Test Methods

The tests were performed on a closed and fully assembled system case and at a constant ambient temperature maintained by an air conditioner. I took care to lay out the cables and wires in such a way that they didn’t hinder free circulation of air. I didn’t change the default speed of the preinstalled system fans and of the CPU fan.

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 Samsung DDR2 SDRAM
• ATI Radeon X1800 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
• 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 ASUS PC Probe which was supplied with the mainboard. The GPU and graphics card temperatures were read with RivaTuner 2.0. The temperatures of the VRM transistors and of the heatsinks on the chipset’s North and South Bridges were read with the universal controller Scythe KamaMeter. The HDD temperature was reported by HDD Thermometer. The temperatures were read only after they had fully stabilized. The ambient temperature remained constant at 25°C throughout the tests.

The noisiness of the preinstalled system fans is evaluated below. I disabled the CPU and graphics card coolers when checking out the noise of the system case fans.