Acoustic Performance
Whilst the thermal performance is easy to measure, acoustics are a whole different ball game. With the iTower 930 we wanted to focus on the air ducts to see how well they helped with the airflow and the resultant noise.
It was pretty bad, frankly. The CPU duct, with no side panel fitted, was pretty quiet, but as soon as you fitted the side panel all hell broke loose. The perforations in the side panel cause the airflow to be restricted, causing a major increase in noise over a standard CPU cooler. If I was going to use the system full time I would remove the CPU duct; it’s a nice idea but just too noisy for an office/workstation environment.
With that said, we removed the CPU duct, but kept the brace in place for the card-mounting system. This seemed to be a bit of a compromise given the intention of the interior, but it worked well and is probably going to be the way most people use the system if they have an aftermarket cooler.
Now remember we said this was a server chassis, albeit at entry level? We decided to continue with our usual hardware specification, not for its gaming capabilities, but because its components are some of the hottest-running out there, meaing a good test for any server-oriented chassis, right?