Thermal Performance
The hardware that we put into the SG-03 is the hottest out there to date, in our experience. For that reason, the thermal results shown are about the worst you could ever expect from the SG-03. It's important to say that because you could find that coupling a mobile-based CPU and the micro ATX board could make things impressively cool – we're simply giving you the worst-case scenario. The SG-03 was fitted with the following hardware:| HEXUS Chassis test equipment specification- MATX/ATX | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Intel D916GUX/Intel 955XBK |
| Processor | Intel Pentium 4 570J (3.8GHz)/Intel Pentium EE 840 (3.2GHz) |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) OCZ DDR2 PC4200 Value Pro Dual-Channel |
| Graphic Card | ASUSTek GeForce 6800 256MiB Ultra PCIe |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX620 |
| Hard Drive | Maxtor 250GB SATA |
| Optical Drive | Pioneer 110 DVD Re-Writer |
At idle, we saw some pretty high temperatures, with the GPU a good 6 degrees higher than the readings from a more conventional case, such as the Antec 900 (see this review). Obviously, given the form factor, the SG-03 was always going to be warm, yet although high, the idle readings were acceptable, if only just.
Under load, the figures were up proportionally, as we expected. But, much like the idle temperatures, the internal case reading is of some concern. We did guess that things were going to be warm in there as soon as we saw the lack of rear active cooling. Maybe SilverStone should include a cross flow fan as standard – to prevent any possibility of overheating becoming a serious issue.
When the thermal tests were complete, we ran a hand all over the case's external surfaces to check for hot-spots and found one - at the back top.
So, a ventilation hole or two in the top of the case might be useful and need not overly affect the aesthetics.
