Chenbro Gaming Bomb II: Anyone for Upscale Gaming?

Benchmarking - Thermal

Today, we begin applying our new thermal benchmarking methodology to mid-tower cases. In the past, we have measured the temperatures of only the key components of our test bed, which provided only a little insight on how well the cooling systems in each case worked. Our new process not only shows the temperatures of the components installed, but also the temperature of the ambient air around each component.

PC Mid-Tower Test Bed
Chaintech VNF3-250 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ OCZ PC3200 DDR x 2 Zalman CNPS7000 Copper Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA ATI 9800XT OCZ 520W PowerStream	Click to enlarge.

The thermal readings for the key components and points on the motherboard during operation were as follows. The numbers in each square represent the temperature of that particular section of the case in degrees celsius:

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The warmest regions in the GB2 are around the CPU, PSU, and chipset areas. From the lower temperatures at the front of the case it is safe to assume that all of the warm air is being pulled towards the back of the case and out through the PSU as well as the rear 120mm exhaust fan.

Here are the temperatures of the various key components in the system. Temperatures have been taken directly off of the surface of the hardware this time for an accurate reading of actual component temperatures.

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We measured the temperature of the CPU's heatsink at 35 while the core runs as hot as 51 degrees under a few minutes of constant 100% CPU load. The VGA card's heatsink ran extremely hot as we have observed in past instances at about 52 degrees while the GPU's core ran at 67 degrees while running a graphically intense application. The front intake fan kept our 120GB Barracuda at 36 degrees throughout our benchmarks which kept us happy.