Powering Up

The lighting theme of the Lexa is blue without a doubt, the 2 LED fans, power on LED and LCD display radiates a cool blue in a dark room. To get the LCD to display relevant temperatures you need to attach the included probes to your system’s “hot spots”.


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A hard drive heats up most on the side, so that’s where we’ll stick our sensor, the system probe was taped to the Southbridge, the CPU probe was shoved between the fins of the heatsink.


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The LCD display can only be read when facing it from the front, at an angle the characters on the display seem to wash out, this is common with the LCD technology use for such displays.


The Performance and Noise Test

In order to evaluate the cooling performance of the Lexa we have installed a mainstream Athlon 64 system, for comparison we’ve included the recently reviewed Antec Sonata II.


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With the test system detailed below installed here's how the weigh in:
- NZXT Lexa (9.8kg)
- Antec Sonata II (13.5kg)

JMke's A64 Test Setup
CPU	A64 3200+ @ 2200Mhz 1.47v vcore
Mainboard	DFI nForce3 250Gb
Memory	1*256Mb OCZ PC3700
Other	Chaintech FX5900XT + NV Silencer Maxtor 120 GB PATA Hard Drive Thermalright XP-90 + Delta 92mm fan Antec SmartPower 450W PSU

The room temp was kept near 26°C as much as possible but small variations and fluctuations can cause the temperature results to differ as much as 1-2°C

The Antec Sonata II was tested with its 1x120mm fan at the back running at Low speed.

And here are the results:



With both cases running with one 120mm fan in the rear the results are almost identical, with the video card running a bit hotter in the Lexa, but the CPU is cooler in the Sonata II. The hard drive bays enjoy a bit more fresh air in the Lexa showing 3°C advantage.

When we activate the other fans gradually the Lexa’s cooling efficiency increase also, but how noisy does it get? To get an idea we placed a dBA meter at 20 and 60cm distance from the front panel and powered on the system. (We don’t have test results for the noise generated by the Sonata II case at 20cm)



The fans used by NZXT for the Lexa are quite silent, with only the rear fan running the system is a mere 3dBA above ambient noise at 60cm; this makes it a silent system, but not quite ultra silent. You can only hear the system running in a very silent room. While the Sonata II scores better in the noise department, it must be mentioned that is was build from the ground up with silence in mind. The NZXT is not marketed for being ultra quiet, but still manages to offer a great balance between performance and noise.

Onto our conclusion ->