Thermal performance
A little while back, we threw out our old hot 'n' toasty test rig in favour of new hardware that's more relevant to the current market.
Gone is our faithful 975XBX motherboard from Intel to be replaced by copper-adorned chippery in the form of an ASUS P5K Deluxe.
And the graphics card has also switched so that, now, an ATI card powers our pixels. Below are the full specs.
| HEXUS chassis test equipment specification | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Deluxe |
| Processor | Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66GHz 1333MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) CellShock DDR2 PC8000 |
| Graphic card | HIS Digital 2900XT PCIe |
| Power supply | Corsair HX620W |
| Hard drive | Hitachi GST 250GB SATA x 2 |
| Optical drive | Pioneer 110 DVD re-writer |
During testing, the ambient temperature was a moderate 20.7 deg C.
We let the system idle for 15 minutes after boot up and then took some readings before putting the system through its paces.
We started off by running SiSoft Sandra Pro's burn-in tests - with ATITool in the background to ensure that the CPU was going at full tilt.
Our new readings mean that rather than just quoting the maximum temperature of the components we will, where possible, provide you with the averages, too. The Tuniq 3 managed to do surprisingly well in the CPU tests with an average of 26.5 deg C, peaking at a still-respectable 32.5 deg C.
The Tuniq 3's main selling point is the 3D Core fan assembly but we had to pull that out of the box to accommodate our R600-based test card. Even so, we still saw some okay figures here, too.
Because we were so surprised at how cool things were running, we did a couple of repeat tests to see if these produced the same results. But nothing much changed - we got similar figures over those additional runs. Not only that but the chassis was surprisingly quiet in use given its diminutive overall size.
Overall, the Tuniq 3 surprised us with its thermal performance - it seems to bat above its station and that proves something quite important about chassis design as we'll discuss on the next page...