Chieftec Dragon DX-02B Review

Performance Analysis

With the two roof fans on full speed the case achieves a pleasing CPU delta T result of 49°C, which puts it on par with cases towards the higher end of our cooling charts. The triplet of exhaust fans obviously work pretty well at removing hot air from the case. The case can be a little noisy in this state, however, as it's not amazing at containing sound and there's a distinctive whir from top fans on full speed too. The GPU delta T here is 45°C, which is another good result. The pair of intake fans at the front and the well ventilated GPU area are obviously benefits when it comes to getting cool air to the graphics card.


Switching the speed to low results in quite a big noise difference, and the noise from the top fans is a lot less easy to pick out from the rest of the system noise, although we'd still hesitate to call the case quiet. It's excellent to see that the CPU and GPU delta T values increase by just 1°C in each example. The drop in airflow at the top of the case doesn't sacrifice much cooling potential, so you'd only really need to run the top fans at full speed if you were pushing your system to its limits.

There's a slight drop in noise again when you switch both of the exhaust fans off, and doing so increases the CPU delta T value by a further 3°C to 51°C and the GPU to 46°C, up by just 2°C. With the front intakes and rear exhaust fan still operating, airflow is still very apparent in the case, and even with two fans disabled the temperatures the chassis achieves are pretty average in both examples. With such little variance between the three speed settings, it really is a shame that there isn't a more capable fan controller included with the case, as this would have introduced the ability to fine tune the noise to performance ratio even further.

Conclusion

We have to admit that we were initially sceptical of the DX-02B when we first set eyes upon it, but the case actually ticks a lot of boxes. With five fans and pretty impressive CPU and GPU temperatures, it's clearly a capable chassis when it comes to cooling your hardware. The rudimentary fan control does therefore leave a little bit of a sour taste, but there's still at least some flexibility afforded by it. We would probably choose to move the front 200mm fan on the roof to the side mount, however, particularly if we had a multi-GPU set-up.

There are, however, a few issues with the case. The side panels, drive bay covers and front dust filters, for example, are too stiff and frustrating to work with as a result. The water-cooling support could easily have been improved too, and we should be seeing more than a single USB 3.0 port and two SSD slots in a £95 case. These problems are easy to overlook individually, but combined they're harder to forgive. Thus, while the DX-02B isn't really bad by any means, it does lack a certain level of finesse. If you're taken by the design, you might want to consider In-Win's GRone as well, especially if you have an eye on water-cooling, but otherwise Corsair's 500R will serve you just as well (if not better) for a bit less money too.