Our Dragon Rider has an interesting air cooling setup. We have 4 x 120mm fans pre-installed, 1 of which is positioned on the side panel, behind the motherboard tray so that airflow is directed towards the back of the CPU socket and VRM. Of course, due to the inability to have the 220mm attached this will be extracted from the thermal tests - which is a shame, but it won't fit inside the case with a large CPU cooler... which we have to admit is a common component found part of ANY gamer's system.

To discover the thermal performance of the Dragon Rider I will record idle temperatures after 20 minutes from a cold boot. I will then stress the system and temperatures will again be monitored after a 30 minute have elapsed.

System Components
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8GHz
Motherboard ASUS M4A89TD PRO
Graphics ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX 480 Amp!
Memory 4GB Mushkin EM3-10666 DDR3
HDD Samsung Spinpoint 500GB SATA-II
PSU Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W









Thermal performance is very pleasing. We can see the significance of that fan mounted behind the CPU socket as it has an effect on shaving off those valuable degrees. I'm sure that other case manufacturers will probably follow suite, this is both innovative and effective.