Crystal A410 Barebone - the MSI way

Written by Stuyo

Thursday, 13 March 2008

 

Page 8 - Cooling

Of course we tested the Crystal A410 cooling too. We compared it to the Intel's stock cooler. We measured 3 temperatures - 2 directly from the thermo sensors in the cores of the processors (i.е. we used the same sensors, so it's only fair to assume that temperatures are dependent on the coolers). The third measurement is from the sensors of the motherboards. We must take into account that the motherboards use different sensors so assuring equivalence of the readings is impossible, meaning that there might be errors in them, still they give us a pretty good idea. Here is what we've got from the two coolers:

As you can see from the results, the MSI barebone cooler did better than the Intel's stock one (though 1 degree isn't much of a difference). But while doing that it's being much noisier. We had no way of measuring the nose level precisely, but the two 60 mm fans of the PSU and the processor cooler were clearly audible. Not terribly noisy, but if you look at Crystal A410 as a maximally quiet system you're barking up the wrong tree. Otherwise the noise level for normal work is well within acceptable levels. Tests also show that the ambient system temperature is higher than the one of the referent configuration. But that to a great extent is due to the ambient temperature sensor being placed in the path of warm air and also that the referent system was without a case to obstruct the air flow. At all the tests the ambient temperature was below 50 degrees centigrade, while room temperature was a tad high (around 25 degrees). In conclusion we can say that the cooling is good enough, while not too quiet.