Revoltec Rhodium

Roasting the Rhodium

So, we’ve got our rig set up and the only thing left to do now is to actually test the case. To do this we run the system through a stress test which pushes the temperature up by bombarding both the CPU and RAM with complex tasks.

Before we do this we also measure the idle temperatures of the case by booting it up and leaving it running with no active tasks to see how hot the system runs when nothing is happened.

Finally, we run a GPU stress test on the system by running a real-time, high dynamic range image based lighting demo on the system using an application made freely available here.

We ran all of our tests in an ambient temperature of 24°C and you can check out the results in the table below.

There are two great things in life; the first is when a place comes together, the second is being proved right and, as you can see in the results below, we were proved right in our worries about heat performance.

While the Rhodium never gets dangerously hot and doesn’t quite reach meltdown temperature, it still gets a lot warmer than some of the competition and is a darn sight warmer than we’d like. The CPU in particular is very warm and, while some allowances must be made for the fact that we’re using a different heatsink to normal, the allowances can’t be that massive.


But, there is some good news in that, although the case didn’t do too well in the heat testing, it still held up remarkably in the noise performance category. In fact, the case was so quiet that we didn’t know it was turned on at first and if it hadn’t been for the LEDs lighting up the front of the case then we would have taken the side panels off to make sure we’d got everything connected correctly.

The noise performance is so good in fact, thanks to those hefty solid steel side panels, that nary a peep was able to escape from the case at all and the whole system was quieter than a dead church mouse whose vocal chords had been removed with a velvet knife.

Macabre metaphors aside, the case is just very, very quiet.

Conclusions

If the Revoltec Rhodium were a computer game then it would be a hardcore, old-fashioned RPG with a slick interface. We say this because, just like old-school RPGs where characters are unable to multitask, the Rhodium is all about trade-offs.

You see, the main trade-off here is to do with noise and build quality versus heat and weight. On the one hand the Rhodium proves itself to be a blissfully silent PC case with a solid construction and a decent look, but in order to achieve this it has to sacrifice heat performance and a low-weight by incorporating a solid steel construction.

So, just like in a computer game, the choice is left with you about whether the trade-off is worth it. Is silent and strong better than cool and light?


Personally, I’d much rather have a colder PC that got a bit noisy than a silent PC which got too hot because, when you get right down to the core of the matter, you can always just put headphones on to blot out the noise. Still, if you’re of a different persuasion then the Rhodium may well be the ideal case for you.

Next we come to the sticky issue of price. Price has always been an awkward spot for Revoltec, which is a German company and whose components are sometimes hard to come across in the UK and US. The Rhodium is no different and all the resellers we could find were based out of Germany, offering prices in Euros only. If you read German then, great, you can find the Rhodium for around €95.50.

If you, like us, don’t speak German then you may be out of luck for a while as the Rhodium isn’t massively available here yet. Still, although a direct currency conversion can’t truly be relied on, the indication is that the Rhodium will be available for around £65, which is good price for a case that performs so well in noise tests.

When it gets right down to the final conclusions though, we reckon the Rhodium is a massive improvement over the retch-worthy Zirconium, which I am still not allowed to place anywhere in sight of passer-bys. The Rhodium is a handsome, quiet PC chassis with a superior construction and the overall product is let down only in a few minor areas. It still waits to be seen if the value of the case will stand up as we hope it will, but if it does then the Rhodium could well be a decently nice, quiet case for a gamer on a budget – providing they can funnel some extra funds into cooling solutions.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

What do these scores mean?