Testing:
The same components used in the installation portion of the review were used to test the thermal performance of the A380. To reiterate:
» Zippy (EMACS) 600W Power Supply
» AMD Opteron 148 Processor
» DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
» 1024MB G.SKILL Extreme DDR (2 x 512MB) Memory
» 3x Hitachi 80GB 7200 RPM SATA-II Hard Drives
» eVGA GeForce 7800 GT CO 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E
» Pioneer DL DVDRW
» Compaq DVD ROM
» D-Link Wireless G PCI
» Sound Blaster Audigy 2z Platinum Sound Card
For testing I overclocked the Opteron 148 to 2900 MHz (290x10) at 1.5V and the G.Skill RAM to DDR590 speeds (2.5-4-4-8) at 2.62V. To reach a maximum temperature for the CPU and chipset I ran Prime95 for an hour and took a reading of the temperatures using Smart Guardian software.
To compare the
Xclio A380 Super Tower Case's cooling, I chose the Enermax Chakra because it has the same size fan on the side. Note that I cleaned the chipset and applied AS5 for the Xclio thermal test.
As you can see by the graph, the Xclio A380 out cooled the
Enermax Chakra. Both have 25CM side intake fans, but the Xclio speed and air flow are both higher. The result is a cooler, but slightly louder system.
