Cooling

DeepCool GamerStorm Castle 280EX CPU Cooler Review

Test System & Methodology

As you may appreciate, we review a lot of coolers here at eTeknix. As such, our prior results sheet was getting more than a little crowded. We have, therefore, applied a new system in which we have picked those coolers we consider most popular or most relevant to this design. Please note that we re-tested the Noctua NH-D15S as our base benchmark for cooling results.

Test system:

  • Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270
  • Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHS
  • Radeon R7 Passive GPU with 2GB VRAM
  • 16GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz (only swapped to 8GB in the unlikely event of RAM compatibility issues)
  • 512GB OCZ SSD
  • be quiet! Dark Power Pro 800W
  • Lian Li T80 Test Bench
  • All testing conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste

We’d like to say a big thank you to Gigabyte, Noctua, Crucial, Intel, OCZ, be quiet!, and Lian Li for providing us with the above testing equipment and their on-going support.

Testing Methodology

  • We always use Noctua Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste
  • Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes to calculate “load” results
  • Unigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate “gaming” results
  • The average temperature across all cores is taken
  • Fans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise stated
  • For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise stated
  • Ambient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise stated
  • Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled
  • Stock tests are performed using “out of the box” settings for the CPU
  • Overclocking tests are performed with the CPU set to 5 GHz and 1.345v
  • All coolers were tested under identical settings unless otherwise stated.
  • There is approximately a 1-degree Celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor
  • There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter
  • In all these graphs we may have a few “reference” results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes.

Software Used

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Mike Sanders

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Thermaltake Reveal New S250 TG ARGB Mid-Tower Case

Thermaltake has just revealed its latest addition to its already packed and awesome case collection,…

11 hours ago

No Man’s Sky Orbital Update Trailer Released

Hello Games continues its road to redemption with No Man's Sky, however, I'd say we're…

11 hours ago

Cooler Master Reveals TD500 MAX ATX Case

Cooler Master, one of the biggest names for PC cases and PC cooling has today…

11 hours ago

Ranch Simulator Hits 1 Million Copies Sold

Ranch Simulator, a game which I hadn't heard of until today, has just reached a…

1 day ago

MSI MAG A750GL PCIe 5.0 ATX 3.0 Power Supply Review

MSI has a great range of PSUs to their name these days, and while we've…

1 day ago

Larian CEO Wants to Make Two New Games After Baldur’s Gate 3

After the massive smash hit that was Baldur Gate 3 developers at Larian have announced…

1 day ago