Cheaper, yet decent cases are not completely gone from the market yet. One such case is the Prime AP201 from Asus’ lower-end. Considering the price well under 100 EUR, you get a case with a above-standard build quality, which is characterized by the “infinite” perforation. Cool air is thus available to components theoretically from all sides. But this also means that it doesn’t damp noise too much. The question is what weighs more in the bigger picture.
The Computex tradeshow this year seems to involve various anniversaries for many companies. In the case of Asus, the company is celebrating 20 years of its “premium” gaming brand, ROG. We visited the booth Asus has at the trade show as well and will show you some of the new hardware the company brought to its booth—because of this anniversary, much of it is quite extraordinary and forms a celebratory lineup called ROG Edition 20. Read more “The most interesting (and craziest) Asus hardware at Computex”
Failures of the 12V‑2×6 power cable (formerly 12VHPWR) have become the scourge of recent GPU generations. Especially for Nvidia cards pushing this power standard, but also for a few Radeon models using these connectors. Various attempts to work around or mitigate the risks have popped up; this time, Asus is introducing the Equalizer special‑purpose cable for its power supplies, that aim to prevent connector melting in several ways. Read more “Asus ROG Equalizer: Robust 12+4pin connectors that don’t burn?”
It wants to go head‑to‑head with the Phanteks T30-120 fan, while also having a slight edge in every respect. That’s Asus’s marketing—and now comes reality in HWCooling’s in‑depth analysis. The ProArt PF120 fans are truly something exceptional and worth paying attention to. High cooling efficiency and elegant daisy‑chaining are just the beginning. The overall design of Asus’s fans is impressive. Read more “Asus ProArt PF120: The most efficient fan at low noise level”
I am curious why adding two fans blowing air to the GPU worsened its temps. Perhaps it’s because the fans have to spin slower overall to achieve the same noise level? The bottom panel plus the filter do look quite restricted so the bottom fans might be providing fairly low airflow.
I like them applying the front PSU mount (more commonly seen in SFF cases) to mainstream cases though, it saves lots of space and airflow can still be great. 3 top fans exhausting air + flipping the CPU cooler to take air in from the back will likely lead to the best balance of CPU/GPU thermals when using air coolers.
The reason is probably quite simple. In a single-fan configuration, at equal noise levels, the fan on the exhaust is significantly faster than in a three-fan configuration. Not only the cooling of the graphics card, but the overall cooling (including the CPU, power delivery surroundings and SSD) is weaker probably due to more heat build-up when the fan on the exhaust is slower. This behaviour is quite typical and at equal noise levels, we usually measured a higher efficiency in a negative pressure configuration in this test of different system cooling configurations as well.