Today we inaugurate a series of articles about the famous SilverStone brand, starting with an analysis of its proprietary cooling solutions. Furthermore, we will present a series of cabinets each having different features, hence oriented to different user groups; we’ll also present during the analysis several interesting products, always of the same brand.
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System and test methodology
We tested the temperature of the component installed in the cabinets presented in precedent pages, except unfortunately the Sugo SG08, because of the different test platform and also because of the total absence of mini-ITX systems based on X58 platform. We used the Thermalright TRUE Spirit 120 heatsink in the following system, with an ambient temperature of about 24.0 °C inside the cabinet (there may be a degree of variation in a positive or negative). We will use this heatsink exclusively in high performance mode with two fans from Prolimatech, the BlueVortex at 1550RPM. Tests will be carried out only in push / pull (P / Pull) to verify the performance of heat dissipation within the cabinet, and consequently to verify the type of dedicated airflow. It will also be used an EVGA GTX 480 with EVGA backplate and HighFlowBracket, with the reference heatsink; generally it’s the video card that heats most of all, so it is the perfect candidate for the test. We will evaluate the temperatures of CPU, VGA and HDDs in each cabinet, obviously with fans at fixed RPM.
We chose to use a Core i7 920 D0 CPU because it can put a proper stress on the heatsink, thanks to its 130W TDP. Regarding the RPM values they can vary in the range of +/- 10%, as specified by almost all fan producers. However, minor differences between the speeds on the same fan do not change the overall result.
We measured the temperatures at idle and full load with the software Realtemp. The full load temperatures were measured after 25 minutes of Prime95 "InPlaceLargeFFTs" (maximum stress and consumption), benchmark known for its ability to stress the CPU heavily, much more than any video game. The thermal paste used is the Arctic Cooling MX-4. We emphasize that the procedure for measuring the temperature is very rigorous and each reported number is verified, recalculated if suspect, using additional tests; a lot of attention is also placed at room temperature (Tamb) so that the results are as realistic as possible, reproducible and fundamentally correct. You can be sure that what you read here, with the same configuration and settings match, within experimental error, it’s the true value.
It was used a test session, with the following frequency:
