PC Specialist Vortex 440 System Review

Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures

Noise

The amount of noise produced by any computer is a vital consideration for most buyers, even gamers don’t really want a noisy PC because less noise is always better. We use an acoustic dBA meter held 2 feet behind our test system at idle and under load to get the idle and load noise levels for the system. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Prime95 to loop together – we take the acoustic measurements 5 minutes into both of these scenarios.

Noise is often the downfall of a lot of high-end system builds and we find that to be the case here. I am very sensitive to noise, I like a silent PC, and the Vortex 440 is far from that. It’s idle value is what I would want to see at load: PC Specialist set their fan profile way too strongly. The ASUS X99-S has great fan controls so please can you make use of them next time PC Specialist?

Power Consumption

To test power consumption we measure the total system power draw during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Prime95 to loop together – we take the power measurements from the “Killawatt” AC power meter 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point.

Power consumption is fairly low under load considering the performance on offer, although, idle power consumption is nearly twice that of a Z97 system due to all the extra hardware associated with X99.

Temperatures

To test thermal performance we measure average CPU and GPU core temperatures during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Prime95 to loop together – we take the temperature measurements from within CPUID HWMonitor 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point. For load we take the average of the maximum temperatures, for idle we take the average of the minimum temperatures.

The CPU temperatures are brilliant: less than 55 degrees under extreme Prime95 load. That begs the question: why such an aggressive fan profile?

Nvidia’s GTX 980 sits at its thermal management point of 80~ degrees celsius so there’s nothing to worry about in that department, especially as it’s a rear-exhaust cooling solution.