Operating Temperature

To ensure accurate thermal results, we installed the same hardware in each case in virtually the same way. Components included the Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional, Phenom II X6 1100T, Prolimatech Megahalems in passive mode (i.e. no fan actively dispelling heat), Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC, half a dozen Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB hard drives, and OCZ's ZX 1000w power supply.

With the system at idle the Silverstone Fortress FT04 had no trouble keeping the hard drives and graphics card extremely cool. The passively cooled Prolimatech Megahalems heatsink on the other hand just wasn't getting enough direct air-flow with the 3.5" drives in the way and the GTX 580 was blocking most of the air from the top of the case.

As a result the Phenom II X6 1100T ran with an idle temperature of 47 degrees which is very high. Although this isn't the highest result we have seen, with some cases pushing into the 50 degree range, it is much higher than those that keep the CPU below 30 degrees.

The stress temperatures of the FT04 shows a similar pattern to what was seen at idle. Here the hard drive and graphics card temperatures are as low as we have seen, which is great news for the FT04. However the CPU temperature was again higher than most, hitting 83 degrees, while most cases operate between 70 - 74 degrees.