Case Continued

The Ice Cube's case includes a molded handle on it which makes it easy to just pickup and go when you need to bring your PC somewhere. The handle is fairly sturdy, and even with a fully loaded PC, it should hold without any problems. Depending on the components, the average weight of a fully assembled Ice Cube should be no more than 15lbs.

Undoing a couple screws at the base of the handle, near the front of the PC, will allow you to easily access the interior. One thing to point out is to remember to tighten the screws before picking up the Ice Cube once you're done working on it.

I mentioned that the Ice Cube is a little easier than some other past SFFs I've looked at when it comes to accessing the case's interior. The issue I had with other SFFs was the case cover made up the sides and back, so I always found it a little tricky removing the cover when I needed to work on these PCs. The removable side windows, and the swing open top is a lot easier to work with in my opinion. Being a slightly larger SFF, there is plenty of space inside to work as well.

The internal hard drive and optical drive rack is removed by loosening a few screws and pulling it out. You can fit two 3 1/2" devices and a 5 1/4" device, though I'd hesitate about putting two hard drives as the heat generated may be too much for the Ice Cube's cooling to handle.

Cooling

The Ice Cube uses an efficient aluminum heatsink with an embedded copper core. This is packaged in a small white box, with some instructions, thermal paste, and Pentium 4 heatsink clips.

The quality of the heatsink is quite good, and although it isn't based on the traditional fin design, the spiral pattern does allow for plenty of fins, hence surface area, for the heat to dissipate. The base of the heatsink is flat, though it isn't polished like many manufacturers like to make them now.

There are three fans that handles the cooling chores for the Ice Cube. For the case, the PSU fan performs double duty by cooling the PSU and venting some of the warm air out of the case through the rear. There is a turbine fan located just beneath the PSU that handles the majority of the case cooling. It does a fair job of moving air, as you can feel it blowing out the back, and it runs relatively quiet.

The fan on the CPU heatsink is of the LED variety, and casts a blue glow throughout the case. The fan seems slightly more powerful than the stock Intel fan, but it is very noisy. The noise levels are about the same as Y.S. Tech's TMD fans, and the noise levels will be compounded should you decided to place this SFF on your desktop. Replacing the included heatsink and fan with Intel's stock solution cuts the sound levels immensely, and although it isn't silent, it is not as disruptive either.

Cooling Performance

To load up the system, we run Prime95 run for 20 minutes, with Folding @ Home running in the background. Ambient room temperature is maintained at ~23C/74F.

Going up against the Ice Cube's HSF will be the non-copper core Intel stock cooler. Nanotherm PCM+ is the thermal compound used for both coolers. Tests will be run with the case closed, with a hard drive and AGP video card installed.

Ice Cube Cooler	50°C
Intel Stock	53°C

There's a three degree Celsius between the two coolers. Temps are a little high, but the enclosure is quite small, and considering you're going to be limited to stock speeds of whatever CPU you choose (more on that later), you should be fine. One other reason the temperatures are at these levels is probably because the air is being drawn from directly beneath the hard drive.

The Power Supply

The Ice Cube IC-VL67 uses a temperature controlled Chyang Fun power supply. Being temperature controlled, the PSU will spin down the fan so they won't be running at full speed when there is minimal load. At 220W, this PSU is the beefiest we've seen in SFF PCs. It's not all about Wattage though, as the rails are also very important. The 12V rail is powered with 12A, whereas past SFFs we've seen were running on 10A.

The extra power is nice, and with the stock PSU, you have four connections (two floppy, two standard four-pin). In a likely scenario, one four pin will go into an optical drive, and one will go into the hard drive. The floppy connection goes into a floppy, and if you have a Radeon 9500/9700, you have a connection for that. However, high end FX owners, and 9800 owners are going to want to keep those molex splitters that came with your card handy as you'll have no more standard molex connections if you happen to fall into the above scenario.