Cubitek Mini ICE ITX Enclosure Review

[siopao1984]

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IntroductionCubitek is one of the newcomers to the scene, with the Taiwanese company leveraging on their decades of experience to create more ambitious enclosure designs for the upper echelons of the market. One of their newest product ranges is the brushed aluminium ICE series, featuring different models from mini-ITX to HPTX sizes. In this article we will attempt to build a watercooled mini-ITX HTPC, and see whether the Cubitek Mini ICE is any good.

ExternalsThe outer layers of the Mini ICE enclosure is made from extrusion aluminium, giving it structural strength and corrosion resistance. In front, a pair of Power/Reset buttons and Blue/Red LED activity indicators for Power/HDD can be found, together with a pre-installed 5.25-inch black bezel for the only external drive bay.
Four minature thumbscrews hold the side panels on each side.

Cubitek have also modeled their logo badge and kept it small in order not to spoil the minimalist look of their case.

On top, we can see a large 140mm fan exhaust cutout and a row of I/O ports including USB 3.0 (blue). We're pleased the designers have gold plated the audio ports to keep the audio signal fidelity high.

From the back, the Mini ICE isn't too different from the typical enthusiast ITX case, with two slots for that PCIe graphics card and a pair of holes for water cooling piping. Annoyingly, a standard ATX power supply is to be mounted on top of the motherboard, which makes the installation of tall HSF towers impossible despite the case being fairly wide.

Hi-Fi like anti-vibration feet can be found at the bottom of the case, which is a nice touch.

Read more: Cubitek Mini ICE ITX Enclosure Review by VR-Zone.com

[siopao1984]

Internals

The Mini ICE has quite a spacious interior, with four internal 3.5-inch drive bays and a 340mm clearance for powerful graphics cards. Cooling is handled by a top-mounted 140mm blue LED fan acting as an exhaust and an optional 140mm intake below. The PSU takes its air intake from the side panel so as not to deprive the other components of air flow.



Our motherboard in this review is the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe, pictured here with a low profile Cooler Master Gemini II M4 cooler. Because we wanted to do more ambitious overclocking, we employed a spare Thermaltake water cooling system that we had lying around in our office.





Hard drive installation was pretty straightforward, with rubberized rollers as screws and an included 2.5-inch adapter for a pair of SSDs, which is pretty commonplace in modern setups.





Plenty of space for hidden wiring at the back also.

[siopao1984]

Temperature Testing



In the ice caps melting Linpack test, we achieved a maximum recorded temperature of 82 degree celcius on a Sandy Bridge 2600K running at 5.0GHz with 1.46v Vcore. This has more to do with the dexterity of the dual 120mm radiator custom water cooling that we had though, and most low profile CPU air coolers won't be able to overclock without getting too hot.



As for the graphics card, our Radeon HD 7870 (175W TDP) got an excellent result of 58 degree celcius on the Furmark extreme burn-in run, with the GPU fans fixed at 50%.



Hard disk temperatures were decent as well, with the notoriously hot WD Velociraptor maxing out at 31.8 degree celcius.





Conclusion



Price: US$169.99

We found that the Cubitek Mini ICE was a pleasant case for system builders, with no blood spilled from sharp edges or screw thread issues. Build quality is top-notch. Asthetics wise its not a bad looker either, although we would have preferred the ATX PSU to be mounted at the bottom of the case like Bitfenix's latest offering, allowing for more ambitious CPU HSFs to be used.

[solaire]

Nindota sa results sa imong FurMark ug Coretemp bro.

[mr.nicejohn]

ubay2 na ang mga gagmay, daghan2 najd kapili.an...