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Review: Fractal Design Define C

by Parm Mann on 2 November 2016, 14:00

Tags: Fractal Design

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qadak2

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Test Methodology

Comparison Chassis

Chassis Form Factor HEXUS Review Reviewed Price Product Page
Antec P380 Full-tower May 2015 £160 antec.com
be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Full-tower June 2016 £200 bequiet.com
be quiet! Silent Base 600 Mid-tower October 2015 £94 bequiet.com
Cooler Master MasterCase 5 Mid-tower August 2015 £90 coolermaster.com
Cooler Master MasterCase Maker 5 Mid-tower June 2016 £180 coolermaster.com
Cooler Master Silencio 652S Mid-tower May 2015 £75 coolermaster.com
Corsair Carbide Series 100R SE Mid-tower June 2015 £50 corsair.com
Corsair Carbide Series 400C Mid-tower January 2016 £80 corsair.com
Corsair Carbide Series 600C Mid-tower December 2015 £120 corsair.com
Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 Cube September 2016 £135 corsair.com
EVGA DG-87 Full-tower August 2016 £220 evga.com
Fractal Design Define C Mid-tower November 2016 £84 fractal-design.com
Fractal Design Define S Mid-tower April 2015 £70 fractal-design.com
Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Full-tower September 2015 £115 nanoxia-world.com
NZXT H440 New Edition Mid-tower January 2016 £90 nzxt.com
NZXT S340 Elite Mid-tower October 2016 £90 nzxt.com
SilverStone Raven RVX01 Mid-tower February 2016 £65 silverstonetek.com
SilverStone Redline Series RL05 Mid-tower October 2016 £50 silverstonetek.com

HEXUS Chassis Test Bench

Hardware Components HEXUS Review Product Page
Processor Intel Core i5-3570K (quad-core, overclocked up to 4.40GHz) April 2012 intel.com
CPU Cooler be quiet! Dark Rock 3 - bequiet.com
Motherboard Asus Sabertooth Z77 - asus.com
Memory 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws-X (2x4GB) DDR3 @ 1,600MHz - gskill.com
Graphics Card 2x EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC in SLI (2x 4GB) April 2015 evga.com
Power Supply be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 (750W) July 2012 bequiet.com
Storage Device 120GB SanDisk Extreme SSD March 2012 sandisk.co.uk
Monitor Philips Brilliance 4K Ultra HD LED (288P6LJEB/00) - philips.co.uk
Operating system Windows 8.1 (64-bit) October 2012 microsoft.com

Notes

Our Z77 test platform consists of an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard, an Intel Core i5-3570K processor overclocked to 4.4GHz, a be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU cooler, 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws-X memory and two factory-overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC graphics cards in an SLI configuration.

To find out how well the chassis can cool this particular setup, we log CPU temperature while encoding a large 4K video clip. This task puts full load on all available CPU cores and we extend the stress test by carrying out multiple passes. In order to provide a stabilised reading we then calculate an average temperature across all cores from the last five minutes of encoding.

To get an idea of graphics-card cooling performance, we log GPU temperature while playing Tomb Raider at a 4K resolution with ultra quality settings and SLI enabled. Last but not least, we also measure chassis noise by using a PCE-318 noise meter to take readings when idle and while gaming.

All chassis are tested only with the standard manufacturer-supplied fans (any/all of which are set to 'silent' in the Asus BIOS or low-speed using a fan controller if present), and to take into account the fluctuating ambient temperature, our graphs depict both actual and delta temperature - the latter is the actual CPU/GPU temperature minus the ambient. For the record, the ambient temperature while testing the Fractal Design Define C was recorded as 21.3ºC.