Avance Technologies 8B04 ATX Mini Tower

The Test

As always, we used the procedures outlined in AnandTech's case testing methodology, which includes temperature and noise testing following reader suggestions and requests. We've created a whole page with all the details of the method.

The Avance 8B04 ships without any secondary case fans and this is the configuration that we tested it in.

The maximum sustained temperatures shown above are unfortunately a bit higher than we've found in most other cases. The power supply clearly does a poor job of removing the hot air from the system and there aren't enough vents to allow cool air in. Of course adding the optional case fans would significantly improve the removal of hot air from the case.

AnandTech has found that CPU temperature does not vary greatly from case to case as long as a quality heatsink/fan combination are used.

The 8B04 does a merely acceptable job of cooling a hot hard drive. At idle the temperature is already 100F, but does not rise too much more to about 115F.

With the ambient temperature near 75F, there's no reason the case temperatures should be this high. At idle, the 8B04 was nearly a full 10 degrees above the Palo Alto ATCX. Fortunately, the ambient temperature in the case didn't rise too much during our tests and leveled off fairly rapidly at 98.6F.

Average temperatures in the 8B04 were a few degrees cooler than the KS-299, but not nearly as cool as the current king, the Palo Alto ATCX. Of course, this was accomplished with no additional case fans installed and taking advantage of the two optional fans could significantly improve things. Additional case fans will still be hindered by the limited venting throughout the case. Although, you must remember that this is one of the smallest ATX cases on the market today.