Cooling Performance

Our micro-ATX test kit contains 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 have trialled previously made the CPU run at a Delta T of nearly 60°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. We run this at a consistent 12V speed, but it is a low-airflow fan, so it will highlight cases with poor cooling for the CPU. We also lock the fan speed on the graphics card to 30 percent in order to prevent the automatic speed control from interfering with the results, making them inconsistent.

We load the system using the Small FFTs CPU stress test in Prime95 and the Unigine Heaven DirectX 11 GPU benchmark. After at least 15 minutes, once temperatures have plateaued, we record the temperature of the hottest CPU core using Core Temp and of the GPU using GPU-Z. Having recorded the ambient temperature in front of the main air intake of each case, we're then able to calculate the delta T - the difference between the ambient temperature of our lab and the temperature of the hardware.

• CPU: Intel Core i7-875K CPU overclocked to 3.4GHz (22 x 155MHz)
  
• Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 1GB
  
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2R
  
• RAM: 2GB PNY 1,600MHz DDR3
  
• Storage: Corsair Force GT 60GB SSD
  
• Heatsink: Gelid Tranquillo with a Noctua NF-S12B ULN fan
  
• Power Supply: Seasonic M12D SS-850EM

Using the ITX Upgrade Kit, we also fitted our Mini-ITX case testing system into the Enthoo Mini XL. This required moving the rear exhaust fan into the roof exhaust position. We then did thermal testing with just the mini-ITX system on, and then finally with both systems on and under load at the same time.

Our mini-ITX test kit includes:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K overclocked to 4.3GHz using a vcore of 1.3V.
  
• Graphics card: GeForce GTX 570 1.3GB
  
• Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe
  
• RAM: 4GB Kingston DDR3 1600MHz memory
  
• PSU: Enermax Eco 82+ 620W PSU
  
• CPU cooler: Zalman CNPS 8900 low-profile cooler

While some cases can house larger coolers, for the results to be comparable, we needed to pick a cooler that was going to fit in as many cases as possible. We therefore opted for a low-profile cooler. This will give a good idea of how well the case is able to remove heat from the system - our primary concern in case testing - although you can probably expect to achieve better results by using a larger cooler if the case in question supports it.

The graphics card fan was locked at 70 per cent speed and the system was loaded using Prime95 and Unigine's Heaven benchmark. We used Realtemp and GPU-Z to monitor the temperatures, taking the maximum values when the readings had plateaued.

Micro-ATX Results

Mini-ITX Results

Read our performance analysis on the next page.