Published on 7th September, 2016
The LZ7 v0.2 has been built up for a few days now as various testing is being carried out, and what better way to test the case than with the massively fun Battlefield 1 Beta!
Battlefield 1 should give a good indication of real world usage in modern games, the minimum requirements released for this Beta were quite high asking for an Intel quad core i5-6600k.
You can see in the photo at the start of this article the LZ7 case is next to the speaker on the right of the photo. I’ve been using an Xbox pad to play the game purely for convenience across the living room, the TV is 1080p.
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE Even though I’ve only been playing BF1 on a 1080p screen, the settings were all turned up to max/ultra and the frame rate is uncapped. This put a high load on both the CPU and GPU, task manager was reporting the CPU usage at 100% during gaming and the GPU was in the region of 95% – 98% usage. The game ran with a frame rate in the region of 110 – 130 fps with no slow downs witnessed, these components were used in the LZ7 chassis:
The priority for this case is low noise, so all fan profiles have been tuned to provide adequate cooling at the lowest possible noise output. The following cooling setup was used:
After a couple of hours of gaming I checked the system temperatures, these are currently just observations and I will do some more detailed testing in the next couple of weeks:
These aren’t bad considering how quiet the system was running, I completely forgot the PC was even running, whether this was due to how quiet it was or how engrossed I was in the game I don’t know! But to give you an idea here is roughly what the fans were spinning at:
This shows that there is plenty of cooling head room left in this particular setup even with fan profiles set to silent/quiet.
ALTERNATIVE CPU COOLER AND SYSTEM FAN
I recently ordered a Thermaltake Luna 14 Slim to test its performance, I also had an Akasa AK-CC7108EP01 lying around which is 58.5mm tall cooler, so I thought I’d give these 2 components a shot in the LZ7 v0.2.
I’ll start with the Thermaltake Luna 14, this is a very very quiet fan. I would say flat out at 1200 rpm it is quieter than the Prolimatech Vortex 14 fan even when running at lower speeds such as 1000 rpm. But, it doesn’t push as much air through as the Prolimatech, this was noticed with the system temps running about 5C higher than with the Prolimatech Vortex fan. But a much quieter system, so it depends on your setup priority as to which is the better choice. The Luna also has LEDs which I don’t think you can switch off, but they are available in 3 colours.
Now onto the Akasa CPU Cooler, it fit fine into the system with about 10mm clearance up to the SFX PSU. It runs silent under idle conditions spinning around 700 rpm, but it does get noisy pretty quickly once it goes above around 1200 rpm. I was expecting temperatures to be lower than the Noctua, but in fact it ran slightly hotter when playing BF1 sitting in the low 60’s Celsius, it was also noticeably louder as the fan was running at around 1500 rpm and it was the loudest part of the overall system. It can actually go up to 3000 rpm, but it sounds louder than a hair dryer at those speeds! FUTURE TESTING I’m going to get hold of either a Silverstone AR-06 (58mm tall), or a Cryorig C7 (48mm tall), or both, as well as the Cryorig XT 140 system fan and do some more testing. If anyone has any particular testing requests let me know.
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