Zotac CI321Nano Barebones System Review

Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures

Noise

Due to the system being completely passively cooled, there was literally no audible indication that the system was running. There was absolutely nothing to detect louder than the ambiance of a silent room, which was a great thing to behold.

Power Consumption

To test power consumption, we measure the total system power draw during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Hyper Pi to loop together – we take the power measurements from the Belkin AC power meter 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point.

Temperatures

To test thermal performance we measure average CPU and GPU core temperatures during idle and load scenarios. For idle we allow the system to sit at the Windows desktop, for load we let Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Hyper Pi to loop together – we take the temperature measurements from within CPUID HWMonitor 5 minutes into both of these scenarios at the same point. For load, we take the average of the maximum temperatures, for idle we take the average of the minimum temperatures.