Benchmarks: Temperature and Noise
A 95W chip also produces a fair amount of heat, and it highlights one potential weak spot in PC Specialist's base specification: the reference cooler. Granted, we didn't run into any throttling issues, but 98ºC under load is a fair amount of heat and, given the amount of room available in the chassis, we'd liked to have seen a beefier third-party cooling solution.
Going hand-in-hand with the high under-load temperatures are above-average noise levels. During benchmarks the Magma A10 registered 40.2dB on our noise meter, which is clearly audible and distracting. The idle noise level is more comfortable at 36dB, yet it's still far from silent and a change in CPU cooler may be needed to reduce overall noise.
