Performance
A combination of three intakes and three exhausts appears to be serving the DG-87 with a decent supply of clean air. For the sake of full disclosure, all six fans were configured to a conservative 25 per cent using the front-panel controls, yet the chassis had no problem keeping our overclocked Core i5-3570K running cool under load.
DG-87 doesn't have things all its own way, mind, and GPU cooling proves to be a bigger challenge. The chassis didn't manage to keep our GTX 970s from hitting 80ºC and further investigation revealed a problem - during testing the case fans would, at times, turn off entirely.
EVGA has since confirmed that the problem has been identified in firmware and is being corrected for retail production. In the meantime, our gaming temperature test was carried out by manually turning the fans back on each time they switched off. Hardly ideal, but then we didn't expect this early sample to be perfect.
The noise readings are interesting because DG-87 has the potential to run very quiet. Turn the fans off and you wouldn't know the PC is on. At low speed (<25 per cent), noise output remains decent at 31.8dB, and it's only when the going gets tough that noise becomes an issue. With both graphics cards running full chat, we found that our review sample struggled to soak-up vibration and had a tendency to rattle. This, again, could be down to early hardware, however we would like to see EVGA add noise-dampening materials to better compete with some of the quietest enclosures on the market.
