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Review: Cooler Master HAF 922 PC chassis. More than just a little brother?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 29 July 2009, 09:03 3.5

Tags: HAF 922, Cooler Master

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qata2

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Thermal results

System specification

HEXUS chassis test equipment specification
Motherboard EVGA 780i SLI FTW
Processor Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 3.00GHz, 1333MHz FSB
Memory 4GB (2 x 2GB) Corsair DDR2 PC8500
Memory timings and speed 5-5-5-18 2T @ 1,066MHz
Graphics card BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX MaxCore
Power supply Dark Power PRO 850W
Hard drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB
Optical drive Sony SATA DVD-RW

To get an all-round feel for a chassis' cooling ability, we record the chassis' ambient internal temperature, along with the temperatures of the CPU, GPU and motherboard (MCP). To get an idea of how the Cooler Master HAF 932 compares, we also housed our test equipment in a Ikonik Zaria SIM and a SilverStone Fortress - both of which underwent identical tests. The chassis' fans were set to maximum speed.

Readers should be aware that ambient room temperature is susceptible to change, and was recorded for each chassis as follows prior to testing:

Cooler Master HAF 922 - ambient room temperature 25.3°C
Ikonik Zaria A20 SIM - ambient room temperature 22.5°C
SilverStone Fortress - ambient room temperature 21.3°C

The Cooler Master HAF 922 was tested on a warmer day, so please bear that in mind when looking at results.

Thermal results

To get started, we booted the systems and let them idle for 15 minutes before taking the following readings.

[graph 2152]

There's nothing much in it. The higher ambient temperature is translated into a higher chassis temperature, as is to be expected.

To make things a little more interesting, we stress the system by running three instances of Prime95 along with 3DMark06 at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF. After a minute, we observe the following readings:

[graph 2154]

A 50°C GPU temperature may seem higher than normal but it's nothing to worry about.

Making the systems beg for mercy, we continue to run Prime95 and 3DMark06 for an hour. Here's what we see after the stress test:

[graph 2155]

We'd expect the HAF 922 to do a little better here; the CPU and GPU temps aren't great, comparatively speaking.

Let the system idle for a minute, and we see how well each chassis manages to cool down.

[graph 2153]

The GPU's rather warm here.