Testing & Operation:
With the whole system assembled, it was time to put it in action. The image below shows the Thermaltake Rhythm mounted on top of the Thermaltake Mozart HTPC case. The components have a similar style that will obviously be right at home in a home theater environment. Many modern consumer electronics devices use a silver and black color scheme, so these Thermaltake items may easily be confused for something else in a cabinet.
And speaking of installation in a home theater cabinet, here it is. The Toshiba DVD/VCR unit right above the two Thermaltake housings looks like it may have come off the same line, and all of it looks quite nicely, in my opinion. Additionally, I found my concerns with the hoses being too long didn't impact my particular installation, and really didn't make sliding the system in any more difficult. Looks are important, but now to test the noise and the cooling.
 
Testing involved monitoring both the idle and load thermal conditions of the CPU and the system by means of the motherboard's onboard temperature sensor. These sensors aren't known to be the most accurate, but previous testing has shown that this particular one is pretty good. I am really just looking for a deviation between test setups, and the "Delta T" is of interest, not the absolute values.
Idle conditions were established by allowing the system to sit at the Windows desktop for a period of no less than one hour. The load conditions were generated by running a full disk scan using Grisoft AVG AntiVirus while playing back a DVD movie that had been ripped to the 300GB drive. During all phases of testing, the media cabinet door was left ajar by about one inch, as that is what I have become accustomed to.
The following setups were all monitored at idle and load conditions:
» "Mozart Air Cooled" - Mozart case installed in the cabinet, with an air cooled CPU heatsink
» "Mozart with Rhythm out of Cabinet" - Mozart case water cooled, with the Rhythm standing upright outside of the cabinet
» "Mozart with Rhythm in Cabinet" - Mozart case water cooled, with the Rhythm mounted horizontally above the case
The chart below summarizes the results:
The Rhythm was able to provide an incredible drop in CPU temperatures, while not doing much of anything for the system temperature (although no system results are bad at all). In my preferred installation (with the Rhythm in the cabinet with the Mozart), a solid drop of 14 degrees was achieved under load conditions. It only gets better if you mount the Rhythm in open air, where the total drop was 22 degrees under load. Quite impressive!
So, it looks good, it cools well, now on to noise output. The two 120mm fans are really the only source of noise, as the pump is inaudible. At 1440 RPM, the fans aren't moving too much air, and the noise is much lower than when using an air cooler on the CPU. That said, you can hear the faint hum of the fans from a distance in certain orientations. I found that with the Rhythm installed out in the open, you need to position it so that the fans are not aimed in your general direction. If you can see the top or bottom surface of the enclosure, you will also hear the fans.
With the Rhythm installed in the media cabinet, the noise all but vanishes, and the improvement in noise level over the air cooled system is drastic. I can now distinguish between the Rhythm and the Mozart case fans, and may try some experiments to see if the 60mm fans in the Mozart case can be slowed down, or eliminated, without impacting the thermal performance.
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