MSI MPG GUNGNIR 300R PC Case Review
Thermal Testing – Is the GUNGNIR 300R the ultimate MSI case?
Cooling Performance
Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look great from the outside, but all of that is for nought if your PC has the internal temperature of an oven. Your PC case needs enough airflow for your components to remain cool under load and to prevent any form of thermal throttling. For our test, we used the following hardware using fixed fan speeds (so that only the case and its included fans can influence thermal performance).
MSI MPG NUNGNIR 300R
Intel i9-9700K @4.8GHz at 1.2V
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming @ 100% Current Capacity/ LL lvl16
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition @ 9V via Fan Speed Reducer
Nvidia GTX 980 Reference @ 60% Fixed Fan Speed
Corsair LP Vengeance LP (Grey) @ 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD
Corsair RM550X Power Supply
The graph below showcases Delta temperatures with a controlled ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.
600 RPM Testing
The MSI 300R is not well suited to our standard case test system. This case is intended to be used with a large CPU liquid cooler, something that would add extra exhaust fans to the roof of the case and give this case design its intended airflow pattern. MSI don’t make tower heatsinks anymore, and this case is not made with those coolers in mind.
The results below speak for themselves. Out of the box the GUNGNIR 300R delivers reasonable GPU thermals and doesn’t deliver great CPU thermals. This would be addressed by using a more suitable cooling solution for this case, like a all-in-one CPU liquid cooler. It is also worth remembering that 600 RPM is an incredibly low fan speed, and we don’t expect users of this case to use fan speeds that are this slow.
1,000 RPM Testing
Cranking this case’s fans up to 1,000 RPM moves the GUNGNIR 600 to a better place in our performance charts. That said, these results do not place the 300R amongst the better cases that we have tested.
Max Fan Testing
The maximum fan RPMs that we could use with MSI’s included case fans was 1,100 RPM. These fans are not fast, but the upside is that they are quiet. Thermal results are very similar to our 1,000 RPM numbers. As you can expect, cases with faster spinning fans have an advantage in this test.
