System Testing
The Kandalf LCS was tested on a red-hot Presler 955 CPU. The ambient room air temperature was maintained at 23°C ±0.5°C and the CPU was loaded by running multiple instances of CPUBurn.
- Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Intel edition motherboard
- Pentium Extreme Edition dual core 955 (3.46 GHz at 1.22 Vcore)
- Thermaltake Toughpower 850W PSU
- (2) Corsair CM2X512-8000UL DDR RAM
- nVIDIA 7800GTX 512 MB 550/850 video card
- WD1200JD SATA HDD
- Sony 16X DVD
- Windows XP Pro with SP2
- nForce 91.31 drivers
For comparison, I have included the results from testing with the stock Intel cooler along with the Zalman Reserator 2 and Koolance PC4-1025 liquid cooling systems. (Note: the Zalman and Koolance systems were tested with a VGA waterblock in the loop, which of course placed a higher heat load on those systems.) The following data is presented for comparative purposes only. Your actual results may be different depending on the variables unique to your system (CPU, GPU, overclock, ambient temperature, case air flow, temperature monitoring, etc).
Amb — Ambient air temperature measured with a thermocouple
CPU — Temperature reported by Everest utility using onboard sensor (unreliable)
Tc — Temperature obtained with calibrated thermocouple attached to IHS
Delta T — Fully loaded Tc temperature rise above ambient air temperature
dBA — Sound pressure level recorded 3′ away (background ~30 dBA)
Note: Noise is subjective. I personally consider anything over 40 dBA to be quite noticeable and potentially a problem.
Loading both Presler cores with multiple instances of CPUBurn, while using the stock Intel HSF, resulted in significant thermal throttling of the CPU to prevent core meltdown. However, with the Kandalf LCS, the CPU cores ran much cooler, so no thermal throttling was necessary and the processors were able to run at a constant 100% load.
The overall performance of the Kandalf LCS system was good but not compared with the noise level. The average sound pressure level measured three feet away; in front of the case was 40.7 dBA. I found part of the problem was the rear 120mm exhaust fan was noticeably noisier than the others. Disconnecting the rear 120mm fan reduced the noise to 39.3 dBA. It might also be nice if Thermaltake would include a fan speed controller to help users find the right balance between cooling performance and noise. Noise level is subjective so while some might not have any complaints with a SPL over 40 dBA, other users might consider this unacceptably loud.
