The Importance of Case Design: A Look at Thermal Performance and Noise Levels

To experiment with sound, I actually took both of the fans on the GPU and the radiator and ran the same three tests again, just to see what the difference was in noise levels. And here it is - clearly you can hear how dramatically the noise levels increase as we increase temperatures in various components in the system. This is why it's so important that you have a case with good airflow to keep temperatures low and lower those noise levels.

For instance, when we had 0% tape on the case, our GPU fans were at roughly 46 percent fan speed. But as soon as we cut it off with 90 percent tape applications, they ramped all the way up to 67 percent - which is reflected in the noise test that you just heard. These are some big differences, and it's clear that having a case with good airflow can make all the difference in reducing noise levels.

Moving on to our average GPU clock speed, this is an Nvidia card using a version of GPU boost which automatically overclocks itself depending on power, voltage, and thermals. Based on the thermals we saw in the last slide, it's clear that our clock speed is going to be affected accordingly. I'm actually gonna start at the bottom of the chart here - at 90 percent tape, we were seeing an average of 1903 megahertz on the GPU core clock.

As we took off some of the tape to get to 75 percent surface area, we started averaging 1914 megahertz, which is a point five seven percent bump. And then at 0% tape completely unhindered, we had 1938 megahertz on average - a 1.8 percent improvement over the 90% tape worst-case scenario. Fortunately, our GPU clock speeds weren't affected too hard here, but it could have been a lot different had we not been using a top-tier GPU with an effective cooling design.

Finally, moving on to our average frame rates in Heaven - 4.0 1440p - we saw a frame rate of 70 FPS at 0% tape, dropping down to 70.6 FPS at 75% and then staying the same at 90 percent tape as well. Honestly, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise when you consider how closely frame rate is tied in with GPU frequency.

A Look at Gaming Performance

Our gaming performance wasn't affected very heavily - again, we only tested one application, which was 4-point-oh. We had one set of hardware in one configuration, and things could have been a lot different if we had tested more things. Steve from Gamers Nexus has done extensive testing on this, and he's mentioned that based on case selection alone, he's seen FPS swings up to 10% - which is wild.

The takeaway from today is that your case is more than just a protective decorative box; it's a cooler. Case makers need to start designing them as such, especially if they're anticipating customers filling their cases with hot running hardware like gaming components, GPUs, and CPUs. The most extreme example was a nearly 24 percent increase in temperatures on our CPU when we taped up the front and top of the case.

Designing Cases for Thermal Performance

The data from today's tests is relatively predictable, but still very interesting to pull up and chart out. However, it's clear that having a good airflow system in your case can make all the difference in reducing temperatures and improving overall performance. It's also worth noting that the quality of the hardware itself plays a significant role in determining how well it performs under load.

If you're looking for a new case to upgrade with, look for one that has good air flow and is designed with thermal performance in mind. This will help ensure that your system stays cool and runs smoothly even when pushing the limits of overclocking or running demanding games. And remember, a good airflow system can also reduce noise levels - so it's a win-win situation.

Conclusion

I thought this was all relatively predictable data that we found here today, but still very interesting to pull up and chart out. I'm glad you guys are tuning in and taking an interest in the tech behind our gaming hardware. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like and subscribe for more tech stuff coming at you soon.

Additionally, feel free to check out the merch store which I'm not wearing any new merch right now, I promise. I'll wear some in a future video soon, but check that out - it's a great way to help support the channel. We have our new heat sync logo on a lot of those items, and the quality of everything is really great too.

Thanks for watching, guys!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys so today I decided to be kind of fun to do a quick little experiment to showcase and determine how exactly case airflow can affect the behavioral properties of a system this is my own personal streaming system with a risin 730 700 X currently overclocked to 4.1 gigahertz on all cores 32 gigs of g.skill shred and z ddr4 at 3,600 speed and msi gaming extra RT x 2070 super and our case the fantex eclipse p 408 the reason why I've chosen this system to test today is mainly because of this case you guys recall this is the one that has the almost fully mesh front panel so it's a good starting off point to see what a best-case scenario might look like in terms of chassis airflow and then we're gonna slowly but surely add more and more strips of duct tape to the front panel as well as the top which is mostly all open ventilation as well to see how it affects a number of things including acoustics temperatures clock speeds and frame rates and of course we can already expect that all those backers are going to worsen as we apply more duct tape and constrict airflow further but to exactly what degree ha we will hopefully be able to nail down by the end of this video now a couple notes really quick about how I have the system set up here we have a 120 exhaust at the rear and the top those are just wired directly to the motherboard so they may ramp up and down a little bit during testing but I do have all the other fans pretty much all the other fans in the system fixed which includes the two 120 s that are on our liquid Aero radiator that's currently cooling our 3700 X those are fixed at 50% fan speed and then we also have our GPU fans fixed at 50% as well the only other fan that would be sort of dynamic right now is the chipset fan on our X 570 chipset so that's probably gonna ramp up and down a little bit as well and maybe get noisier as we as we go along here on the software side I'm gonna be using Unigine Heaven 4.0 as our testing application so the first test again is gonna be the system as is with no impeded airflow no tape on it whatsoever in the second test all applied duct tape to the front and top panels that covers roughly 75% of the surface area and then finally we're really gonna try to choke this mother effort by applying tape to roughly 90 percent of the surface area sadly this is probably gonna be a more realistic test than you might imagine there have been case trends now with a very sleek and minimalistic design on the front and top panels which unfortunately blocks a lot of airflow to impedes a lot of fresh intake or exhaust that can really hurt your systems performance and that's also why we're not going to or tape up any of the backside of the case because case manufactures don't do anything back there because you can't see it there's no point it's not visible to most users so they they just leave it alone which is kind of funny that the back side of the case is usually the most consistently well ventilated part of a chassis these days on the software side I'm gonna run Unigine Heaven 4.0 for 15 minutes for all three tests and at the end of those 15 minutes I'm gonna log all the data and then immediately jump into the actual benchmark so we can get an FPS rating as well so that's what's on the agenda today should be pretty interesting I'm gonna go ahead and start testing and then I'll circle back once I have all of our data all right the results are in and we can talk about the data now but right off the bat I wanted to mention that our ambient temperature was 73 degrees Fahrenheit or roughly 23 degrees Celsius throughout our entire testing it did not stray away from that point I have the a/c on running consistently so let's take a look first at temperatures these are the max temp values in degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of use in heaven-- 4.0 at 2560 by 1440 and you can see right off the bat that we are getting increased temperatures as we impede the cases air flow but starting with our CPU having zero tape on the case our CPU is maxing out at 54 point one degrees Celsius not too shabby at all and definitely what you would expect with that 240 millimeter liquid AO add on enough tape to cover roughly 75% of the surface area of the front and top panel however and we spiked up to 59 point eight degrees or roughly 10.5% of an increase with 90 percent of the ventilation cut off we saw nearly 24% increase in CPU temperatures over the best-case-scenario at 67 degrees Celsius thermally speaking our CPU has definitely hit the hardest out of everything that we tested here and I think that's mainly because it's relying solely on those two radiator fans for all of its cooling as soon as you compromise those and you choke those off particularly at 90 percent tape applications there's really no other assisted cooling that the CPU receives elsewhere in the case unlike the GPU as you can see our GPU started out at 68 C which is really not too bad at all for an RT X 27 T super and it went up to 74 see once we cranked it up to 75% tape that's an eight point eight percent increase on thermals and then up to 76 or eleven point seven percent with 90% tape application now I think there's a couple reasons why the GP wasn't hit quite as hard as the CPU was I think the first reason is that we have a pretty effective atom borne partner cooler design on the GPU it's been very highly reviewed this is why Adam board partner GPUs costs quite a bit more especially with custom PCBs and things like that it's just a really good card with a great cooler and the other factor at play here is that we have to exhaust fans the rear and top fans that are constantly pulling heat away from the GPU and ejecting it out of a case that's found to help some I also think that the GPU at some point especially when we started applying more tape on the front panel and constricting that area the GPU fans started to intake air from the back of the case notably the expansion slots that are all vented as well as the fairly large gap that's just on the right of those expansion slots I think that was serving as the new intake for our GPU when we started cutting off the front panel and that's not ideal but by any stretch you shouldn't ever have to depend on the back of your case to get most of your intake however with the exhaust fans above it that does mean the GPU is potentially put in a much better airflow path and had a lot much more circulation in its area than the CPU did in this case our chipset BRM + SSD also saw some significant temperature increases primarily anywhere between the nine and twelve percent range 92 degrees Celsius on our chipset with 90 percent tape is definitely definitely not where you want to be in most cases I also think the vrm could potentially be at a slight disadvantage here because we aren't using an air CPU cooler which would have helped to circulate some of the air in that area now it's worth noting that the sound levels remained more or less consistent throughout all three of our tests because the noisiest fans in the system which are the GPU fans and the radiator fans were said it fixed rpm on the contrary most users are probably just going to run their components at the factory out of the box settings which is generally an automated fan curve for components that have built-in fans in them and that's typically going to keep your temperatures more closely in check than a fixed rpm fan however that's also going to lead to increased noise levels as the temperatures increase so just to experiment with sound a little bit I actually took both of the fans on the GPU and the radiator and Riaan able to be Auto fan curve ship was out of the box and ran the same three tests again just to see what the difference in in noise levels was and here it is so clearly you can hear how dramatically the noise levels increase as we increase temperatures in various components in the system which is why it's important that you have a case that has good air flow to keep temperatures low so you can also lower those noise levels to pull some numbers from that exact sound test when we had 0% tape on the case our GPU fans were at roughly 46 percent fan speed but as soon as we cut it off with 90 percent tape applications we ramped all the way up to 67 percent which is reflected in the noise test that you just heard so definitely some some big some big differences there moving on to our average GPU clock now this is an Nvidia card using a version of GPU boost which automatically over clocks itself depending on power of voltage and thermals and so based on the thermals that we saw in the last slide you can infer that our clock speed is going to be affected accordingly so I'm actually gonna start at the bottom of the chart here at 90 percent tape we were seeing on average nineteen hundred and three megahertz on the GPU core clock then as we took off some of the tape to get to 75 percent surface area we started averaging nineteen hundred and fourteen megahertz which is a point five seven percent bump and then at 0% tape completely unhindered we had nineteen hundred and thirty eight megahertz on average which is a 1.8 percent improvement over the 90% tape worst-case scenario fortunately our GPU clock speeds weren't affected too hard here but it could have been a lot different had we not been using a top-tier GPU with again a very effective cooling design on it so we got pretty lucky there and finally moving on to our average frame rates here in heaven-- 4.0 1440p we saw a frame rate of 70 7.1 with 0% tape moving down to 70 6.5 FPS with 75% and we actually saw that same score at 90 percent tape as well this honestly shouldn't come as a huge surprise when you consider how closely frame rate is tied in with GPU frequency and since we didn't see a huge discrepancy in the last slide you wouldn't really expect a huge shift in frame rates here either again this is sort of a tip of the hat to the msi GPU for being able to sustain relatively decent thermals and performance despite being in an airflow restricted environment so hats off there but let's summarize some things up really quick before we close out the video for starters our gaming performance wasn't affected very heavily then again we only tested one application and have been four-point-oh we had one set of hardware in one configuration things could have been a lot different if we had tested more things Steve from gamers Nexus has done extensive testing on this and I think in one video he mentioned that based on case selection alone he's seen FPS swings up to 10% which is wild and it definitely makes you think twice about what case you're gonna get because it really does it really can affect your your performance in a significant way what is reflected in today's tests are the thermals the temperatures were significantly increased as we taped up the front on top of the case with the most extreme example being a nearly 24 percent increase in temperatures on our CPU which is obviously going to heat significantly into our overclocking Headroom and potentially dump even more heat into our system so I think the main takeaway from today is that your case is more than just a protective decorative box it's a cooler and case makers need to start designing them as such especially if they're anticipating customers filling their cases with hot running hardware's like gaming components GPUs and CPUs and stuff so I thought this was all relatively predictable data that we found here today but still very interesting to just pull it up and chart it out and then the less so you guys let me know what you think down in the comments below I'm gonna get out of here thank you guys so much for watching feel free to check out the merch store which I'm not wearing any new merch right now I promise I'll wear some in in a future video soon but check that out it's a great way to help support the channel we have our new heat sync logo on a lot of those items and the quality of everything is really great too apart from that guys feel free to toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it and get subscribed for more tech stuff coming at you really soon have a good one guys I will see you all in the next weekwhat's going on guys so today I decided to be kind of fun to do a quick little experiment to showcase and determine how exactly case airflow can affect the behavioral properties of a system this is my own personal streaming system with a risin 730 700 X currently overclocked to 4.1 gigahertz on all cores 32 gigs of g.skill shred and z ddr4 at 3,600 speed and msi gaming extra RT x 2070 super and our case the fantex eclipse p 408 the reason why I've chosen this system to test today is mainly because of this case you guys recall this is the one that has the almost fully mesh front panel so it's a good starting off point to see what a best-case scenario might look like in terms of chassis airflow and then we're gonna slowly but surely add more and more strips of duct tape to the front panel as well as the top which is mostly all open ventilation as well to see how it affects a number of things including acoustics temperatures clock speeds and frame rates and of course we can already expect that all those backers are going to worsen as we apply more duct tape and constrict airflow further but to exactly what degree ha we will hopefully be able to nail down by the end of this video now a couple notes really quick about how I have the system set up here we have a 120 exhaust at the rear and the top those are just wired directly to the motherboard so they may ramp up and down a little bit during testing but I do have all the other fans pretty much all the other fans in the system fixed which includes the two 120 s that are on our liquid Aero radiator that's currently cooling our 3700 X those are fixed at 50% fan speed and then we also have our GPU fans fixed at 50% as well the only other fan that would be sort of dynamic right now is the chipset fan on our X 570 chipset so that's probably gonna ramp up and down a little bit as well and maybe get noisier as we as we go along here on the software side I'm gonna be using Unigine Heaven 4.0 as our testing application so the first test again is gonna be the system as is with no impeded airflow no tape on it whatsoever in the second test all applied duct tape to the front and top panels that covers roughly 75% of the surface area and then finally we're really gonna try to choke this mother effort by applying tape to roughly 90 percent of the surface area sadly this is probably gonna be a more realistic test than you might imagine there have been case trends now with a very sleek and minimalistic design on the front and top panels which unfortunately blocks a lot of airflow to impedes a lot of fresh intake or exhaust that can really hurt your systems performance and that's also why we're not going to or tape up any of the backside of the case because case manufactures don't do anything back there because you can't see it there's no point it's not visible to most users so they they just leave it alone which is kind of funny that the back side of the case is usually the most consistently well ventilated part of a chassis these days on the software side I'm gonna run Unigine Heaven 4.0 for 15 minutes for all three tests and at the end of those 15 minutes I'm gonna log all the data and then immediately jump into the actual benchmark so we can get an FPS rating as well so that's what's on the agenda today should be pretty interesting I'm gonna go ahead and start testing and then I'll circle back once I have all of our data all right the results are in and we can talk about the data now but right off the bat I wanted to mention that our ambient temperature was 73 degrees Fahrenheit or roughly 23 degrees Celsius throughout our entire testing it did not stray away from that point I have the a/c on running consistently so let's take a look first at temperatures these are the max temp values in degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of use in heaven-- 4.0 at 2560 by 1440 and you can see right off the bat that we are getting increased temperatures as we impede the cases air flow but starting with our CPU having zero tape on the case our CPU is maxing out at 54 point one degrees Celsius not too shabby at all and definitely what you would expect with that 240 millimeter liquid AO add on enough tape to cover roughly 75% of the surface area of the front and top panel however and we spiked up to 59 point eight degrees or roughly 10.5% of an increase with 90 percent of the ventilation cut off we saw nearly 24% increase in CPU temperatures over the best-case-scenario at 67 degrees Celsius thermally speaking our CPU has definitely hit the hardest out of everything that we tested here and I think that's mainly because it's relying solely on those two radiator fans for all of its cooling as soon as you compromise those and you choke those off particularly at 90 percent tape applications there's really no other assisted cooling that the CPU receives elsewhere in the case unlike the GPU as you can see our GPU started out at 68 C which is really not too bad at all for an RT X 27 T super and it went up to 74 see once we cranked it up to 75% tape that's an eight point eight percent increase on thermals and then up to 76 or eleven point seven percent with 90% tape application now I think there's a couple reasons why the GP wasn't hit quite as hard as the CPU was I think the first reason is that we have a pretty effective atom borne partner cooler design on the GPU it's been very highly reviewed this is why Adam board partner GPUs costs quite a bit more especially with custom PCBs and things like that it's just a really good card with a great cooler and the other factor at play here is that we have to exhaust fans the rear and top fans that are constantly pulling heat away from the GPU and ejecting it out of a case that's found to help some I also think that the GPU at some point especially when we started applying more tape on the front panel and constricting that area the GPU fans started to intake air from the back of the case notably the expansion slots that are all vented as well as the fairly large gap that's just on the right of those expansion slots I think that was serving as the new intake for our GPU when we started cutting off the front panel and that's not ideal but by any stretch you shouldn't ever have to depend on the back of your case to get most of your intake however with the exhaust fans above it that does mean the GPU is potentially put in a much better airflow path and had a lot much more circulation in its area than the CPU did in this case our chipset BRM + SSD also saw some significant temperature increases primarily anywhere between the nine and twelve percent range 92 degrees Celsius on our chipset with 90 percent tape is definitely definitely not where you want to be in most cases I also think the vrm could potentially be at a slight disadvantage here because we aren't using an air CPU cooler which would have helped to circulate some of the air in that area now it's worth noting that the sound levels remained more or less consistent throughout all three of our tests because the noisiest fans in the system which are the GPU fans and the radiator fans were said it fixed rpm on the contrary most users are probably just going to run their components at the factory out of the box settings which is generally an automated fan curve for components that have built-in fans in them and that's typically going to keep your temperatures more closely in check than a fixed rpm fan however that's also going to lead to increased noise levels as the temperatures increase so just to experiment with sound a little bit I actually took both of the fans on the GPU and the radiator and Riaan able to be Auto fan curve ship was out of the box and ran the same three tests again just to see what the difference in in noise levels was and here it is so clearly you can hear how dramatically the noise levels increase as we increase temperatures in various components in the system which is why it's important that you have a case that has good air flow to keep temperatures low so you can also lower those noise levels to pull some numbers from that exact sound test when we had 0% tape on the case our GPU fans were at roughly 46 percent fan speed but as soon as we cut it off with 90 percent tape applications we ramped all the way up to 67 percent which is reflected in the noise test that you just heard so definitely some some big some big differences there moving on to our average GPU clock now this is an Nvidia card using a version of GPU boost which automatically over clocks itself depending on power of voltage and thermals and so based on the thermals that we saw in the last slide you can infer that our clock speed is going to be affected accordingly so I'm actually gonna start at the bottom of the chart here at 90 percent tape we were seeing on average nineteen hundred and three megahertz on the GPU core clock then as we took off some of the tape to get to 75 percent surface area we started averaging nineteen hundred and fourteen megahertz which is a point five seven percent bump and then at 0% tape completely unhindered we had nineteen hundred and thirty eight megahertz on average which is a 1.8 percent improvement over the 90% tape worst-case scenario fortunately our GPU clock speeds weren't affected too hard here but it could have been a lot different had we not been using a top-tier GPU with again a very effective cooling design on it so we got pretty lucky there and finally moving on to our average frame rates here in heaven-- 4.0 1440p we saw a frame rate of 70 7.1 with 0% tape moving down to 70 6.5 FPS with 75% and we actually saw that same score at 90 percent tape as well this honestly shouldn't come as a huge surprise when you consider how closely frame rate is tied in with GPU frequency and since we didn't see a huge discrepancy in the last slide you wouldn't really expect a huge shift in frame rates here either again this is sort of a tip of the hat to the msi GPU for being able to sustain relatively decent thermals and performance despite being in an airflow restricted environment so hats off there but let's summarize some things up really quick before we close out the video for starters our gaming performance wasn't affected very heavily then again we only tested one application and have been four-point-oh we had one set of hardware in one configuration things could have been a lot different if we had tested more things Steve from gamers Nexus has done extensive testing on this and I think in one video he mentioned that based on case selection alone he's seen FPS swings up to 10% which is wild and it definitely makes you think twice about what case you're gonna get because it really does it really can affect your your performance in a significant way what is reflected in today's tests are the thermals the temperatures were significantly increased as we taped up the front on top of the case with the most extreme example being a nearly 24 percent increase in temperatures on our CPU which is obviously going to heat significantly into our overclocking Headroom and potentially dump even more heat into our system so I think the main takeaway from today is that your case is more than just a protective decorative box it's a cooler and case makers need to start designing them as such especially if they're anticipating customers filling their cases with hot running hardware's like gaming components GPUs and CPUs and stuff so I thought this was all relatively predictable data that we found here today but still very interesting to just pull it up and chart it out and then the less so you guys let me know what you think down in the comments below I'm gonna get out of here thank you guys so much for watching feel free to check out the merch store which I'm not wearing any new merch right now I promise I'll wear some in in a future video soon but check that out it's a great way to help support the channel we have our new heat sync logo on a lot of those items and the quality of everything is really great too apart from that guys feel free to toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it and get subscribed for more tech stuff coming at you really soon have a good one guys I will see you all in the next week\n"