The moment of truth
After booting up our test system to verify that it was running properly, we put the Conqueror's side panel back on and closed up the system. Note in the picture below how the window is tall enough to provide a good view of the internals; some case windows aren't tall enough to show off this much of the system.
Today, we'll be testing the Conqueror against the Hiper Osiris, which also features three 120 mm fans. On the Osiris, we hooked the two front fans to the 5V line and the rear exhaust fan to a Zalman Fan Mate controller, turning down that fan's speed until it was inaudible. The Conqueror's rear exhaust fan isn't noticeably noisy when running on 12V power, so that's how we connected it. However, the Rosewill case's front 120 mm fans are a little loud when fed 12V power, so we hooked them up to our PSU's 5V line, too. Since Rosewill doesn't supply three-to-four-pin adapters for the Conqueror's fans, you'll have to provide your own if your motherboard doesn't have enough (or conveniently placed) fan headers.
We set the Antec Tri-Cool fan on our CPU cooler to its low setting and turned down the fan on our Zalman VF700-Cu GPU cooler until it wasn't noticeable anymore. We configured our test system with a basic Nvidia nForce-based Micro ATX motherboard, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor, and an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics card. To keep our test results consistent, we swapped out the Rosewill PSU that's been posing in pictures in favor of an Enermax unit we use for enclosure testing. We fired up the rthdribl HDR lighting demo for GPU load testing and used Prime95 to stress the CPU. Component temperatures were measured with SpeedFan.
For our first set of measurements, we left the system idling until temperatures stabilized.
The extra airflow provided by 12V power running to the Conqueror's rear fan likely explains why that case delivers slightly lower temperatures here. Note, though, that the hard drive isn't as cool, suggesting that the Osiris' front fan is still moving more air at 5V than the Conqueror's (or that the extra side venting on the Rosewill is actually disrupting cool airflow over the hard drives).
To heat things up, we fired up rthdribl and left it churning out dramatically lit frames until temperatures stabilized, which took about seven minutes.
While the Osiris does an admirable job here, the Conqueror's GPU temperatures are slightly lower. Again, we see the Rosewill system's hard drive running a little hotter, but otherwise, system temps are very close.
Next up came our combined GPU and CPU load testing, for which we ran both rthdribl and Prime95.
Once again, the Conqueror benefits from being able to run its rear fan at 12V without offending our ears, yielding slightly lower temperatures nearly across the board. Only when we look at the hard drive is the Rosewill design warmer, either because it uses a different layout for the drive cage or because it has additional venting on its side panel.
Thus far, the Conqueror has proved to be a little cooler than the Osiris, but what about noise levels? We took out our trusty decibel meter and probed the system under full load to find out.
I should add that before I put the Conqueror's front door back on, our sound meter reported an even higher number from the front: 27 dBa. There certainly is some justification for doors, at least on a case like the Conqueror.
Keep in mind here that sound levels are measured on a logarithmic scale; adding three decibels is roughly equivalent to doubling the sound level. The Conqueror may run a little cooler overall, but it's one decibel louder than the Osiris, and my ears noticed the difference. I'd never call our Conqueror config noisy, but it is slightly more noticeable than the Osiris because of the full strength fan. The good news is that 120 mm fans tend not to be annoying. A slight whooshing sound is all you'll hear, and from the front, that's hard to discern from other background noise.
