Thermal Stress Test

Our test setup focuses on four components small enough to fit into every chassis format. This allows us to compare the impact case size and cooling potential have on a modern system. Each of the four measured components is connected to a REED Instruments SD-947 Data Logging Thermometer, with K-Type sensors that have been placed as closely as possible to the benchmarked areas of the CPU, GPU, M.2 SSD, and motherboard chipset. A fifth sensor is used to monitor the room temperature for an accurate delta T result. While the data provides us accuracy to one decimal point, it is still affected by human placement of the sensors as well as variance from things like automatic disk activity in windows for example. The systems are air-gapped, so that no automatic software updates trigger an unwanted workload on components.

For cases in review, the out-of-the-box fan setup is tested, connected to the motherboard, with the board adjusting fan speeds automatically. This puts the onus of noise and performance on the case manufacturers and motivates them to care about thermals, instead of simply using active cooling as a marketing bulletin point.

On the software side, the test setup includes Windows 10 Pro with both Furmark and Prime95 running concurrently, to put maximum synthetic load on the processor and graphics card.

We allow the chassis to idle until temperatures reach equilibrium, but never for less than 30 minutes. Next, our stress-testing load is started, and it continues to run until temperatures are stable. The temperature results for each section of the case are the highest values measured during the test run. All reported temperatures are normalized to 20°C room temperature.

Comparison