The bottom two charts on page 6 are both the same.

Thanks for the review - case reviews here are a notch above most other sites in terms of useful information.

Hmm... I don't agree with this statement here from the introduction:



The FT01 is noticeably smaller than the TJ07 and is even smaller than the P183:

FT01 - 211mm (W) x 486mm (H) x 494.5mm (D) = 50.7 liters
TJ07 - 220mm (W) x 560mm (H) x 565mm (D) = 69.6 liters
P183 - 205mm (W) x 514mm (H) x 507mm (D) = 53.4 liters

Which hardly means it wasn't bulky

What's the target market for a case this big? File servers?

Midgets

Hi,

I wonder why there is an exhaust fan at all? The air will just go out all the openings anyway, so the exhaust fan might even be slowing the air flow down...

Editing artefact. Fixed to put the proper chart back in...

Point taken and revised. I've put up a case volume comparison table at the bottom of page 1. It's quite enlightening.

I like the case volume comparisons. Now im going to have to measure my own cases and see where they fall.

Any indication of how much this thing weighs? (If its in the article, I missed it).

An interesting experiment to try would be to shut down and/or block off the top fan on the case and see what that does to temps and noise. Should be fairly simple to place a book or such over the opening.

In your Antec Mini P180 review, I was surprised that you weren't curious enough to test the top blowhole as an intake. I thought you'd do it this time for sure with the Silverstone, so please reverse that top blowhole into an exhaust and tell us which works better -- innie or outtie.

The superior test results could be due to the aluminum construction, aluminum transfers heat many times faster than steel. So a well-designed aluminum case is one giant heatsink, a great advantage yet to be exploited. I would bolt the CPU & GPU heatpipes directly to the case, turning the aluminum case into one giant passive Ninja! If this topic interests you, I'll have some more. Also, this fad of painting cases or lining them up with foam, rubber, etc, simply defeats the greatest asset of aluminum -- superior heat transfer.

No way. Aluminum has nothing to do with cooling in a case unless the hot parts have direct conduction paths to the aluminum. With only air to transfer the heat, I assure you the material from which the case is made of has ZERO effect on cooling.

I love this case and have read up on it quite a bit.
See here

I'm sure I saw another comparison somewhere but can't find it now. There's also a YouTube video demonstrating the flow with smoke.

Seems pretty conclusive and will surely upset a few die hard "negativists".

In FT01's case, positive air pressure is definitely better as we've tested it extensively during development. Cases with lots of open vents may not work as well though.

Here is another article on the FT01 showing difference in temperature between positive and negative air pressure:

http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3454&p=6

Here is the link to the YouTube video with smoke machine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe-2ZqmSGug

Onboard fans on CPU heatsinks, like the Ninja, show that airflow removes heat very effectively from aluminum. I used to work for Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, their air-cooled engines are thermodynamically very efficient, similar to the Porsche engines. I'm up for an experiment, are you? the Scythe Zipang is a good candidate, lose the fins and bolt the heatpipes to the side cover of a Lian-Li

Rebellious --

There's no need for such an experiment, it's already well known that direct conduction -- via heatpipes and other methods -- between CPU and aluminum case panels can be used for effective cooling. There have been cases going back almost to the very start of SPCR that use such technology.

I was very specifically countering your comment...

...which is simply not true in the FT01 -- it's the airflow effected by the case design which makes the difference here.

Seems like a less restrictive hard drive design and softer mounting method a la Antec Solo would be brilliant in this case.

I suppose you could calculate it out, measure the alum case's mass and its change in temperature. Blowing positive pressure through the FT01 probably amplifies its heat transfer, just like the fan on a Ninja. A well-designed alum case can dwarf the largest CPU heatsink even as an air-cooler, whereas a heavy steel case lined with foam rubber is thermally insulated. Judging from my Lian-Li, I'd say alum is thermally superior, but acoustically inferior...

There is no way that aluminium case can be better then a steel case if they both use air as heat conductor. It's not possible.

Right, because air transfers heat more slowly than both aluminum and steel. The whole point of a heat sink is to pull the heat out of the core then have a huge surface area for it to be evacuated.

Aluminium is a much better conductor of heat than steel. See this table. That's why heat sinks are made from aluminium and not steel. Even better would be copper but that's expensive.
Therefore an aluminium case would dissipate more heat than a steel case, especially a foam lined (insulated) steel case. The amount of heat transferred through the case would admittedly be tiny in both types of case relative to the amount of heat exhausted using air cooling; and effectively zero in a foam lined case.
The only difference you might notice is that an aluminium case might feel warmer to the touch slightly more quickly than a steel case.

An analogy might be : If you had two cups of coffee, one in an aluminium mug and one in a steel mug, the coffee in the aluminium mug would get cold more quickly. A third cup of coffee in a wooden mug would stay hot for much longer than either of the others.

That's one lousy analogy.

What we have is by all relevant aspects a (fairly short) pipe. Inside the pipe, well away from the sides, is a heater. The air surrounding the heater insulates it thermally from the walls.

If the ends of the pipe were sealed the air would heat up and eventually transfer heat to the pipe walls.

But the pipe isn't sealed. In fact there's a fan sucking air out at one, forcing cold air in at the other. The air that get in contact with the walls is never warm enough to dump off any heat, and so what material the pipe is made of becomes irrelevant!

Cheers
Olle

Look guys, no one is arguing about which metal has better heat conductivity. This is well known by any self-respecting geek and discussed ad nauseum here and in every other cooling forum on the web.

What judge56988 cites is true, but it's a totally incorrect analogy for what's actually being discussed. The medium of heat transfer in the cup is WATER! Hence, the nature of heat transfer is direct conduction. In contrast, in a PC, the medium for any heat transfer from components to the case is AIR, whose density compared to water is so low that the conduction is a minuscule fraction of conduction in a coffee cup. The coffee in the cup is also unmoving while the air in a typical case is being moved 20~100cfm -- ie, constantly refreshed with cooler air .

The "hot" air in a case is not really that hot, perhaps 50~60C just after it passes through the CPU & GPU heatsink fins, usually only ~6-7" from exhaust vents. Hence, there is very little surface area (relative to the skin of the entire case) actually exposed to the hot air.

The key here is how the aluminum is being used. As a heatsink mechanically coupled tightly to the heat source, no question it's far superior to steel for cooling. But as the skin of a normal PC case without direct mechanical connection to the heat sources, aluminum has no advantage in cooling -- at least not for any normal PC. Maybe if the air was totally heated to 100C by being completely sealed in there, yeah, ok, but for any normal PC, NO!

And in a case that's well designed for airflow, lining the panels with acoustic damping that does not impede the airflow will have ZERO effect on the component temps.

All this is totally different from "heatsink" cases like the Zalman TNN, Hush, mCubed and others where the hot components' heat is conducted by direct coupling or via heapipes to the aluminium panels of the case.

For everyone who does not understand or wants to disagree with the above, read Cases: Basics & Recommendations (esp p.1-2) before coming back with any reply. This discussion is turning absurd and will be locked if it continues in the same vein.

Very neatly done! Bravo!

OK, the analogy is crap - I stand corrected.

To be fair, I did also say:

Maybe I should have said negligible.

If you were to use a case as a heatsink by directly connecting it to components, you might lose part of the EMI shielding effect and actually make things worse by doing so. It is possible to crash some laptops by putting a mobile phone very close to the heatsink area at the back and having a huge heatsink for a case would offer the same effect.

FYI: here's some pics of my install in an FT01:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50554

I stripped the HD cage completely and mounted my HD enclosure on foam blocks. I tend to leave the big fans running at 100% and turn the back fan down to 50%. The 120mm fan is the most "annoying" sound in the whole thing. GTX260 stays cool even when gaming. It's not completely silent but it works well for me.

Try infinitesimal.

Where's the "banging my head against the wall emoticon" here at SPCR? This thread needs it.

To Rebellious and the other "aluminum cases cool better than steel cases" apologists. Years ago, Systemcooling.com did a test on this hypothesis using the venerable Chenbro "Dragon" series of cases. There are identical versions of these cases, made from steel and made from aluminum. It gave a perfect "apples-to-apples" comparison of the cooling difference between the two cases. The results: The was no difference, they both had the same interior temp and CPU/systemboard temp. IIRC, the difference from one to the other was around 1 degree C.

The top fan should be moved forward a bit. It looks like half of its output goes straight to the exhaust and is wasted.

+ve pressure is good for back venting vid cards since they will act as exhausts. In a -ve pressure case the can can end up fighting the case exhaust fan for air and need to ramp up to higher levels. In a case with filters and open slot plates you may even end up with heat recycling at the vid card area. as the exhaust are sucked right back in. This effect is more pronounced with high power cards that have leaf blowers for fans.