Testbed and Methods
The system was tested as it was. That is, the speeds of the system fans were left default; the case was closed and fully assembled during the tests; an air conditioner maintained a constant ambient temperature. I took care to lay the cables and wires in the case in such a way that they wouldn?t hinder airflows. However, I used all the included adapters for the tests to be closer to life.
The following components were installed into the Cooler Master Media 260 system case:
- Intel D945GTPLR mainboard
- Intel Pentium D920 processor (2.8GHz, Presler core, boxed cooler with a copper core)
- 2 x 512MB DDR2 SDRAM from Samsung
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive (200GB)
- DVD-CD/RW from LG
The tested system case is obviously not meant for building top-end PC systems while this set of components is more than sufficient for any multimedia task, except playing modern 3D games. Considering the lack of a discrete graphics card, I tested the system in the following modes:
- Idle
- CPU Burn (two copies of the CPU Burn utility running)
- HDD Burn (two file-sets, a 7GB folder with small files and a 40GB folder with movies, are being copied simultaneously from one partition to another)
We used Intel Desktop Utilities to read the CPU and mainboard temperatures; the temperature of the hard drive was reported by HDD Thermometer.
The ambient temperature remained constant at 21?C throughout the tests.
The temperatures are read after they have fully stabilized.
