Page 8 -- By the Light of the Fire

Heat

The latest in our continuing our series of helpful temperature graphs, we loaded the Firestorm with Prime95 and let it run for intervals of 30 minutes, or until our testicular fortitude ran out, and logged the temperatures with Everest Ultimate 5.  Graphing the results in Excel produced a waterfall plot of the CPU load and core temperatures.

Two tests are shown here, the first spike with the fans at a pleasing 1600RPM, and the second at a rather noisy 2600RPM.  The i7 core temperatures shot up to 80C in both test runs, and kept climbing until I didn't have the balls to continue.  Huh?  Basically, the front fans have very little impact on removing heat from the CPU.  The design of the case, and a lot of similar small cases, make use of the PSU to exhaust the heat from the CPU.  This would be fine, but in my estimation, the Silverstone PSU isnt spinning up its fans to beat the heat.  Even though the exhaust from the PSU is pretty warm, warm enough to make a fine plate of nachos, it's not moving much air at all.  I would think a smaller wattage PSU would be a better fit for the Firestorm, or at least one that was more thermaly sensitive.

A quick screengrab of Everest and Core Temp shows the idle temperatures are around 50C, which is just too hot.  For a computer named Firestorm, it couldnt be a more ironic name.  The biggest problem with this case is getting rid of the heat.  The i7 965 has a thermal design power (TDP) of 130W, which is not that much, but it is confined to a pretty small area.  So, getting rid of heat is a fairly serious issue, and one that the PSU needs to be sensitive to.