Personally, I think that the two most important factors when considering purchasing a case (besides intended purpose, price and looks) is the cooling performance and noise. Subsequently, those will be the two areas that we will be assessing in our testing today.

Cooling performance

One of the features that Sunbeamtech market in regards to the UFO Acrylic Cube case, is that of enhanced cooling to motherboard components.

 

 

So we are going to test that statement! The hardware I have decided to run with for todays testing has been listed below:

* Intel E6600 with retail heat sink
* ASUS P5B Deluxe WiFi/App motherboard
* 2GB XMS2 PC2-6400 RAM
* Gigabyte 7600GS graphics card
* 1 x Western Digital 80GB SATAII HDD
* Antec EarthWatts 500W PSU
* Pioneer DVR-A06 CD/DVD drive
* Creative X-Fi audio sound card.

All temperatures will be taken at both idle and load and measured with a digital thermometer, allowing 5 minutes for acclimatisation. Load will be simulated by running the Stanford Folding @ Home Windows SMP client, which effectively saturates the E6600 by running 1 thread per core. Graphic load was obtained by playing Valve's Counter Strike: Source at a resolution of 1280 x 1024. Ambient temperature during the testing period was a mild 25.9 Deg Celcius.

Noise

Possibly the hardest part of any active cooling review is summarising the level of noise given out by the fan/s. The threshold for what is considered 'noisy' varies from person to person and therefore what I may consider quiet, another person may consider extremely loud. For this reason, all reviews at Overclock3D use a dBA meter to measure the level of noise output by the fan/s. However, because the test system includes a number of fans (CPU cooler, PSU etc) I have chosen not to include any dB(A) measurements. I will however report my findings as objectively as possible.

On to the testing...