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Installation
**click to enlarge**
While the Trinity is a small mid-tower chassis
with no removable motherboard tray, there is still ample room to work
comfortably. Installation of all components was quick and easy.
I was fortunate enough to use some matching
parts along with this attractive new case. Let's have a look at some
of them...
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**click to enlarge** |
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Considering this case does support dual 120mm
fans, I wanted to use them to measure its maximum cooling potential.
Courtesy of Xoxide.com,
I decided to use these new
Turbine cooling fans from AeroCool. These extremely quiet fans
feature double layer fan blades...a whopping 16 in total. They are
rated at 19.66 dBA while providing higher airflow of 37.44 CFM. They
also feature blue LEDs and chrome blades that certainly does compliment this
case quite well.
**click to enlarge**
I also used the excellent
QTechnology Papst Series 460W PSU. The
finish on this unit is almost identical to the front panel of the Trinity.
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**click to enlarge** |
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Installing your drives in the Trinity is quick
and extremely easy. There is a box included that is full of drive
rails that are color coded and clearly labeled for the type of drive being
installed.
**click to enlarge**
Thanks to the drive rails, I found that the
only reason to actually remove the 3.5" drive cage is so that you can
install the front intake fan if desired.
When installing all components, I was quite
surprised to find there was no hard drive or power LED leads to connect to
the motherboard. After powering the system up for the first time, I
found that the red HD activity LED is actually embedded on one end of the
small temp LCD display. This gives a purple glow to one end of the LCD
as shown in the pictures above.
**click to enlarge**
Finally, a shot of the lighted side 80mm fan.
The honeycomb style grill looks great.
Performance
A quick look at the test system specs first...
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Test System |
| Motherboard: |
Shuttle AS45GTR |
| CPU: |
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz |
| Memory: |
Corsair XMS3200 512MB |
| Hard Drive: |
Western Digital 40GB |
| Cooling: |
Thermaltake XP-120 & Turbine 120mm
intake/exhaust fans |
I would like to start off saying that going
the 120mm fan route with this case truly makes it one of the most quietest
air-cooled systems I've personally built. The noise levels are cut down to the bare
minimum, while still providing exceptional cooling performance. Let's
have a look at the results...
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Idle Temp |
Load Temp |
| CPU Temp |
39șC |
42șC |
| Case Temp |
27șC |
28șC |
Temperatures were recorded both idle (after
30min) as well as under load. To load the system, I used
Sisoftware's
SANDRA burn-in wizard. The results were indeed impressive. There
was almost no change in case temperature when loading the system thanks to
the dual 120mm fans used for testing. CPU temps also remained very low.
However, keep in mind that we were using the massive XP-120 cooler.
Results will vary depending on your choice of heatsink.
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