Testing and Results

Testing the PC-XB01 was always going to be a contentious issue, as all we have to compare it to is the mass produced, done-on-the-cheap stock Xbox chassis. However, Lian Li claims significantly improved cooling from the PC-XB01 and much improved fan noise (or lack of it) so we have to “apples to apples” compare the two.

Before we fully dismantled Tim’s 360 (again, shhhh he doesn’t know yet) we tested its thermal performance from two points on its heatsink assembly under load and idle situations. We placed one thermal sensor on the graphics heatsink, and another in the middle of the CPU heatsink assembly, and then fired up the Xbox to the welcome screen, leaving it for thirty minutes to produce our idle reading. We then fired up Soul Calibur 4 for thirty minutes of bouncy beat ‘em up action to stress test the 360, and repeated these tests once the Xbox had been fitted into the PC-XB01.

While not as accurate as our usual case or heatsink testing (we can’t exactly access the CPU and GPU core temperatures), we did our best to place the sensors in identical positions between the tests to ensure as high a degree of accuracy as possible, and feel our results below give a fair indication of both cases thermal performance.

Results

As you can see, the XB01 knocks several degrees off the stock Xbox case at idle, and while the margin of its lead decreases when under load, the PC-XB01 is still 3°C cooler on the CPU and 13°C cooler on the GPU. Some of the results might seem a little strange, especially because the stock Xbox 360 CPU is cooler under load than when at idle, but this is due to the 360’s inbuilt fan controls that scale up the fans when the system is under load to keep it at a consistent temperature. What is clear is that the PC-XB01 certainly does deliver improved cooling when compared to the stock Xbox 360 case at both idle and full workloads.

However, while having a cooler console is always advantageous, the real advantage of the PC-XB01 to us was the promise of significantly reduced noise levels, and this it certainly delivers. At idle in the welcome screen the thing you notice most is the absence of noise. Having a 360 astonishing quiet, to the point you almost couldn’t tell it was turned on, is actually unnerving because we thought it was broken at first.

The quiet performance continued in DVD playback, with the low skipping of the DVD drive all we could hear. However, all this was shattered when we loaded a game and the Xbox 360’s jet engine of a DVD drive whirred into life. In games, the DVD drive completely removed any advantage brought from running the PC-XB01, although as expected the 360 did increase the speed of the 120mm fan somewhat when in game, making it a little more audible, but still MUCH quieter than the dual 70mm stock cooling solution.