Testing

As I said in my intro, I hoped that this case would allow me to make use of the ThermalTake Fanless 103 heatsink without worrying about my CPU heading to an early grave. I tried to keep as much consistency as possible between my earlier heatsink testing and testing in this case. While I'm not going to re-test each of those heatsinks, I will present numbers for the Fanless 103 to give you an idea of the effectiveness of the wind tunnel.

Temperature Readings
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

CPU

Northbridge

Ambient

MaxFlow - High Speed

MaxFlow - Low Speed

Thermaltake XaserV V7000D

40

65

62

0

°Celsius

100

 

 

CPU

Northbridge

Ambient

MaxFlow - High Speed

MaxFlow - Low Speed

Thermaltake XaserV V7000D

33

47

68

0

°Celsius

100

 

 

CPU

Northbridge

Ambient

MaxFlow - High Speed

MaxFlow - Low Speed

Thermaltake XaserV V7000D

36

27

29

0

°Celsius

100

 

 

You can see that at low speed the wind tunnel can't move enough air to keep the CPU happy. In fact, at this low speed, when I turn the machine on, the front 120mm fan doesn't always spin up and I have to crank the knob past one-third to get it to start moving at all.

At high speed the picture is very different as the CPU temp never broke 40°C while running Prime95 in torture test mode. This number is lower than the Zalman 7700 at high speed in the ThermalTake XaserV case!! The temps for the northbridge were also very much under control as its heatsink was partially covered by the wind tunnel duct.

With the fan control dial it's easy to find a happy medium that balances noise and cooling effectiveness. At medium the fans are near silent and my CPU purrs happily along even when gaming.


Conclusion

Well, I wanted to see if I could run the Fanless CPU heatsink with this case and I certainly found that I can. Even with only two case fans and the power supply fans my temps are kept comfortably under control and noise is at a minimum. In fact, now that I'm using this case, my video card has taken the crown of loudest component.

My biggest disappointment is the cheap nature of the side panels. For a case that breaks $200 with the included power supply, it seems like they should be much easier to remove and replace. The rest of the case is built solid, the cooling performance is excellent, and it looks very nice sitting on my desk. In fact, it almost hurts me to have had to put a plain beige floppy into such a nice looking case.

At $200 this case isn't cheap, but the power supply by itself rings in around $80 and it is a high quality unit with connectors for all current hardware. That effectively leaves the case alone at about a $120 price point which is about average for a case with such a good feature set and quality build. I definitely give this case a big thumbs up and recommend you look into one for that next monster rig you plan on putting together.

Pros

Excellent cooling
Looks great
Very sturdy
Nice front panel connectors and display
Nice LED fans

Cons

Side panels are tough to remove and are somewhat flimsy
One fan didn't reliably spin up when at low speed setting
Difficult cable management