Gadgetory

whoa sue gasps so in the last few years or so we've seen this explosion of premium mini ITX chassis x' targeted at better airflow liquid cooling support and hardware compatibility this new breed of small form-factor cases has more or less been well received by the community allowing for an assortment of powerful configurations never before possible in such a tiny footprint one caveat however is that many of these chassis x' are designed with the close proximity between the power supply and graphics card which is often said to pose a thermal concern particularly for cards whose fans are either partially or entirely blocked by the PSU thereby restricting the amount of air intake required to keep the GPU cool a popular school of thought to combat this potential issue is to use a video card with a single blower style fan that's positioned at the far end of the cooler and the Sun Eclipse to buy the power supply additionally blower style cards are typically fitted with enclosed shrouds that exhaust hot air exclusively out the back of the case which is said to further improve thermals of other components in the system especially those of the small form factor variety so today I am putting these various claims to the test to find out the optimal GPU configuration for the specific type of mini ITX case the first question in our investigation is whether a standard non blower graphics card in an ATX case performs less adequately when put inside a small case where it's being encroached upon by the power supply to test this as fairly as possible I needed to build two systems using all the same parts with the exception of the motherboard and of course the chassis for our mid tower I decided on the define s from fractal design so it seemed appropriate to use their define nano s for our mini ITX built with its identical interior lamped the top ma Juventus were removed from both cases for more ventilation and each system was equipped with a pair of fractals own GP series fans connected to the motherboard all 140 millimeter models except for the 120 exhaust in the define nano s due to mounting limitations I'd also like to note here that the front intake fan in the Nano s was positioned to favor the GPU for all the tests we ran our processor is the core i5 6600 K that I've overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz and that's what the help of B quiets dark rock 3 cooler like our cases I tried to find similar motherboards despite them having different form factors so here we have the EVGA z170 for the win and it tiny counterpart to the z170 stinger the boards were paired with eight gigs of corsair lpx ddr4 3200 and powered by a fractal design Integra 750 watt PSU Windows 10 in all applications were run from this one terabyte crutial MX 200 SSD and lastly for graphics we have the EVGA gtx 1070 for the win Edition to represent our non blower subject and a gtx 1070 founder's addition for our blower card to better spot any thermal constraints both GPUs were overclocked to the same core clock frequency of around 2 gigahertz that we'll see that number vary a bit with different thermal conditions I should also mention that I kept a close eye on ambient temp stirring today's tests to ensure that my room never ventured outside the range of 25 to 26 degrees Celsius to put a working load on the systems I fired up Unigine Heaven 4.0 for 20 to 30 minutes at a time before taking a screenshot of all the temps clock speeds and other relevant data that we'll be using for comparison with that said let's circle back to answering our first question here to see if our non blower card favors one case or the other taking a look first at our mid tower results in the define sr4 the wind card was set to an auto fan curve in MSI Afterburner averaging a core clock speed of 2025 megahertz and maxing out at 80 degrees Celsius hopefully we don't see much hotter temps when switching cases as this is already pretty toasty on the bright side the GPU clock speed maintained it's 2025 megahertz frequency despite the chip being relatively warm for the CPU the cores on our 6600 K reach to max temp of 64 degrees Celsius which seems about par for the course given this type of cooler in overclock now let's see how our mini ITX system fared with the same OC and fan settings CPU temps are pretty much the same maybe a degree warmer at most but overall it seems moving to the smaller case hasn't had much effect on our coolers ability to tame the CPU hopefully the same goes for our video koh god well this is interesting the GPU rose a whopping 5 degrees taking it to a fiery 85 degrees Celsius it also appears that this extra heat prompted GPU boost to enforce some thermal regulation which brought down our core clock speed by about 25 megahertz now the slightly lower frequency I can live with but no GPU should be running at these temperatures for an extended period of time from this initial test it can conclude that a PSU restrictive chassis is likely to introduce more heat to an blower style videocard would things improve if using a card with a blower fan like our gtx 1070 founders edition here maybe but first I wanted to see how much I'd have to crank the fans on our for the win edition to get us under the 80 degrees Celsius mark with the current OSI settings it turns out the answer was 95 percent fan speed only then did our GPU stay below 80 degrees Celsius under load and my guess is that the fans are needing to work twice as hard because one of them is being starved for airflow by the power supply a small benefit here is that the GPU boost actually bumped up the core clock to 2012 megahertz due to the lower temperatures sure we've escaped the thermal danger zone and even recovered some of our performance but at what cost to our fragile ears here's a back-to-back sound test with the GPU fans at Auto versus 95% sound speed so we have quite a predicament on our hands in one scenario we're suffering extremely hot GPU temperatures and in another we have an obnoxious amount of fan noise plus having one of the GPU fans so close to the power supply doesn't do much to help our acoustics and sure this is why small form-factor cases like the define an OS are geared towards liquid cooling over air but still there's bound to be some users who have either missed the memo or built a system similar to this one and find themselves in the same conundrum if that sounds like you and swapping parts out of your existing rig isn't an option there's probably a few things you can do to remedy the issue such as installing more case fans the Nano s has some of the best fan mounting options for a chassis and size tidying up the outgoing cables from your power supply to open up more airflow or reducing or removing your GPU overclocked entirely to keep it from overheating now this might cost you some slight in-game performance but it's likely not worth causing any damage to your components I really wish I had time to test out the Nano s loaded up with case fans and such but that's a focus for another video our next move here is to see if the gtx 1070 founder's edition and its blower fan will be more effective in the mini ITX chassis than our for the win so under load we saw the GPU clock average out at the same two gigahertz mark with a max temp of 84 degrees Celsius interestingly we found virtually no difference in performance or thermals between the two graphics cards in this setup there was one change though if we look over at our CPU temps we can see that the 6600 K actually dropped a whole 5 degrees Celsius on its hottest core could this be a fluke or was the enclosed shroud actually helping to move heat away from our CPU to verify I ran the load test once again and what do you know we came up with the same results our CPU temps seem to have improved significantly just by switching to the founder's edition but the card itself is still running pretty damn hot so just as we did with the EVGA card I tried to get the temps of our reference 1070 to stay below 80 degrees Celsius to our delight we easily reached our temperature target with only 60% fan speed that seems a lot slower than the 95% that are for the wind card needed to operate it but bear in mind that the fans we're comparing here are completely different in size and engineering and if we look at gpu-z both cards were actually spinning at around the same rpm so which one do you think was quieter interesting it turns out the founders Edition ran much quieter under load with its blower fan unimpeded the cooler was able to operate as intended without requiring an absurd bump in fan speed keeping noise levels down the positioning also helped to eliminate any turbulence noise from the fan being pressed up against the power supply the only benefit that our EVGA card saw in this test was a small 12 megahertz boost in core clock speed but I think most of us would prefer the dramatically reduced noise levels any day of the week so to sum things up with today's results to say that blower cards run inherently cooler than non blower cards in this type of small form-factor case doesn't always tell the full story as per our testing installing both cards and hitting the same clock speed resulted in identical temperatures where the blower card truly shines is its ability to operate at 100% efficiency which allows it to maintain a quieter acoustic profile than a custom multi fan card another bonus here is that an enclosed graphics card can make a significant dent in reducing temperatures of other components in a meeting ITX chassis both of these findings tend to make blower cards quite appealing to those building in a case like the defined nano s especially since a lot of added board partners are manufacturing these types of coolers at a reduced cost from their reference design counterparts of course you can also beat the heat by using a card with an AO liquid cooler or go big with your own custom water cooling loop assuming you have the funds on a final note I'd like to say that I'm not trying to throw shade to this new wave of mini cases nor am I saying that the 1074 the wind is an awful card or anything like that I'm simply sharing my data so that the DIY community can make informed buying decisions and vendors can continue working to overcome these kinds of challenges in order to provide the best gaming desktop experience for all of us if you guys want more info on all the parts that were used today output links in the description below but that's gonna do it for now guys so let me know what you think about today's results and feel free to share any of your own experiences in the comments with this kind of setup before you guys go don't forget to douse me a like on this video if you enjoyed it and also feel free to check out my store where you can pick up a shirt and possibly help support the channel as always thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I will see you all in video