Acoustic, Power & Thermal Performance
Acoustic Performance
During idle conditions, the system is relatively quiet and any fan speed changes are quite subtle. As a result, the noise output appears lower than it actually is because your ears adjust to the current levels. Of course, the idling noise isn’t silent and I’d prefer the system to record lower numbers. Once stressed, the system noise hovers around 44 decibels and is much quieter than many competing systems. Saying that, the cooler has the propensity to make slight vibrations every so often and I’m not entirely sure why this is the case.
Power Consumption
The hefty manual overclock applied to the CPU and extreme graphics card contribute to a higher power draw than other systems. Despite this, the load rating is still pretty low when you consider the kind of performance on offer.
Thermal Performance
Unfortunately, the CPU cannot maintain a 4.6GHz frequency when tackling the AIDA64 stress tests and consistently hits the 100C TJ Max. As a result, the CPU scales back to 4.3GHz to prevent hardware failure. Whether or not this is down to the cooling being insufficient or the CPU utilising too much voltage remains to be seen but it’s certainly a disappointing result. Thankfully, the CPU doesn’t exhibit these problems during games due to the lower thermal stress. On a more positive note, the GPU’s cooling is exemplary and way under the core’s safe limit.
