Hard Drive Cooling System - Conclusion page 2
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| Company: Antec Inc.
Product: HD Cooling System
Price: $29.95
Availability: Now
Written by: Mack "SPeeD" Littleton
Reviewed: September, 2002 |
Installation Continued: And of course. Here is a shot of the unit in it's home environment.
Being as it is an Antec product, it matches the beige Antec case color almost exactly. Unlike the digital monitor you see below it. Also, notice the current temp of °39C. The readout flips back and forth between the 2 probe temperatures every 5 seconds. Ok, now that we have most of the specifics out of the way, lets jump to the actual performance of the unit.
Benchmarks: As you all know, Antec (Chieftech, Chenming, etc) cases have excellent stock air flow possibilities. Even this little workstation case has slots for 2 80mm fans in the front, with 1 80mm slot in the back to exhaust hot air from around the CPU and vid card area. Lets first look at temperatures of the HD mounted in the front cage with no type of intake cooling whatsoever.
Ok, above is basically temps of the HD sitting in it's cage with no cooling at both Idle and Load temperatures. The numbers are a good indication of what type of temperatures you can expect with no HD cooling whatsoever. Now lets see how it looks in the Antec HD Cooling System.
OK, the numbers don't lie. The Antec HD Cooling System shows a slight improvement over no HD cooling with a load on the HD. However, at idle it appears that the unit is simply keeping the heat in on the HD. I'm not sure if it's worth the $30 for this small drop in temperatures, but lets not forget, this is also a monitoring device as well.
Finally, lets see the temperature of the HD when the 80mm fan is running in the HD cage. Not familiar with the Antec case cooling system? Take a look.
Ok, not complicated or intricate , yet VERY effective. This is one of the many things that makes the Antec case design one of the best sellers world wide. I could go on, but not in this article. Now this fan is nothing special, just your standard $4.00 80mm fan I got from some obscure website that had the great prices on case fans. The fan runs around 2500RPM with a very average 33cfm. Lets see the numbers.
Again, the numbers don't lie. Obviously the standard Antec case/hd cooling solution is shinning very brightly here. Bottom line is that the Antec HD Cooling System is not doing nearly as stellar of a job at cooling the HD as I had both hoped and suspected. The HD Cooling System is effectively acting as a heat "blanket" as opposed dissipating heat. End result? Not good.
Conclusion: Well, there are some products that are great for your PC, unfortunately, this is not one of them. This product is intended to monitor and cool your HD and it just doesn't do this very well. I think Antec set out to introduce a revolutionary product for HD cooling, but in the end, fell short of accomplishing that goal. Certainly not for lack of quality, for Antec is well known throughout the hardware community for producing high quality products at a reasonable price. But the execution of this device just doesn't deliver and I simply can not, and would not recommend it for use in anyone's PC.
Highs:
Lows:
Does not cool your HD
A bit pricey for it's performance
Molex connector is a bit short
Cannot change "flipping" of the 2 thermal probe temps
There you have it. We'd like to thank Antec Inc. for sending us this product for review. You win some, and you lose some.
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