Thermal Performance
For thermal testing, I used a Ryzen 2700x running at 4.175GHz and 1.35V with a Corsair H100i Pro 240mm AIO and an MSI Gaming X 1080TI with a +65 offset on the core and +525 on the memory. I ran ADIA64 for 10 minutes for the CPU and the superposition benchmark for 10 minutes to test the GPU.
As you can see from the pictures above temperatures were very close whether the front panel was on or off so it seems like Antec knew what they were doing when the cut out breathing holes in the front panel. Temps did go up slightly when I put the front panel on but I’ve seen way worse thermal bottlenecks on other looks based cases.
So far thermals look good but let’s see how well it handles a heavily overclocked GPU.
While GPU thermals performed slightly worse rising about 7 degrees between having the front on and the front off but temps still were fairly impressive since my card maintained nearly 2000MHz during the test while most other cases that I’ve used my card drops closer to 1900MHz within a few minutes of testing at the same overclock.
Overall I’m fairly pleased with the thermal performance, the thermal bottleneck from the front panel wasn’t nearly as bad as expected considering the looks based front panel, while GPU temps did go up slightly when I put the front panel on it still stayed within an impressive range considering the speeds my card was running at.
I rate the thermal performance 4/5. Thermals were really good considering the looks focused front panel but there were slight raises in temperatures between having the front on and off so it isn’t perfect.
Sound Performance
In the recording above I recorded the case from approximately 1 foot away with all fans running at 100% fan speed
The DF500 is pretty good at managing noise, I was running 7 120mm fans and my GPU fans at 100% and the sound was recorded about 10-20db above the ambient sound in my room. I was easily able to drown out any noise coming from this case by using some headphones and considering most people don’t run all of their fans at 100% speed I highly doubt you’d ever have an issue with system noise bothering you during games or general use.
I rate the sound performance 5/5. I really have no complaints here. You can easily drown out any system noise by using some headphones or lowering your fans RPM.
Miscellaneous Features
The DF500 case has some support for custom water cooling by providing a pump and reservoir mounting on the inside of the case, this isn’t something I was able to test directly so I’m unsure about the exact support but I’ve seen other builds in this case with custom loops and there seems to be dedicated mounting for pumps and reservoirs and plenty of room between the GPU and front radiator to support mounting them.
This is nice because most budget oriented cases don’t worry about custom water cooling support so it’s a nice surprise from Antec.
Now onto the conclusion and final score!
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