Testing

During the tests the room temperature was about 22°C. I used a Velleman dvm1326 meter for all the dBA readings. The ambient noise clocked in at 37.1 dBA, the meter was placed 50 centimeters from the front of the case. I used SuperPI to stress the CPU, some Sisoft Sandra benchmarks for the hard disk and Futuremark 3D mark 2005 to stress the GPU. The temperatures were logged using Speedfan and mCubed T-balancer BigNG. Rivatuner monitored the 6600GT GPU temps at regular intervals.

The GPU and CPU fans are running at 50% during all tests, as this gave the best performance/noise balance.



The case fans were setup as follows:

Test1: One 120mm fan front & back, and one at the side

Test2: One 120mm fan front & back, and one at the side

The difference between the test setup is the location of the side panel fan, check the photo above to see test1 side fan near bottom and test2 side fan near top of the case.

Moving the “core fan” went quite easily, Sunbeamtech paid attention to making it simple and this shows.



With the case fans running at full speed the dBA meter only registered a ~2dBA increase over ambient, Sunbeamtech’s choice of 1000rpm pays off here, noise is kept to a minimum.

Performance wise there isn’t much incentive to undervolt the case fans unless you’re really in need of total silence, with fans running at 60/30% temperature go up as expected, the VGA area sees the largest increase +6°C with fans at 30%. Noise level wise the dBA meter is recording levels very close to ambient.

Let’s see if moving the core fan over the CPU area changes things:



Results are noticeably better for the CPU results, but the VGA area is also cooler; noise wise the dBA meter registers slightly higher value, but not worrying.

If you’re in need of more cooling power the Core Fan Tech allows for two fans to be installed (test1&test2 combined) but my particular test setup prevented this, my custom chipset cooling blocked this. If you have a larger VGA (19+cm) card you also run into problems trying to fit two 120mm fans at the side, keep this in mind.

Let’s wrap things up ->