The Lazy Days of Summer Case Review

The Review Process

To review each of the cases, we used our established standardized process : we build a computer in each case using the same setup for each one of the test cases ; we use the same cables and the same power supply. We believe that it is more important to test "real world" functionality of each case using a "real world," standard setup in order to yield more comparable and accurate information as to the performance of each case. Our sample testing configuration was as follows :

As we have explained in previous reviews, due to the increased popularity of rounded cabling, we used both rounded floppy and IDE cables during our testing. Each system was pushed for a continuous four-hour period, running 3DMark 2003 in a loop to make sure that the system and the case maintained proper temperature. All of the cases reviewed passed this test. However, we did maximize the number of fans by adding Antec fans to the cases that did not include a sufficient number. In instances where we needed to use a Micro ATX board or Flex ATX board, we substituted the Asus A7N8X-VM. (In this review only the Athenatech A100SC required a Micro ATX board.)

Temperatures for the CPU were within a range of 47°C/ 116°F to 50°C/ 119°F. The ambient temperature within the case ranged from 35°C/ 95°F to 40°C/ 100°F. These measurements are based on the information provided by the hardware monitoring that is built into the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, and these temperature ranges are well within acceptable limits. (We verfied this information using our new Superflower SF-609 Fan Master which as part of it’s feature set includes tempature monitoring.) None of these cases failed due to a cooling issue, even when the system was at its hottest. These temperature measurements were taken several times during the four-hour test period.