Thermaltake Lanbox Specification

Dimensions (W*D*H): 300 x 430 x 280 millimeters

Material: aluminum

Cooling system: 90mm front fan with blue LED highlighting (1500rpm) and two 60mm exhaust fans (1800rpm)

Mainboard form-factor: Micro ATX & mini ITX

Open bays: one 7” (to install the 7” Bay LCD Monitor (A2413-01); it is covered with an additional 5.25” faceplate), one 5.25” bay, and one 3.5” bay.

Internal bays: two 3.5” bays

Front interface connectors: Two USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE1394 (FireWire), and HD Audio

Max expansion slots: 4

Weight: 4.2kg

Testbed and Methods

I tested the system case as it was, i.e. without changing the default speed of the preinstalled system fans. The tests were performed on a closed and fully assembled case and at a constant ambient temperature maintained by an air conditioner. Unfortunately, it is impossible to lay the cables in the case neatly unless you remove the unneeded ones and shorten the long ones with a soldering iron. The Lanbox is just too compact.

The following system was assembled in the Lanbox:

• Intel D945GTP mainboard
• Intel Pentium D 920 CPU (2.8GHz, Presler core)
• Zalman CNPS8000 cooler (1400rpm)
• 2x1024MB DDR2 SDRAM
• ATI Radeon X1800 256MB graphics card
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200GB hard disk drive
• Seasonic SS-401HT power supply

This system is ahead of the entire Core 2 Duo series in default mode in terms of CPU heat dissipation. This is quite enough for our testing purposes.

There were four test modes:

• Idle
• CPU Burn: two copies of the CPU Burn utility running
• VGA Burn: Unreal Tournament 2004 is running with the maximum graphics quality settings
• 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

The temperatures of the CPU and mainboard were read with Intel Desktop Utilities which were 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 23°C throughout the tests.

The noise of the preinstalled fans is evaluated below. The system case comes without a power supply, so I don’t count it in as a noise source.