CyberPowerPC ZEUS Thunder 2500 SE Review

Temperature & Sound Testing

CyberPowerPC went with the Asetek 570LX Liquid Cooling system CPU cooler and on Zeus Thunder 2500 SE, so we wanted to test it out to see how this CPU cooler performs at both idle and load.

We used CoreTemp 1.0 RC3 to monitor the CPU temperatures. At idle in a room that was 26.7C (80F) we found the CPU to be running at 22C (71.6F). The internal system temperature was reported at 33.5C, which is pretty darn good for everything inside this PC along with the 4.7GHz overclock.

We fired up Prime 95 64-bit to put the CPU at full load and found the CPU temperature jumped up to 45C and the system temperature was reported at 71.75C across all four cores. Intel Ivy Bridge processors run a little on the hotter side of things, so this was to be expected. The 240mm water cooler and dual fans were easily able to keep the system stable though.

We wanted to push the system to the max, so we fired up Furmark v1.10.1 and Prime 95 at the same time to really stress all the components. The temperature of the CPU bounced around 74.5C, but never got much hotter. The EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Superclocked video card got up to 80C in the system. These temperatures might sound hot to some, but are well under the maximum thermal limits for both the CPU and GPU.

Noise is something that people are really concerned with these days on computers. We placed our trusty sound meter a about a foot away from the case at an angle and recorded 50.4 dBA. This is by no means a silent case, heck we wouldn’t even consider it quiet. You have to remember the Zeus thunder SE has a total of 11 fans in it, so there is a lot of air being moved. With the system at full load the fan noise went up only slightly (1.4dB) as just the GPU fan and two fans on the Asetek watercooler increased in RPM.