Enlight EN-8950 Server Extended ATX

The Test

As always, we used the procedures outlined in AnandTech's case testing methodology, which includes temperature and noise testing following reader suggestions and requests.

As you can see, the case doesn't get very hot at all in comparison to other cases we've reviewed thus far, at the same time it isn't dramatically cooler than the coolest Mid-Tower ATX cases we've taken a look at either.  You would expect a little more out of a $160 investment. 

In spite of the two 80 mm exhaust fans at the rear, the CPU temperature was barely effected courtesy of the well made heatsink/fan combo we used on the test Pentium III 550 CPU.  Once again, this re-affirms our theory that as long as a case provides adequate ventilation and you have a decent heatsink/fan combo, the case won't affect CPU temperature all that much.

The Hard Drive temperature stayed consistently lower (although not by too much) than what we're used to from our normal batch of ATX cases, since this is a server case, it can be expected.   The 8950 didn't do the best job of cooling the hard drive that a server case could do, but as we discussed before, that was the result of the lack of any sort of direct cooling on the drive itself.   

With noise obviously not being that big of a concern, the cooling of the case itself could have been improved by Enlight with the addition of at least a couple more fan mounts, even as optional mounts.