The Best Chassis for Steambox/HTPC Style Gaming Systems

Testing and Methodology

There’s no shortage of graphics cards, motherboard and other components we could use for these tests. However, for the chassis performance tests I’ve chosen some good quality mid-range components that are typical of what your average gamer would use. Sure we all strive for 295X2 graphics cards and ultra high-end processors, but in reality these are often just the plaything of the enthusiast market, not the majority of users. The graphics card I’ve chosen offers great performance for 1080p gaming at maximum settings, given that most HTPC/Steambox style gaming PC’s will be hooked up to big screen TVs in the living room, it’s unlikely you’ll need to push beyond 1080p anyway, while your screen will likely only have a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz; so there’s little need for more performance at this time and you could always throw more into your system should your budget allow it or you feel the need. The Sapphire R9 270X is also quite a large card, great for testing the maximum GPU size of each chassis.

I’m using a high-end CPU in these tests, mostly because I know it’ll push the limits of our CPU cooler, giving us a good set of results in terms of thermal performance and acoustics. I’ve also opted for a good quality Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard. I’ll be using the mini-ITX, Micro-ATX and ATX form factor boards from this series as they offer great performance, overclocking and esthetics in relation to their price.

I’ve picked a high-quality Seasonic power supply, which is likely overkill for this level of system performance, but a good power supply is no bad thing. Of course, we will revisit the components section of Steambox and HTPC gaming in a coming article, for now, the focus is on the chassis.

• Intel “Haswell” Core i7 CPU (stock speeds)
• Cooler Master Cooler
• Seasonic M12 II 80PLUS Bronze Modular PSU
• ADATA 128GB SSD
• ADATA 8GB (4+4) DDR3 RAM
• Gigabyte Gaming 5 Motherboard Series*
• Sapphire R9 270X Tri-X 2GB Graphics Card

*Only the mini-ITX Gaming 5 motherboard from Gigabyte will be used for Thermal performance tests on each chassis to help keep the results as uniform as possible.

Thermal performance will be done with a ten minute run on Prime95, with the average core temperature recorded before and after testing. I’ll also be running the popular Unity Heaven 4.0 benchmark for 10 minutes to test the GPU thermal performance in a similar fashion.

Acoustic performance will be done with the same tests as thermal performance, recorded with a decibel meter at a range of 2ft above the chassis before each test, then again towards the end of each test to record the minimum and maximum dBa.