Gigabyte 3D Aurora Case
Test Setup and Results
In order to test the Gigabyte 3D Aurora chassis I have used a standard set of hardware. The hardware has been listed below:
During testing I will be taking temperature measurements from the CPU, GPU and HDD areas of the chassis. To measure the system temperatures, I used Everest Ultimate Edition. Case temperatures were measured using a common household mercury thermometer. Idle temperatures were taken 20 minutes after the computer has been turned on to allow temperatures to acclimatise, and load temperatures were taken after playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for an hour. Ambient temperature during testing was 25 deg Celsius.
Noise readings will be taken approximately 30cm’s away from the chassis using a digital sound level meter. All fans have been connected to 4-pin molex connectors on the power supply instead of the motherboard in order to prevent the motherboard controlling fan speed by PWM.
Results Observations
The Gigabyte 3D Aurora performed quite well by maintaining reasonable temperatures across the board, in both idle and load testing. One area that the chassis fell down considerably, though, is that of the HDD cage. Due to the tool-less HDD mounts not having any form of vibration dampening material, HDD vibration was extremely noticeable. Running the sound meter during load testing returned a reading of 41.27dBA, which is very reasonable (Sound pressure level chart).
