Cooling Performance
Now we’re to the heart of the matter, the snazziest case in the world is useless if your components overheat! Any time you build a new system you should do some testing to make sure your components are running at safe temperatures under full load conditions.
For this test I overclocked my 2600k CPU to 4.6ghz, using about 1.37 vcore. This makes for a fairly large heat load, and with the Sapphire 5830 coming in at 171 watts itself we’ll likely well over 300w in heat being produced!
I ran the exact same settings the case I normally use, it’s a monstrosity of a Full Tower case, is has no fewer than five fans, one of them being a 300mm fan in the case side panel. Plus the entire side panel around that 300m fan is a mesh, it has an extremely large amount of airflow. It’s not exactly a fair comparison, but it serves well enough. The ironclad case also costs quite a bit more than the Xange does, making things fairer.
The CPU was loaded to 100% load with IntelBurnTest set to “high” and run through ten loops, while this was running the GPU was loaded with Unigine’s Heaven benchmark running windowed, the Heaven benchmark was set to absolute maximum detail, quality, and tessellation settings. It’s every bit as brutal a GPU benchmark as IntelBurnTest is for the CPU.
I then recorded the maximum temperatures during the run, swapped cases and repeated. I have averaged the four CPU core temperature maximums into a single number, as that is much easier to compare.
The Rasurbo Xange was run in an ambient temp of 26.2*c. It gave me a CPU core temp of 80.5*c, a PCH (motherboard Southbridge) temp of 74*c, and a GPU core temp of 64*c.
None of those are dangerous temps, but that is about as high as you want to run the CPU cores. The GPU is quite happy at 64*c, it’s rated for far higher. The PCH is well within it’s rating as well, but getting towards the hot end of what I want to see.
For comparison purposes, the Full Tower Monstrosity was in an ambient of 25.8*c, and had a CPU temp of 72.75*c, a PCH temp of 66*c, and a GPU temp of 61*c.
The Xange it did quite well, if you aren’t overclocking the CPU heavily the CPU temps will be far lower, well within their acceptable range.
That said, a side panel fan would help significantly, with this large of a heat load trapped inside the case more than a single 120mm intake fan is needed for optimum performance.
If you do intend to overclock your CPU heavily with this case, a cooler like the KÜHLER H2O 620 that dumps the CPU’s heat directly to an exhaust fan is ideal. That combined with a GPU that dumps it’s heat out the back rather than recirculating it would result in very good temperatures.
