Thermal performance
We recently threw out our old hot 'n' toasty test rig and replaced it with some new hardware that's a lot more relevant to the current market.
Gone is our faithful Intel 975XBX motherboard, its place taken by the copper-adorned chippery that is the ASUS P5K Deluxe.
Below are the full specs of the new test rig.
| HEXUS chassis test equipment specification | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Deluxe |
| Processor | Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66GHz 1333MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) CellShock DDR2 PC8000 |
| Graphic card | HIS Digital 2900XT PCIe |
| Power supply | Corsair HX620W |
| Hard drive | Hitachi GST 250GB SATA x 2 |
| Optical drive | Pioneer 110 DVD rewriter |
During testing, the ambient temperature was a moderate 20.1 deg C.
After the system booted up, we let it idle for 15 minutes and then took some readings before putting everything through its paces.
We started off by running SiSoft Sandra Pro's burn-in tests - with ATITool running in the background to ensure that the CPU was going at full tilt.
Our new readings mean that, rather than just quoting the maximum temperature for the components, we will - where possible - provide the averages, too. We were pleasantly surprised by the CPU readings on the 570, with the processor maxing out at a very respectable 29.5 deg C and returning an average of 25.4 deg.
As for the GPU, that returned 70.4 deg C under load with an average of just under 68 deg C.
Under load, the whole system was pretty quiet, even though it carries three 120mm fans inside.
The extra space inside started to pay further dividends in the overall case temperatures, with a change of only 1.7 deg C between idle and load - peaking at 22.8 deg C.
Given the ambient temperatures, we did expect the figures to come in a little lower than a smaller case such as the Lian-Li PC-A12 but we didn't expect the differential to be as large as we saw, especially in the CPU area. Good stuff from the 570.
