Internal Examination (continued):
Usually I don't take a close look at the motherboard standoffs, since they are usually about the same for each case. However, NZXT has included several that were different than what I have seen before. Here you can see the standard standoff, as well as an unusual standoff. If you look closely, at the end where the screw goes, there is a little extra on it. What that little piece does, is goes through the motherboard mount holes. This will ensure your motherboard is in the proper location. While a very minor detail, I really like this design.
In Use:
Once everything was installed and cables routed, the system was powered up. The lower portion of the front bezel glows a nice blue color that matches the side panel fan.
To test the cooling potential of the NZXT Apollo Orange Midtower Case, I installed the following equipment in order to monitor the CPU thermal results.
» AMD Opteron 148 processor @250x11
» DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert
» eVGA 7900GT KO Superclock PCIe card
» 2GB (2x1024) OCZ Special Ops DDR memory
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3Gbps hard drive in RAID 0
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-in-1 Media Card reader
The chart below details both the idle and the load temperatures of the CPU. The idle conditions consisted of having the system sit at the Windows' desktop, while the load conditions had Folding@Home running in order to keep the CPU usage at 100%.
As you can see, the Apollo does a decent job, although not as good as the other referenced cases. Other recent cases have one major difference in design, which may help their performance. The Apollo has a side panel fan, while the other cases each have a large opening in the side panel. That large opening could be the reason for those cases cooling a little bit better.
After I tested the cooling the way the case arrived, I added a Thermaltake 120mm fan into the front intake location. This fan provided a drop of 1.5C in the load condition, which puts the NZXT Apollo even closer to the other cases.
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