The new Gigabyte Radeon 6850 arrived this afternoon and I set out to installing it into the test system. It does a fine job of filling the empty void in the bottom of the case. It’s fans will pull air from under the case to cool it and due to it being situated below the case’s front intake fan, it shouldn’t interfere with airflow over the motherboard.
I reran the same tests with the same settings I used pre-GPU and again took the temperature of the Core i5 2500K.
Prime95
Prim95 quickly heated up the CPU but even after the full 30 minutes, the CPU did not reach the temperatures that were recorded earlier. One core just broke the 70 degree mark while the other three hovered in the high 60’s. It would seem that the graphics card had no negative effects on the CPU temperatures.
3DMark06
3DMark06 was rerun with the same settings and shows that the vido card again had no negative effect on the CPU cooling. The results from RealTemp are almost exactly what were recored in the earlier test, showing only one degree cooler on both the high and low ends.
The only noticeable impact the video card had on this mini-ITX system was the 3DMark06 score; up from 4,173 to a much more satisfying 21,652.
Even with adding a large video card, I would have no issues with using the full range of Sandy Bridge processors in this board. That’s mostly due to the fact that any case I put the DH67CF in will be designed for gaming with above average airflow compared to standard mini-ITX cases. If your build calls for a silent PC or a fanless design, heed the warnings from Intel. The 95w processors will run much hotter in a case with minimal airflow.