Fractal Design Arc Mini Cooling Performance

Our new micro-ATX test kit comprises a pre overclocked KFA² GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB LTD OC graphics card and an Intel Core i7-875K CPU, which has been overclocked from 2.93GHz to 3.4GHz using a vcore of 1.175V and a CPU PLL of 1.86V. This is an admittedly modest overclock, but as some cases that we trialled made the CPU run at a Delta T of 54°C, it's reasonable for a micro-ATX case.

The CPU is cooled by a Gelid Tranquillo with a Noctua NF-S12B ULN 120mm fan. This is a low-airflow fan, so it will highlight cases with poor cooling for the CPU. We also locked the fan speed on the graphics card to 50 per cent in order to prevent the automatic speed control from interfering with the results, making them inconsistent.

We recorded the temperature of the CPU using RealTemp, noting the temperature of the hottest core, and used GPU-Z to log the temperature of the graphics card. Having recorded the ambient temperature in front of the main air intake of each case, we were then able to calculate the delta T - the difference between the ambient temperature of our lab and the temperature of the hardware.

To load the system, we used a combination of the Unigine Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark and the smallfft test in Prime 95. We looped each test for a minimum of 30 minutes, or until the temperatures plateaued, and recorded the highest temperature in the log files.

• CPU: Intel Core i7-875K CPU overclocked to 3.4GHz
  
• Graphics Card: KFA² GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB LTD OC
  
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2R
  
• RAM: 2x 2GB OCZ 1,866MHz DDR3
  
• Hard Drive: 1x 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
  
• Heatsink: Gelid Tranquillo with a Noctua NF-S12B ULN fan
  
• Power Supply: Seasonic M12D SS-850EM