MGE Viper: Another Xtreme Gamer Creation

Benchmarking - 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 see if it is actually as effective as the manufacturer's say that it is. We have hand-picked a full system that we believe is the current system setup for the average user.

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 region under the video card is much cooler than that in Chenbro's Gaming Bomb II that we looked at last week. This is all due to the fan mounted on the left side panel, which takes in air and helps circulate warm air from that region. The current system configuration does not have any exhaust fans, but there are plenty of ventilation areas for air to flow out through the back as well as up through the top of the case.

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Temperatures of each key component remains close to the results that we have observed in the past few cases. There are slight variations in temperatures, but very little compared to the variations in ambient air temperatures.