LABS TEST / PREMIUM CASES
What do you get if you spend over £100 on your PC’s home? Antony Leather
puts five of the latest and greatest cases to the test to find outTitanic towers
LABS TEST
How we test
O
ur case testing method is simple. We use real, overclocked
hardware in a standard system to see how cases perform
in terms of air cooling. We use an Asus TUF B450M-Plus
Gaming motherboard, along with a Ryzen 5 1600 overclocked to
3.8GHz using a vcore of 1.365V.
We also use a Palit GeForce GTX 1660 StormX with an open GPU
cooler to better represent modern graphics cards, and we limit its fan
speed to 60 per cent to prevent it from interfering with noise testing
results, which we gauge with a sound meter. Meanwhile, our CPU
is cooled by a Thermaltake Riing Silent 12 Sync 120mm cooler, but
again, we’ve limited its fan speed using a 7V resistor cable to put more
emphasis on each case’s cooling.
One change to our usual testing is the addition of two Corsair ML120
Pro fans, which we add to cases where possible to see how they
respond to additional airflow. This not only allows us to more sensibly
test cases that come with no fans, but also lets us test whether it’s
worth adding more fans to cases that already include them.
We leave each case for 15 minutes, with the system running
Prime95’s smallest FFT test with AVX disabled (mersenneforum.org)
to load the CPU, and Unigine’s Valley benchmark (unigine.com) to load
the GPU. Results are taken from Ryzen Master (amd.com) and GPU-Z
(techpowerup.com/gpuz), and we subtract the ambient temperature
from the results to give a delta T reading, which we can use to test in
normal conditions across several days and varying temperatures.
Where fan controllers are included with a case, we test at the highest
and lowest fan speeds to see what impact the different fan speeds on
offer have on cooling. We score each case using weighted calculations
for their cooling, design, features and value, to give an overall score.Contents
be quiet! Silent Base 802 / p43
Corsair 5000D Airflow / p44
Fractal Design Meshify 2 / p45
NZXT H510 Elite / p46
Phanteks Enthoo Luxe 2 / p48
Results graphs / p49LABS TEST / PREMIUM CASES