A CASE IN POINT
UNSURPRISINGLY, this system beat the living daylights out of our 1080p zero-point system in almost every benchmark. The Samsung 960 Evo in our comparison machine secured the win over Corsair’s MP510 SSD, but otherwise this system excelled in all areas, as expected. If you’re looking to build this machine, we’d recommend upgrading to a newer graphics card—perhaps one of those shiny RTX 3000 series cards! But as we said, this was never just about the benchmarks.
We also did some temperature testing here, and you’ll see the same tests in future case reviews (ATX cases, anyway). One of the key things we were looking at is how well the system dissipated heat, and how the case’s fans and airflow design affected this. Of course, we needed a baseline for our baseline: This system was manually overclocked to 4.5GHz at 1.2V, and the GPU clock speed set to 1,750MHz ( using MSI Afterburner). We also ran XMP, so we had full memory speed. This ensured that we had a fixed performance point for the system, without intelligent features like Intel’s Turbo Boost creating heavily varying temperatures.
For testing, we monitored component temperatures during our regular benchmarking process, but then we took things one step further with duration stress testing. We ran the blended system stress test in Prime95 for a full hour, then 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark looped for an hour as well, with half an hour of idle time for the system to cool down between tests.
During general testing, the Noctua NHU12A held up well, and the MPG Sekira 500X’s five case fans did a good job of forcing air through the case. Airflow isn’t incredible in this build, since the front panel and roof are entirely solid and air must be drawn in through the narrow grilles on the edges. The highest CPU temperature we saw was 64C, specifically during the Cinebench R15 test. Temperatures during the gaming benchmarks mostly sat within the 60C area.
The idle system temperature was around 28C, only slightly higher than the ambient room temperature. The PWM fans calm down when the system is idling, so this machine isn’t too noisy. After blasting the system on all 16 threads with Prime95 for an hour, our CPU temperature was 66C, with highs of 76C and lows of 62C. Not bad, then, especially since we’re using air cooling. The glass and metal of the case itself didn’t get warm at all.
During the 3DMark test, the CPU reached a maximum temperature of 70C, but the GTX 1080 rose all the way up to 82C and took a while to cool down due to its single, puny blower fan. The system as a whole ran relatively cool, though, with the motherboard never recording temperatures in excess of 44C and the case itself remaining cool and quiet. Props to MSI for this one!