The King of All Cosmos...

Testing is a core part of any PC case review which we do and we always look for a case to succeed on three fronts; ease of system installation, noise performance and heat performance. The ideal case should be cool, quiet and feature robotic arms which tighten all the screws automatically. Failing that though, we’ll settle for a case which doesn’t have any sharp, journalist-slicing edges.

We always use the same system in our heat tests to ensure a set of consistent results so, even though we had some unexplained software troubles with the test system recently and spent many hours fiddling with XP installations, you can rest assured that the results are still reliable.

Regular bit-tech readers will already be familiar with our test system, so can probably skip the specs below, but if you’re a bit-tech n00b then you can check out the information below on your way to the forums.

CPU: Intel Pentium XE 955 (dual-core, 3.46GHz)
Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT Ultimate
Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI Platinum
RAM: 2x 512MB Corsair XMS2-667
Hard Drive: 1x 250GB Western Digital WD2500 7200RPM
Heatsink: Asus Silent Square Pro

Installation of the system was incredibly easy. Although there were a few problems on the software side, it isn’t something which Cooler Master can be faulted for obviously and the actual hardware installation was made easier than ever thanks to the included toolbox which meant I didn’t have to wrestle with Richard for the one screwdriver in the office.


To monitor the heat performance of the case, we ran the same standard tests that we always do. First, we monitored the idle operating temperature of the case interior, the CPU and the graphics card. After that we bombarded the processor with information with a CPU/RAM blend test to try and push the temperature of the CPU as high as possible.

Lastly, we used a program called RTHDRIBL to push the graphics card to the limit using a real-time high dynamic range image-based lighting demo. The RTHDRIBL demo is free to download and quite pretty to watch, so if you feel like stressing your own GPU and posting your own temperatures in the forums then it’s a good place to start.

You can check out the scores for the Cooler Master Cosmos below in our ultra high-tech picture table which was made in something a hell of a lot more fancy and elite than Microsoft Excel. You’d better believe it.


So, the results are in for the Cosmos and we’ve had a good time to appreciate them and stew over what exactly they mean (we don’t have anything better to do with our bank holidays). While the case interior temperature is admirable enough, keeping everything at a more than adequate temperature, the graphics card test results were lot less impressive. The GPU temperature was a little high to start with, though not massively so and the GPU test itself pushed it even higher.

The odd thing is that the GPU temperatures alone aren’t anything to worry about and within range for what we’d expect. They simply stand out when placed next to the results for the case interior and CPU and seem to prove that the base fan, which was targeted at the GPU for the whole set of tests, doesn’t perform as well as might have been hoped.

Still, the results aren’t anything to get in a twist over and if you are the type of geek to worry about the temperatures that much then there are rubberised holes in the back of the case for watercooling support.