Testbed and Methods

The system was tested as it was. That is, the speeds of the system fans were left default; the case was closed and fully assembled during the tests; an air conditioner maintained a constant ambient temperature. I took care to lay the cables and wires in the case in such a way that they wouldn’t hinder airflows. However, I used all the included adapters for the tests to be closer to life.

The following components were installed into the Cooler Master Media 260 system case:

• Intel D945GTPLR mainboard
• Intel Pentium D920 processor (2.8GHz, Presler core, boxed cooler with a copper core)
• 2 x 512MB DDR2 SDRAM from Samsung
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive (200GB)
• DVD-CD/RW from LG

The tested system case is obviously not meant for building top-end PC systems while this set of components is more than sufficient for any multimedia task, except playing modern 3D games. Considering the lack of a discrete graphics card, I tested the system in the following modes:

• Idle
• CPU Burn (two copies of the CPU Burn utility running)
• HDD Burn (two file-sets, a 7GB folder with small files and a 40GB folder with movies, are being copied simultaneously from one partition to another)

We used Intel Desktop Utilities to read the CPU and mainboard temperatures; the temperature of the hard drive was reported by HDD Thermometer.

The ambient temperature remained constant at 21°C throughout the tests.

The temperatures are read after they have fully stabilized.