Antec 900 "Tardis Project

Date Log; August 27, 2007

Performance

Lets start out by talking about the engine room of most computer systems the fans. Fans, generally speaking, determine so many things in today's liquid cooled systems. Firstly, fans come in anything from the near deafening to super quiet so they really do affect your comfort zone. Secondly, the unfortunate reality is that fans run out of puff even at the top ranges of speed and air flow so getting the correct balance with the radiator makes for a happy outcome if you value your comfort zone. Thirdly, if you get the fan choice wrong you will wish that the fans would just "go away". For us the prospect of gaining an extra 0.5 degree of performance using excessively noisy fans is not important if it affects our comfort. We value a superbly quiet yet powerful cooling system. After all what is the point of liquid cooling if you end up with the same level of noise as your typical air cooled system.

Fortunately for us the decision about fan choice is a little less complex. Given that we are taking a minimalist approach to the addition of the cooling system, in this project, it is necessary that we retain the supplied fans. Antec have chosen to fit three Tri-Cool fans to this case with some attractive blue highlighting. I am advised that these fans produce 39CFM at 1200rpm with a sound output of 25 Dba. This value rises to 79CFM at 2000 rpm with a sound output of 30dba. Just as a general note for the purpose of our testing we will run these at their lower rated values of 1200 rpm and 39CFM.

Testing

During the course of our testing we will be overclocking the system and measuring the various temperatures including the delta variation from ambient. We have verified the correlation between Speed Fan and Core temp on this system. With the temperature measurement of Speedfan and Core temp confirmed we should be able to add an active live testing element to our formal in-house work on our live testing web page.

So on to testing.

Ambient; 23 degrees Celsius.

Our "rough" testing with the DFI ultra-d motherboard will be with all values set to auto except vid with an override to 104%. There will be strict adherence to manipulation of FSB only with CPU voltage set to remain at default plus the override value mentioned.

Testing at Idle

First test 16M Super Pi result.

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Second Super Pi testing

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Okay so all the indications are that this water cooling system is holding its own with our overclocked AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU at 2.8Ghz, a stock 7600GT graphics card and of course the chipset block in the cooling system. Rough overclocking like this at default voltage (plus the bios override) demonstrates the potential of this particular CPU before final tweaking and other bios adjustments are made. The 4200+ X2 being a hotter 90nm size part also provides a higher thermal input to our system than say the newer AM2 65nm CPU's. What that adds up to is a very good "guesstimation" for the future addition of an AMD Quad core.

Delta

Water to ambient delta was measured and remained stable at a value of +1 degrees. Considering we are using the lowest of the fan settings on the Tri-Cool fans we are happy with this result. We should also point out that this is a very good indicator of the low fan speed performance of the Slimline 120mm and 240mm radiators used.

When full load is applied we will test a range of options such as multi speed fan settings on each of the fans to evaluate the value of higher speed settings for Summer use.

Testing at Load

Ambient; 21.5-23.0 degrees Celsius

We are using Folding@Home to evaluate the stability with this range of over clock. At 2.8Ghz the temperature ranges up to 39 degrees at load giving an approximate 10 degrees delta spread idle to load.

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Comments

At the time of writing this performance review the price of this particular AMD CPU had dipped just below the $100.0AUD level making it a bargain for a small gaming machine and/or a home theatre combination. To demonstrate gaming performance we will be running a number of games on this unit to evaluate performance prior to the arrival of the AMD Quad core. We will present some of this data about gaming temperatures on our live testing page when the higher ambient temperatures arrive.

Overall we are happy with the Antec 900 Tardis project simply because we have managed to successfully accomplish what we set out to do. Now we have a minimalist external case appearance with some serious cooling inside.

Well we couldn't leave this project without the money shots so here are the "all lit up" views.