Test Setup and Test Methodology

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

Room temperature was 20°C during testing, ambient noise clocked in at 37.8dBA. Noise measurements were taken at 50cm from the front of the case.

Realtime HDR and Orthos were used to stress the Dual Core system; Core 2 Temp was used to monitor Core temperature (duh) and Speedfan to check the temperature of HDD and Motherboard. Rivatuner’s temp monitor checked the G80 GPU at regular intervals. Maximum values were recorded.

The Intel Bax Axe motherboard features several thermal sensors, the “mobo” values are those recorded by the sensor which can be found between the DDR2 memory banks, marked A in the overview:



Cable routing & Fitting larger video cards



Overall cable routing is okay, as long as you have some spare place in the drive bay area you should be fine.

Fitting the 8800 GTX was a close call once more than one hard drive was installed, as you will see in the photo below, the distance between the VGA card and the SATA cables is almost too close for comfort:



With a smaller video card like a 7900 GT you have room to spare:



Onto the stress testing ->