendly system cases in this review. Such cases are supposed to accommodate high-end hardware, so their cooling systems should be up to that purpose. Here’s the summary table of the test results of the Ninja and Sidewinder cases from MGE:

“Rear cooler + Case” means we put an additional fan at the rear panel of the case. The next diagram shows the temperatures of the computer’s subsystems in the MGE Ninja case:

It’s all right when everything’s Idle, but the CPU feels really hot in the Burn mode. The problem must be with the cooler installed on the side panel of the case. This fan is of no good use: it’s just driving warm air from the mainboard’s chipset and the memory modules right at the CPU cooler.

And here are the temperatures of the computer’s subsystems in the MGE Sidewinder case:

That’s an excellent and praiseworthy performance! I even doubted the temperature data at first, especially in the Burn mode. I suspected the sensors had yielded incorrect information or the MotherBoard Monitor hadn’t been properly set up. But I checked everything out and tested this system case once again and got the same results. So, the ventilation of the Sidewinder is superb. When the PC was working, I half-opened the side panel of the case to connect the rear-panel fan. As I put my hand inside the case I felt no heat at all. On the contrary, it was rather cool there, despite the PC working in the Burn mode!

The two fans on the side panel of the chassis and the single fan at the front panel create such a powerful stream of air that the air inside this system case just hasn’t enough time to get hot. The diagram above shows that the installation of an additional rear-panel fan doesn’t bring any considerable improvement (it’s just impossible to improve this cooling further!). The airflow created by the three fans is so strong that it seems like there is a working fan at the rear panel: at least, air comes out through the holes in a perceptible flow where this fan is supposed to be.

Conclusion

I liked both these cases from MGE, but of course the design of the Ninja is more exotic. The Sidewinder looks somewhat less ambitious. But if you’re going to put your top-end computer system into an MGE Sidewinder, you may not bother about overheat at all. It would be like putting your PC into a fridge!