Acoustic and thermal performance

Acoustic performance - Fans Noise Levels

Processors and graphics cards can produce a lot of heat, that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. Do remember that the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will measure how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HDD, PSU fan, etc., so this is, by a mile or two, an imprecise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
 

 
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1 kHz and above 6 kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1 kHz and 6 kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

There are a lot of differences in measurements among websites. We measure noise levels in a completely enclosed and closed room. The lowest dBA level we can measure without any equipment activated is roughly 30 dBA in this room. We measure the noise 30 to 40cm from the side panel.

Used components are:

• Intel Core i7 8700K de-lidded @ 4.8 GHz @1.30 V
• EVGA Z370 FTW
• AORUS Waterforce GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition 11G
• OCZ RD400 512 GB
• Seasonic Prime Titanium Plus 850 W
• Thermalright True Spirit 120 Direct for AC
• NZXT Kraken X62 for LC

Temperatures were recorded during OCCT testing and in DiRT Rally, with the highest settings and at 2560 x 1440. Each of the 3 measurements lasted 30 minutes. Noise was measured using a Voltcraft SL-100, at 30 cm from the side panel, in idle and during stress tests. The NZXT Kraken X62 that we used has two be quiet! Silent Wings 3 140 mm fans on it. The Thermalright True Spirit 120 Direct is entirely stock. The measurements were taken with a closed chassis. This is close to a real-life scenario, making it a bit noisier than an open environment. This is the nature of airflow bumping into and hitting the innards of the chassis. 

Acoustic performance - Fans Noise Levels

From the acoustic point of view, the Define S2 is very decent, but not leading the pack.

The Define S2 was really quiet with the air cooler. Summing it up, the Fractal Design chassis performs very well, especially with the AIO cooler, but it’s not too shabby with the Thermalright True Spirit 120 either.

Thermal performance – temperatures of GPU/CPU

Fans are connected to the motherboard, with one pre-defined fan curve. Room temperature was 21 +/- degrees Celsius. The charts present the highest temperatures recorded using HWMonitor 1.35 or HWiNFO 5.86-3480. Since we are testing it all pretty thoroughly, here are the temperature measurements. First up is OCCT - [°C] less = better. First up is the AIO.

The results look very nice and impressive, and they’re actually in the upper section of the chart. Next are the measurements taken with an Air Cooler on the CPU.

This time the result is in the middle.