Cooling Performance

For cases with a CPU cooler clearance of less than 65mm, we use our super low-profile mini-ITX test kit. which includes:

• CPU: AMD A10-6700 (stock speed)
  
• Graphics card: Gigabyte Radeon R7 250X OC 1GB
  
• Motherboard: MSI A88Xi AC
  
• RAM: 4GB G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3 1,600MHz
  
• SSD: OCZ Arc 100 240GB
  
• ATX PSU: Fractal Design Integra M
  
• SFX PSU: Be Quiet! SFX Power 2 400W
  
• CPU cooler: Noctua NH-L9a

We use our ATX power supply if possible, but switch to the SFX model if not. The CPU fan is fixed at 12V with a Molex adaptor while the graphics card fan is locked at 40 percent speed using MSI Afterburner. The system is loaded using Prime95 25.11 and Unigine's Heaven 4.0 benchmark. We use HWMonitor and GPU-Z to monitor the temperatures, taking the maximum values after 15 minutes - enough time for the readings to plateau.

In cases that can house a discrete GPU, we obtain thermal results with both the CPU portion of the APU and the discrete graphics card under load as described above. However, we also perform a separate test where only the APU is stressed, again using Prime95. This way, we'll be able to compare APU results for a wider range of cases, but also allow you to see how larger cases perform when a discrete graphics card is added to the mix.