For the purpose of this review I will be testing the Zaward Gyre with the following system.

Fitting the Gyre after running the stock cooling tests was relatively straightforward and took approx 10 minutes, as I didn’t need to remove the motherboard. What took a bit longer was plugging in the 12v ATX power cable as I had to re route it because the Gyre is so big, with hindsight I would have plugged this in first, great thing 20/20 hindsight.

The Zaward case fans are of my own choosing ;o).

Once the Gyre was in place all that remained was to refit the shroud and fan and plug the fan in, again this was pretty straightforward but plugging the fan in was a little fiddly due to the header being located almost under the Gyre.

Once the Gyre and fan were in place I fired the pc up and I have to say the fan is very quiet even at full speed. After an hour or so I set about testing the system with the Gyre.

To test the Zaward Gyre I will run the above system at idle and full load (running Ortho’s prime) for approx an hour to let the temperatures settle with the stock CPU cooler fitted then rerun the tests with the Zaward Gyre cooler fitted. All temperature readings will be taken using Everest Ultimate edition and I will take an average of the four cores. The case IS a multimedia case and as such has limited system cooling to keep noise to a minimum.

Results are as follows.

Room temp whilst testing was 25c.

Temp results are the delta type, which we believe is a much more accurate way of provide results as it takes the different room temps into account… for more info on delta temps read here.

After a short time at 100% load with stock cooling the PWMIC reading hit 100c so I stopped the test, as I didn’t want to destroy my motherboard. I don’t know what the safe limit is for the PWMIC’s but 100c is starting to get VERY worrying and is the warning limit of my motherboard so I ended the test prematurely, obviously the stock cooling and case airflow doesn’t provide enough, if any, extra cooling to the PWMIC’s.

The airflow over the motherboard when using the Gyre is obviously significantly better as the PWMIC’s never seemed to go much above mid 80’s (65 if you take away room temp at time of testing) so that down draught through the Gyre is definitely helping to keep the chipset cooled.

Overall the Gyre has proved to cool things down significantly, the CPU is considerably cooler at idle to the tune of 5c and the result for fully loaded is even better at some 11c cooler. It is safe to say the Gyre is definitely what my Phenom was begging for.

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