Due to the numerous cutouts, it's pretty easy to get rid of most of the PSU cables. Plus due to the small protrusion on the sidepanel you can quite easily tuck them away. The finished case with the black and white theme is a real show stopper.

As expected, the Hydro 100 fit's like a glove. The radiator rests on the case, the fans are screwed in via the bottom. Top notch cooling guaranteed without the requirement of a bulky air cooler. Dual GTX480's installed for some high FPS Battlefield 3 action.

For the temperature test we opted for a dual GTX480 GPU setup. More than adequate to see if the sidefan is able to bring some extra coolness to our two hot Fermi cards.

The Idle results are measured after 15 mins of idling. The CPU Load test results are obtained after 30 mins of number crunching prime95, custom test 12 - 12K, set to run on 12 threads. The GPU load was measured and logged via AIDA64 by running a tri loop of 3DMark Vantage.

We conducted the above tests with the side fan disconnected ( off ) and once running it at full blast (fan controller maxed).

In idle mode, the side fan already shows it's effect. The motherboard sensor is aligned straight on the air flow of the fan. Hence the explenation for the massive 6°C temp drop. For the rest of the sensors a 2-3 °C temp drop in CPU and GPU temps are observed.

While running prime 95, the CPU goes up to 66-68°C. The Hydro 100 was set at balanced mode and had close to no issue with the CPU at 4.5Ghz. Scary though are the PWM temperatures. Even surpassing both hot Fermi GPU's. And this with only 1.37Vcore set with the loadline setting at Optimised. Imagine pushing close to 5Ghz with +1.45Vcore. It will get scorching hot in that area. Definitely a recommendation to choose a well ventilated case, like this Carbide 500R.

However while the 500R officially only supports ATX format motherboards, our E-ATX format Gigabyte X79 UD5 blended in perfectly. But drawback is that you can't use all S-ATA ports. The picture below explains more than 100 words will ever do :