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For testing today we are using a Silverstone Raven 02 Chassis
KitGuru AMD reference gaming system:
Processor: AMD Phenom 1055T
Cooler: Noctua NH C12P SE14 Cooler review
Motherboard: MSI 890 GXM-G65
Graphics: PowerColor HD5870 PCS+
PSU: Coolermaster 700w
Hard Drive: Crucial 256GB SSD (review forthcoming)
Memory: Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600mhz
Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64bit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2
The Silverstone Raven 02 Chassis has been a personal favourite of mine for many years and when I reviewed it for another publication I gave it a top rating. My views on this chassis haven't changed, I think its one of the finest cases ever produced and Silverstone created an airflow monster case with a design which is purely based on the laws of physics rather than a traditional front to rear flowing system.
Heat rises, it is a basic principle, and before Silverstone released the Raven 02, I always wondered why a chassis manufacturer had yet to release a vertically designed air flow system. Fans at the bottom, forcing air upwards, across all the components and expelled outwards. Why battle against a natural system when you can use it to work for you? The Raven 03 will be with us shortly, so we hope it makes as positive an impact with us as the 2nd revision did.
For the purposes of monitoring air flow and how this fan improves cooling, we are going to swap out the second (middle) fan in the Raven 02 chassis with the new Penetrator AP181. This means that direct airflow over the position of the PowerColor HD5870 PCS+ graphics card. We selected this card for a very specific reason.
We attached two diodes to the heatpipes on the Powercolor PCS+ graphics card as shown above and will monitor the temperatures with the standard fan in the Raven 02 and the new Penetrator design, this is a great real world test to see if it brings any additional cooling to the table. The heatpipes get very hot on this card under load so its an ideal way to test performance – we measure load after 45 minutes of running Furmark. Card Ambient temperatures are measured a few mm from the surface of the rear of the PCB.
Laboratory room climate is maintained at a steady 25c with air conditioning. All fans are set to high.
It is clear to see that our testing shows much more focused air flow with the new Penetrator design resulting in a reduction of several degrees with both our positional diodes and even ambient air temperature in the vicinity of the hot running PCB has been reduced.
As the noise levels are a little higher than we like (more on this later), we retested with all fans at low speed settings.
While the noise levels are reduced dramatically it is clear that the temperatures are hardly affected at all by the slightly lower spinning speeds … clearly due to the low ambient case temperatures with the three fans working in tandem. An excellent set of results for Silverstone, even for their older fan design.
