|
Installation
In probably its final time in a review, my
trusty old AMD XP Athlon rig was transferred into the Viper 2 for a
temperature test. The install went very smoothly, and I found the plastic
stand offs that are included in the package to be of great assistance in
getting the motherboard properly mounted. They almost act like that ‘third
hand’ you wish you had when you’re trying to get a board into a case like
this and you don’t have a screw starter handy. The Viper 2 may not have a
removable motherboard try, but this is the next best thing.
|
Processor |
AMD |
Athlon XP 2500+
Barton Core |
|
Motherboard |
Abit |
NF7-S V2 |
|
RAM |
Corsair |
TwinX 2700 DDR-RAM |
|
Video Card |
Sapphire |
Radeon 9800 128M |
|
Hard Drive |
Western Digital |
WD2000JD SATA |
|
Audio Card |
N/A |
N/A |
|
CD/DVD Drives |
Pioneer/Liteon |
DVR-108/LTN-529S
|
**click to enlarge**
Due to some time restraints, I didn’t have
enough time to wrestle with the front of this case to get a better picture,
so I’ll apologize now. The HDD LED is hidden behind the right ‘eye’ of the
case, and I found it to be exceptionally dim and hard to see. Although as
you can see in the picture, if you have the time to wrestle with the six
inconveniently placed screws to get the front off, it’s an easy matter to
fix with a soldering iron and glue gun.
**click to enlarge**
Finally, a video clip of the LCD display in
action. To view the clip, you'll need Macromedia flash player
installed.
10 sec video clip
**click to play**
Testing
To be a little different this time around
instead of putting one sensor in the upper part of the case where it usually
gets the hottest, I placed three sensors around the interior and one on the
outside to track the ambient temperature. The Top sensor was placed just
above the rear of the DVD-RW drive, the Bottom sensor was placed in-between
the motherboard headers and the last PCI slot, and the final probe was
placed on the edge of the Athlon chip. Idle temperatures were taken after
the system had sat undisturbed for an hour and a half. Load temps were
created by setting up a bot match in Unreal Tournament 2004 in Onslaught. I
let that run for almost three hours before taking a reading towards the end
of a match.
|
|
Idle |
Load |
|
Ambient |
24°C |
24°C |
|
Top
Sensor |
28°C |
29°C |
|
Bottom
Sensor |
26°C |
27°C |
|
CPU |
38°C |
61°C |
The table clearly shows that the Viper 2 has
fairly good characteristics. The hottest air in the case stayed at 4-5
degrees above ambient, with 5 being what we normally see. This was even in
the face of the 23°C swing in CPU temperature. Overall, this was a very
solid performance from the Viper 2. If you need more cooling, there is room
for another 120mm fan on the intake instead of the stock 80mm.
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