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Thermal performance

For all our reviews we have a preset component list that's designed to push any chassis to the limit. This is intentional and is to show just how capable any chassis is when fitted with the hottest hardware out there.

We fitted the Fatal1ty FC-ZE1 up with the following components:

HEXUS Chassis test equipment specification
Motherboard	Intel 955XBK
Processor	Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (3.2GHz, Smithfield core)
Memory	2GiB (2 x 1GiB) OCZ DDR2 PC4200 Value Pro Dual-Channel
Graphic Card	ASUSTek GeForce 6800 256MiB Ultra PCIe
Power Supply	Antec Neo HE 430W
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA
Optical Drive	Pioneer 110 DVD Re-Writer

In order to put the system under the maximum load a double run of 3D Mark ’06 was executed and followed up by 3 consecutive burn-in tests using SiSoft’s Sandra Pro 2007.

The day of our testing was quite cool; as a result we don’t currently have a comparison to give but we will go ahead and discuss the thermal readings from the FC-ZE1 alone.


As mentioned previously, the design of the HDD caddy at the front of the chassis could be compromising the cooling from the pair of 92mm fans and, unsurprisingly, the readings we took indicate this to be true.

There is does seem to be a potential issue with the airflow through the chassis which resulted in the high idle readings, especially considering the readings were almost exactly the same as the Cooler Master Mystique 632 results.

How is that a problem? Well, the idle readings on that chassis were taken with an ambient temperature four degrees higher!

Overall, then, the thermal performance of the Fatal1ty FC-ZE1 was nothing to write home about. An average performance, really.

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