Placed inside GRone are five 140mm cooling fans, two as front intakes, another as an intake on the other side of the HDD cage and then two as exhausts at the rear and top of GRone. With an abundance of cooling fans and with them being placed in traditional airflow spots the results in theory should be good.
To discover the thermal performance of the GRone 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 30 minutes have elapsed. Fan controller will be set to highest setting (Turbo).
For the purpose of accurate analysis the idle and load temperatures for CPU and GPU will be recorded and the range between idle and load will be calculated to determine how efficient cooling is.
NOTE: Ambient temperature is 20C
System Components
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8GHz
Motherboard ASUS M4A89TD PRO
Graphics NVIDIA GTX 480 (Different from card pictured)
Memory 4GB Mushkin EM3-10666 DDR3
HDD Samsung Spinpoint 500GB SATA-II
PSU FSP AURUM GOLD 650M
Motherboard ASUS M4A89TD PRO
Graphics NVIDIA GTX 480 (Different from card pictured)
Memory 4GB Mushkin EM3-10666 DDR3
HDD Samsung Spinpoint 500GB SATA-II
PSU FSP AURUM GOLD 650M
Noise
GRone has a fan controller which allows the speed of up to four fans to be controlled. With the intakes all hooked up and the exhausts plugged into the motherboard headers the resulting noise levels are certainly noticeable even on the “Silence” setting. If the setting is changed to “Turbo” noise levels become disruptive and would generally only be used if the user had a headset on whilst gaming.
