Corsair Obsidian 800D

 

Idle temperatures were taken after thirty minutes of sitting idle, and load temperatures after thirty minutes of torture tests using Prime95 to max out the 4 cores. Ambient temperature during testing was 22°c controlled by an air conditioner. The 800D was tested against a Cooler Master HAF 922 for comparison.  The hard drive temperatures were tested by cutting and pasting a 100GB random text file between the 2 hard drives 4 times and recording a maximum temperature over the course of the test. All fans in the both systems were run at 12v.

 

The excited kid with a new toy inside me soon calmed down when I booted the case for the first time, I let the system idle for 30minutes before taking these readings. The temperatures just kept rising, 8 degree’s alone on both of the GPU’s was enough for me to wonder what the hell was going on. So I popped the door open to inspect. The fans were moving hardly any air! I first thought they were wired wrong and were running at 7v, but no they were at maximum speed and running off a 12v molex correctly. The other big area of difference is the hard drive temperatures, I had worried the complicated layout would not work all that well, and compared to the 922 even at idle there is 8c difference on the Velociraptor and 7c difference on the Samsung. I did disconnect the fan and temperatures went up another 5-8c, so its the design thats making the drives this much hotter.

 

 

Moving on to Load testing things didn’t get better they got a lot worse, the GPU’s again suffering the most with the 922 coming in at 68/70c the Corsair was running at an egg cooking 85c on both the GPU’s. The CPU was much the same, the 922 ran at 58c but the Corsair struggling to keep it at 75c. Even the motherboard was running a whole 8c hotter.

This would normally be the point Id move on to the conclusion and say that this case has terrible airflow, but as many of us do like to make changes to upgrade performance. I’m pretty sure that the problem with the temperatures is just airflow, because the fans that are shipped with the case are just too quiet and move next to no air. 

 

 

So throwing tradition aside I set about making some changes. The bottom intake fan was swapped out for a 140mm Xigmatec, as was the rear fan but rather than exhaust I had it feeding air into the case, this is the way Corsair say their H50 all in one water cooling unit should be mounted also, so as its a Corsair case I thought it would be good to see this as a comparison as well. The only other change was I added a pair of 120mm Xigmatec fans into the roof as exhaust fans.

The results speak for themselves, the temperatures plummeted, bringing the difference between the Corsair to the 922 down to a much more acceptable level. I suspect this case was designed for water cooling systems all along and relies on the rear intake and a radiator in the roof to act as an exhaust.

 

 

Testing over with some wild differences in the results, lets move on to the conclusion.