Testbed and Methods

During our test session all fans of the tested PC case were turned on, the voltage regulators weren’t used. We ran all benchmarks with the case closed. The system assembled inside the Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case included the following components:

• ASUS P4C800-E rev.2.0 mainboard (BIOS 1016);
• Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz CPU;
• Intel Box processor cooler;
• 2x256MB OCZ OCZ433512EDLCPE-K memory;
• Sapphire ATI RADEON X800 Pro 256MB graphics card;
• Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 250GB HDD;
• 3.5" Sony MPF920-E floppy drive;
• LG GCR-8523B CD-ROM drive.

We ran the tests in a few modes. Here they are:

• Idle: the system is idling.
• CPU Burn: we are running two copies of SuperPi test at the same time.
• HDD Burn: we are performing HDD defragmentation.
• VGA Burn: we are running 3DMark05 tests in endless cycle. The settings are: 1600x1200 with enabled FSAA 4x and 8x anisotropic filtering.
• Game: we are running FarCry with maximum graphics quality settings selected in the game menu and 1024x768 resolution.

Before we measured the temperature, we kept the system running in each mode for 30 minutes.

For monitoring pf the processor temperature (CPU) and mainboard surface temperature (MBoard) we used the latest version of Motherboard Monitor utility reading the temperatures from the built-in CPU thermal diode and mainboard thermal diode.

For monitoring of the graphics chip temperature (GPU) and the graphics card surface temperature (VBoard) we used RivaTuner utility.

The temperature of the heat-spreaders on the RAM memory modules (Mem) and graphics memory chips temperature (VMem) was measured with the help of Fluke-54 II thermometer.

The HDD temperature was also measured with the Fluke thermometer, because the built-in thermal diode of the hard disk drive was reporting absolutely wrong temperatures. According to DTemp utility (HDD Int), the HDD temperature could reach 15-120^oC for the room temperature of 25^oC.

The external thermometer diodes were fastened to the “warmest” spots of the HDD: on top of the lid right next to the spindle (HDD 1) and onto the micro-processor chip on the drive PCB (HDD 2).

The room temperature (Room) during this test session was 25-27^oC.