Daniel Blaisdell

Over the weekend I rebuilt my computer into the Antec 900 case. The parts arrived on Tuesday but with work and TF2 matches I couldn’t risk being down during the middle of the week. This case is a definite improvement in cooling over the Sonata III that I originally purchased for my system.

When I initially was putting this system together I didn’t expect to do any overclocking. The hardware was already pretty fast and would play any games out now and rocked my primary concern of Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat. Then I tried overclocking just to see what performance gain I could achieve and was pleasantly surprised that I could take the processor to 3.6GHZ on stock cooling.

This got the itch started and I began adding on parts to bring the temperatures of the hardware down to reasonable levels. First I replaced the cooler with an Arctic Freezer Pro 7 CPU cooler and finally replaced the case completely to increase overall airflow.

The Sonata III had 2 120mm fans running at full 2000 RPM and was removing 79 Cubic Feet / Minute of hot air from the case. The problem was, the intake fan was 4-5 inches inside of the case and it struggled to replace the hot air with cool air from outside the case. With both of these fans running at 30DB each, it was loud and wasn’t doing a very good job of cooling the system.

The tables for fan speeds are only estimates due to the fact that I use SpeedFan to automatically monitor temperatures and adjust fan speeds based on my desired temperature specifications.

The Antec 900 case has two fans in the same positions as the Sonata III, but adds 4 more fans to the overall system, including a huge 200mm exhaust fan situated directly above the processor. I am not going to include the internal fan in the same position as the Sonata III because it doesn’t directly intake or exhaust outside air anymore.

Overall The Antec 900 case is great for anyone who wants to build an air cooled overclocked system. I would recommend it to anyone that’s interested in keeping the airflow high while keeping the noise levels down.

The memory is slightly overclocked, but now that there is enough air flowing over the head spreaders it’s not flaking out like it was in the Sonata III.

I was really happy with my overclocking results, but I wasn’t too thrilled with the temperature increase I was seeing with the stock CPU cooler. After much research I settled on the Arctic Cooler 7 Pro which helped dropped my core temperatures dramatically. At $22 it’s a deal for the amount of cooling that is provided.

In my previous post, I never mentioned anything about noise or fan speed because I was shooting for raw performance. The joy of having your personal jet airplane in the computer room is great for playing hardcore games, but when I’m idle there is no reason to have that thing blasting air through the system and filling the computer room with white noise.

After installing the new CPU cooler I was amazed at the difference in temperatures and since I was able to control the heat dispersion by playing with the temperature thresholds, I was able to tweak my configuration to match the demand I place on the system. My CPU speed automatically adjusts between 30 and 70% depending on temperature to keep the desired temp close to 35C. At 45C an exception occurs at the CPU fan is maxed out to 100% hopefully for a short while. The Arctic Cooler 7 keeps my CPU around a max of 40C during a Prime95 torture test.

I took this screenshot via remote desktop so the Core, which is the nvidia card, is reading 0C

The CPU temperature and speed is configured independently of the video core and system temperatures which automatically adjust my chassis fan speeds to remove hot air from the system.

Overall I would highly recommend the Arctic Cooler 7 Pro for the semi-serious overclockers out there. A temperature drop of 13C on each core over the stock Intel cooler says shows that for the money you simply can’t beat the added value of upgrading to this cooler.

For the longest time I was totally against overclocking. I could never seem to find the sweet spot of a performance increase being worth the potential instabilities that are bound to happen by running expensive hardware over spec. A few months ago I bought a new system and over a weekend I begun investigating what other people had been able to push their hardware too.

System Info:

I am currently using stock cooling, and added one additional 120mm tricool fan to the front of the case to pull air in.

CPU Info

Mem Info

Hellgate London

CPU Temp

Video Card Temp

Prime95

CPU Temp

Speed Fan Snapshot