Testing:

The Antec P280 was loaded with the following components for some basic testing:

» Intel Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz processor
» ASUS P8P76 Rev 3.0 motherboard
» (2) Diamond Radeon HD6870 video cards in Crossfire
» Western Digital RE4-GP 1.5TB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Enermax ENM750AWT 750 Watt power supply
» Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit operating system



For testing purposes we pitted the Antec P280 against another case we have used often for temperature comparisons, the Antec 300. Each case was benchmarked using only the fans that ship with the units. Idle tests were conducted by allowing the system to sit at the Windows desktop with nothing running for 30 minutes in a room with an ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius. The load tests were conducted by playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for an hour - I know, it's hard work but someone has to do it.

The first component we'll look at is the processor temperatures. The first graph shows the temperature reading from our motherboard's processor sensor. At idle, the P280 is a few degrees warmer than the 300 chassis. With the fans switched to high, we get another slight increase. Under a full gaming load, the P280 with the fans on low recorded the highest temperatures, but when we do some math, setting the fans to high had the best temperature differential.