NZXT Guardian 921 Computer Case

  After installing my hardware into the Guardian 921, I fired the case up for some general gaming and web surfing.   The case wasn’t too noisy but wasn’t quiet either. If your looking for a silent case you’re going to have to replace some fans. Mainly the plastic LED one on the case door. It’s not really all THAT loud to me but I’m not real picky when it comes to fan noise. I game with headphones on and don’t expect my gaming computers to be silent anyhow.  If this was meant to be a media PC I could understand.  Too some who enjoy the silence this thing is going to annoy you. Plan on getting better fans if you like a silent running rig.

Running the case through some benchies and games the case never heated up. Even my hotter than Hades XP3200+ stayed fairly cool at around 55C.  I know that sounds high but that is my normal high under a Prime95 load. So I know the cross flow cooling is working as well as it should. My Sapphire HD3850video card and Corsair XMS memory stayed cool under a load and never got to a point that temps were anything to worry about either. I still worry that with a higher end system with say two Nvidia 280’s in it there would build up some serious heat. More than this setup could handle maybe. I just know this from experience using this style of chassis many times.

The Temperature Monitoring and thermal sensors worked as well as can be expected too. I had each of them hooked up to the corresponding parts of my CPU, Memory and hard drive. Each one was pretty much a degree off or right on what Speedfan, real temp or the XMS Ram itself was telling me. Which isn’t unusual. Neither is really exact but each is close or off in their own ways. Take the CPU for example, you can take 3 different programs and get near the same temps depending on the how the TJ max is set. For temperature probes it’s how well you can seat the thermal probe and how close you can get it to the core. To do it right you really need to drill a small hole and place it under the nickel top near the core on the Intel Duel cores. With this old XP3200 I was able to lay it right next to the actual core.  The temps are so close that you really can’t fault one or the other. There are proponents of both scenarios. I just happen to think that software monitoring has come far enough to work for what most people will need.