Antec Performance One

Benchmarks - Thermal

Describing the cooling equipment that comes with a case just doesn't cut it for us. We need to see how it actually performs, to determine if it is actually as effective as what the manufacturer's claim. We have hand-picked a full system that we believe to model the current system setup for the average user.

PC Mid-Tower Test Bed
Chaintech VNF3-250 AMD Athlon64 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:

Click to enlarge.

We added an extra 120mm fan in the front of the case to level the field with the other cases that we have looked at. The fan is rated at the same speed and sound output as the one included with the P160. Our results show the average temperature of the system's ambient air to be between 29-30 degrees.

Take a look at the temperature readings of each critical component in our test rig.

Click to enlarge.

We didn't expect the P160 to perform different from the PC-V1000 from Lian Li. Since adding that second fan would pretty much give the P160 the same cooling setup as the V1000, and the only difference was the slight variation in the layout of the hardware, we expected the very same average temperatures. Since our look at the V1000, our thermal benchmarking methodology has changed, but we still measure the temperatures of each critical component. The P160 performed well, cooling each individual component with the two 120mm fans.