Cooling Performance

Instead of using our usual mini-ITX test kit, AMD and MSI have kindly given us an A88XI AC motherboard and A10-7700K APU for our new HTPC test kit. We'll be using this for all future HTPC case reviews so this is why the graph is a little lonely at the moment - we'll be adding to it shortly.

We've also thrown in Raijintek's Pallas low-profile CPU cooler. This has enough cooling capacity to deal with the 95W TDP of the APU and to emphasize a case with good cooling - sadly something smaller heatsinks fall short of. We load the APU using Prime95 and record the peak delta T (software-measured temperature minus the ambient air temperature) using HW Monitor. There are no GPU results as the GPU is built into the chip so we just list the CPU result.

Test kit:

• AMD A10-7700K
  
• MSI A88XI AC
  
• 4GB Corsair 1,600MHz DDR3
  
• BeQuiet Straight Power E9 400W PSU
  
• Raijintek Pallas CPU cooler