Thermaltake XaserV Damier V6000A

Benchmarking

When benchmarking the V6000A, we test the temperatures of key components including the actual CPU temperature, the actual temperature inside the heatsink, the temperatures of the DDR, Northbridge, Southbridge, HDD, PSU, and the ambient temperature inside the case all during normal operation. For a system to operate efficiently, the components need to stay at a specified temperature to avoid system crashes, or worse, hardware damage. A well-designed case should have an air flow system that is effective in keeping the hottest running components at a constant and stable temperature for optimal performance. During our testing, the PSU and CPU heatsink fans remained on to measure temperatures during normal system operations.

AOpen AK86-L AMD Athlon64 3200+ OCZ PC3200 DDR x 2 Zalman CNPS7000 Copper Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA ATI 9700Pro AGP8x OCZ 520W PowerStream

Click to enlarge.

We took temperature readings of the components at 10 and 30 minutes of system operation time. In the previous articles, we included results of the two most recent cases that were reviewed. However, in light of our change in test bed, we will start a new board.

Thermaltake Damier V6000A
System On-Time	CPU	Heatsink	HDD	DDR	Northbridge	Southbridge	Power Supply	System Ambient
10	35.2	21.6	29.1	29.1	33.5	27.1	23.8	23.2
30	43.6	28.4	30.2	30.1	33.9	28.4	26.4	25.8

The results show that the Athlon64 3200 runs a few degrees hotter than our previous test bed's Athlon MP 2100+. Our results show that the CPU was kept at a stable operating temperature, at 43.6 degrees, which is about 54 degrees Celsius below the Athlon 64 3200's maximum recommended operating temperature.

Though cooling is a major factor in choosing a good case, noise levels also affect the overall quality of the product. We test the noise level of the V6000A about 12" from the sealed case with the power supply and CPU fans turned off to reproduce the noise of the case alone. Since our test bed power supply and CPU heatsink fan were turned off, we were able to compare the Damier to the results of previous cases that we have tested.

Case	dBA
Thermaltake Damier V6000A	53
Super Flower X-Mask	51
Lian Li PC-V1000	46
Opus Technologies MT-200	56
Thermaltake Xaser III Skull VM3000A	55

Though the V6000A had five fans, it was much quieter than the VM3000A, which had only four fans. Thermaltake decided to use variable speed fans with the V6000A as well as various models of fans, which all had different output ratings, instead of using all equally powerful fans throughout the chassis. This variance in output produced less noise, since only certain fans were required to operate at higher speeds than the others.