A Look at the Inside
Here you see the hard drive cage, this simply
piece of plastic not only holds your hard drive but it also has four
noise dampening mounting points to reduce vibrations and noise.
On one end you have the handle to install and remove the cradle and
to install the hard drive just be certain that the connector are all
pointing to the back of the cradle.
Installing video cards or NIC's is tool free and surprising the system works very well even on the double bracket used on the HIS X2600 we are using to test this system with. The tool-free brackets had no trouble with double-wide card what so ever.
Now here is a nice touch Cooler Master has applied a nice thick layer of foam dampening material around the opening for the power supply, once again this is done for noise and vibration reduction.
Testing the RC-690
With RC-690 filled with components it was time to test it to see how well it would cool our system Here is a brief run-down of the components we used.
-
ECS KN1 Extreme motherboard
-
AMD 3500 Processor overclocked 15%,
-
Silverstone NT04 Heatsink
-
2 GB of OCZ PC-3200 Rev 2 memory
-
500 GB WD hard drive
-
two additional 120mm (low speed) mounted in the top of the case.
-
HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT
With sides back in place we started two instances of Prime and one HotCPU Tester and ran them all for a total of 30 minutes, then using two probes placed inside the case, one under the processor and the other near the power supply we read the temperature after 5 minute intervals.
|
Time |
Idle |
5 |
10 |
15 |
20 |
25 |
30 |
|
CPU |
34 |
52 |
57 |
58 |
58 |
59 |
58 |
|
Case |
34 |
37 |
38 |
38 |
39 |
39 |
38 |
One thing for certain the Silverstone heatsink is not meant to be used as an overclocking heatsink but we already knew that, it just happened to be handy and it would allow us to generate some easy heat inside our case.
Overall I was very happy with the result of the test, the five 120mm fans did an outstanding job of keeping the case temperature down where it should be and with a better heatsink the the CPU temperatures would have be significantly better.
Conclusion
Admittedly the RC-690 does have a couple of flaws in it's design, with things such as the certain power supplies not fitting correctly if a fan is placed in bottom mounting bracket. But putting these small problems aside I think Cooler Master has done a bang-up-job of creating a mid-priced enclosure that offers a number of features some of which are not even found on other computers such as the rows of screws on each side of the drive rack.
It's features like these that continue to make Cooler Master the company to beat when it comes to computer enclosures!
As special thanks to Cooler Master for their continued support!
