Ready for Lift-off



After I had finished installing all components, I fired it up the system began evaluate the cases in real world performance. Prior to moving the system components over to this case, I had been using a left over case, based on the Enlight 7237 design. The older case served its purpose, but struggled to keep up with the heat production from the fusion reaction we like to call the Pentium4 Prescott CPU. Temperature for system and CPU were taken prior to swapping parts over from the Enlight enclosure, and after installed in the Silverstone case measurements were repeated for idle and load temperatures.



Temperatures for the CPU in the Silverstone improve over the Enlight 9C at both idle and load, where system temps fall 3C at idle and 5C at load. Given the prodigious heat output of the Prescott P4 I am very impressed. Furthermore, the system fans are fairly quiet in their operation, definitely below noise levels of the heatsink fan used in testing.

System Temps

During testing of the Enlight and Silverstone ambient temps were within 2C, actually favouring the Enlight case. I did measure exhaust temps for the Silverstone case with my Radioshack indoor outdoor thermometer, but did not think to do so with the Enlight until all parts were removed, so I apologize that comparison data is not available for exhaust temps. However, as you can see, the Silverstone case excelled in performance. Basically, the system and exhaust temps were just about the same, signifying that the wind tunnel was indeed allowing maximum heat extraction.




HD Temps

On the advice of several crazed crustaceans (my friends here at Madshrimps), I did manage to run some HD temps using a very nice utility called DTemp. The TJ06 falls ever so slightly behind the Enlight case in regards to HD temps, but nothing I would be concerned of. Also, keep in mind the Enlight has an 80mm fan (24cfm) blowing over the HD. Load temps are the same, with idle or low activity being slightly lower for the Enlight. Actually, I was surprised this difference wasn't greater as there are no fans near the HD area on the TJ06. Possibly, the wind tunnel keeping most of the heat trapped and exhausted instead of allowing the rest of the case to baste in the overall system/cpu heat has something to do with the lack of appreciable difference. Otherwise I cannot account for this except to fall back on Silverstone's marketing of a three section cooling concept, and somehow the total case airflow contributing to sufficient cooling/airflow near the hard drives.