Stress Test AMD System

AMD Test Setup
CPU	Opteron 144 @ 2.25Ghz
Cooling	Scythe Mine @ 100%
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI Premium
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 OCZ
Other	Club3D 7900 GT with Zalman VF900 Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD

The room temperature was ~20°C, the noise level was recorded at 50cm from the front of the case. The fans were set to High, Medium and Low speed, temperatures were recorded of CPU, VGA, Mobo chipset and Hard Drive. These were the results:



The impact on the CPU, Motherboard and Hard Drive is minimal when reducing the fan speed, the noise level drops drastically though, at High speed the case is definitely loud and quite noticeable from far away. At medium speed it’s more bearable, but the still not quite relaxing. At low fan speed the noise level is a mere ~3dBA over ambient and while it’s not dead silent, it will be quiet system for most of us.

The VGA sees the largest temperature increase, which is also related to the VF900CU fan speed, so overall with this AMD system the low fan speed is sufficient to keep all components very cool.

Let’s throw out the 7900GT and install the Geforce 8800 GTX, power consumption jumped up from ~180W to ~230W at full load, can the Nine Hunderd handle the extra heat; to help it out I tested with an additional 120mm ~1200rpm fan (Papst) in the side panel:



The noise level with/without the side panel remains the same as the ~1200rpm fan is drowned out by the much louder front fans. Impact on performance is less than stellar, with 1°C drop on CPU and Motherboard. Going for silent the system remains quite cool, the Geforce 8800 GTX stock cooling is remarkably quiet even at full load; I couldn’t hear a difference with the Zalman VF900Cu @ 5v! Temperature wise the CPU, Mobo and VGA temperature a rise ~3°C, not bad at all.

I see no reason to recommend the medium/high fan setting, as the extra noise doesn’t deliver a large enough performance increase.

Stress Test Intel System

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	XFX Geforce 8800 GTX Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD

The E6400 was running at 2.8Ghz without a vcore increase, plug and play, nowhere near the limits of this CPU. The CPU temperature was obtained using this nifty Core Temp utility, the motherboard temperature in the chart below is actually the read-out from a sensor which sits between the DDR2 slots.



This system proved hotter, the Geforce 8800 GTX with the fans at high is running 5°C hotter compared to the AMD system, at low case fan speed the difference is ~4°C.

In the end though the low fan speed setting proves sufficient enough to keep everything cool, the DDR2 ram area sees the largest benefit from the high fan speed, all other components only drop 2-3°C, not quite worth that extra noise.

Let’s wrap things up ->