Noise & Temperatures
The temperatures overall aren't too bad for a system of this price range. Obviously additional cooling fans would drop temperatures even further but for fairness' sake we tested the system with the fans equipped as-is. For our testing purposes we used a combination of software and hardware with the Hardware Sensor Monitor program and our lab approved Fluke 62 Mini Infrared Thermometer. It offers the best accuracy in its class, +/- 1% of reading. It also has a very wide temperature range from -30º to 500ºC (–20º to 932ºF.) The Fluke 62 was used at a constant distance of 10 inches from each surface and each reading was measured at an ambient temperature of 25º C. Keep in mind when running the system at 100% the entire rig was quite noisy due to the increased CPU fan speed and the relatively high levels of noise the stock fans emit. Personally, this writer wouldn't want to sleep in the same room with this case. Setting temperature triggers via the system BIOS or using a third-party temperature monitoring program such as SpeedFan would be a wise choice. While taking each measurement, Orthos Prime & Futuremark 3DMark 06 ran on a loop for 60 minutes to ensure 100% CPU & GPU utilization at all times.


With our test setup, the AMD Opteron 146 has a stock speed of 2.0GHz and was overclocked to 2.8GHz, which required the OCZ Dual-Channel PC4000 Gold Edition VX ram to run with 3.2 Volts and the nForce 4 chipset to run with 1.8 Volts. This of course caused extra heat to dissipate into the case. Yes, this system might seem outdated to our readership, but it still emits a ton of heat compared to other systems at FPSLabs. Considering the internal design of the Cooler Master 690 compared to that of the Antec 900 and NZXT Zero, we were expecting a bit more. Since the components are exactly the same, we've decided to show you the difference in thermal performance. Obviously the Antec 900 blows everything away but at any given point the Cooler Master 690 doesn't lag too far behind. Only in measuring the temperature of the PWM area did we notice a huge 10 degree difference. This is no doubt a result of the lack of airflow to that particular area. However, this can be fixed by adding at least an additonal 120mm fan to the bottom of the case to start pushing air more efficiently towards that area of the motherboard. Keep in mind if you are interested in installing any type of cards in SLI or CrossFire configuration we recommend that you install the additional side fan as well in order to haul air as quickly as possible over the cards and out the rear. All in all the performance was dead last in practically every category, but for the most part it wasn't by much.