Gadgetory

the Platinum xdf series of power supplies from enter Mac's featured patented dust free rotation fan technology and a DF switch for users to activate DFR anytime during operation units range up to 1200 watts with an 80 plus platinum rating while maintaining a compact length of just 160 millimeters and new slave cables give your build an extra clean look right out of the box click the link in the description below to learn more what's going on guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well today I'm taking a look at yet another brand new case this time it's from the folks over at BitFenix this is their BitFenix and so you guys might remember this case I actually checked it out at Computex earlier this year it was proposed as an $80.00 case it is now $89 RP that's the official statement and it's a it's it's quite packing a lot of aesthetic features for a sub $100 chassis for example you can see we've got RAF the Betts nice addressable RGB on that front panel additionally we've got an RGB fan that's included at the back of the case 120 millimetres both of these elements can be wired up to the built-in RGB hub / controller that's actually located behind the motherboard trade from there you can pipe it into a 50/50 header on your motherboard if it's supported and this may be good or bad depending on if you have an asus or a sync supported motherboard because that's currently the only vendor that BitFenix has worked with on this case so unless you have an asus or a sync supported motherboard you won't be able to software control the RGB elements in this chassis however don't fear if you don't have one of those boards you can still actually control all the lighting from the built-in front panel button here so it cycles through a couple different colors I know we're just starting right off with with RGB stuff what a world we live in 2017 yeah get it so there's a ton of different different features and/or different effects I should say for these elements and of course you could even attach your own LED strip if you wanted to get super fancy with it and illuminate the inside even further additionally you get tempered glass you have a tempered glass side panel here with four typical thumb screws that we're used to seeing and and this is these are both sort of premium features a lot of people can't really get a case with both addressable RGB and a tempered glass side panel under a hundred bucks and somehow BitFenix has managed do this the question is what kind of shortcuts have they taken in order to fit all of this in an $89 chassis so that's kind of what we're gonna figure out today if if this is still a well balanced enough chassis for your particular needs but starting off with the front of the case as I mentioned before there's of course RGB elements you also might notice a dearth of ventilation I was trying to look for where are the front fans or the single front included fan where is it actually in taking air from there's zero ventilation at the front at the top on the sides meaning really you have one small opening I guess it's a fairly large opening at the bottom but still if you have three fans you can actually have three 120 millimeter fans here at the front it seems like they're only able to pull air from the very bottom of the case which we're actually gonna do some thermal testing later on in this video so stay tuned for that we'll see if it's actually being starved or choked in any way I should also mention that at the front you do get support for up to a three hundred and sixty millimeter radiator so a iosr welcome you can even try your hand at some custom water cooling in here it might be a little tight I did see them pull it off at Computex although it did look pretty claustrophobic in there but 360s at the front and you've also got a pretty nice I Oh selection here at the front panel mic and headphone jacks your power and reset and that led changing button as well as two USB 3.0 ports at the top you get what looks to be another radiator mount but unfortunately it's just mounts for two 120 millimeter fans I don't think you'd actually have enough clearance for your motherboard vrm and memory etc if you were to mount a radiator there the case is just a little too narrow for that fortunately they do throw in this handy-dandy magnetic dust filter which is of course removable they've also included a non mesh version of this if you wanted to just cut it off for ultimate silence or you know improved acoustics or something like that however you would be sacrificing a bit of ventilation on the back of the case you get like I said that 120 millimeter RGB fan a cutout for your motherboard IO and seven expansion slots as well as just a regular power supply mount you would basically mount the power supply from behind them or tray as opposed to from the actual back of the case which is totally fine by me you also get a power supply dusk filter that sort of pulls out from the side of the case same side as the tempered glass side panel which is kind of interesting it comes out fairly easily and sliding it back in is a little bit more tricky it's easy to get snagged but you know you got to wiggle it a little bit there's probably takes a little bit of practice should also mention that there are two removable dust filters at the front of the case for your 120 millimeter fans and those are sort of the same deal they come out pretty easily but they can be a little bit janky going in I've kind of gotten used to them but first few tries were a little tricky but that seems to be pretty cool and all in order the left side panel is pretty basic it's just got these two thumb screws that are not captive unfortunately but they seem to do the job just fine on that note I think we can probably take a look at the inside of the case I'm gonna go ahead and get this side panel off so we can check out the internal layout so here we are taking a look at the inside of the N so now at that side panel removed first thing I want to point out is for the front mounted radiator you do have a certain amount of clearance available to you there is a cutout with this power supply shroud first off Bravo for power supply shroud in an $89 case so there's a small cutout here at the front which gives you I would say about three inches of clearance for your radiator and and in fans on one side of that radiator unfortunately it does not look like there's any room on the opposite side of this mounting plate for a push-pull configuration so you want to bear that in mind especially with the limited airflow that you're getting from the bottom of the case putting more fans cramming more fans underneath this front panel would probably restrict your airflow even further additionally the fan here at the front doesn't have a cable that's long enough to reach behind the motherboard tray and actually plug into one of the fan headers on my motherboard which is why I had to route it so nastily on this side of the case it's quite an eyesore it would have been no problem had I had a fan header on this motherboard that was somewhere on the right side it would have been a little bit closer and it would have been able to go behind that motherboard tray but unfortunately that wasn't the case now if you have a premium other board with you know five to eight fan headers on it then you probably have a fan header somewhere on here where the cable could reach theoretically and and be hidden overall but most people who are buying an $89 case are going to be buying something like this you know whatever this is prime be 350 plus motherboard that only has a few headers on it so it's kind of a shame that this cable coming from this fan is so short but the one on the back is just fine of course additionally we've got rubber grommets two of them right here right by the ATX 24 pin and one at the bottom near the power supply shroud they actually look really nice and they feel nice and stuff but they're also kind of loose so when you're passing larger cables through them it's really easy for them to come out or to be shaken loose and you kind of have to fit them back in which is a bit of an annoyance additionally there's a large cutout for cables right here towards the front of the case it's very large I would have liked to see that with a grommet as well but what can you do and there's also a really small cable cutout at the top left corner of the case that you can hardly see actually it's kind of tricky to pass cables through there and it's really small I was able to fit my 8 pin EPS connector through there just fine though and then we've also got two smaller cutouts at the bottom of the case right on the power supply shroud where you can pass your smaller cables like your USB 3 and your front panel connectors additionally I do appreciate just how long of a graphics card you can fit in here pretty much any GPU will do just fine I wouldn't recommend a crossfire or SLI set up in here simply because the power supply shroud has zero ventilation and if you were to slot it in a second card you might be a bit starved for airflow unless you maybe mounted another fan at the bottom here to sort of help with heat dissipation and things like that also I do appreciate the pre-installed standoffs just to make the build process go that much quicker but on that note let's go ahead and flip this guy around and see what's on the other side all right so taking a look at our business end of the BitFenix and so first off I noticed a large CPU cooler cut out which is always handy to have we've also got plenty of tie down points no shortage of that so cable management in this case despite what you see here in the brief three minutes that I took to just quickly slam the side panel on cable management in this case is actually pretty good for an $89 case I mean obviously you get a power supply shroud so you can stash all of your excess cables under there and again with all the tie-down points and stuff as well as about just under an inch of gap between the the motherboard tray and the side panel it's actually quite easy to wire things up even if you had extensions or something like that should be no problem over here you actually get a little plate a removable plate for an SSD or any two and a half inch drive really little thumb screw which I do not believe is captive nope just comes off like that you simply mount the SSD to the tray and then you mount it back on to the motherboard tray and it's a pretty tried-and-true solution no complaints there you also have two two and a half inch mounts right here these are these are more just like holes that are cut in to the actual motherboard tray and the issue that I have with this is that if you put them if you if you mount the drive with the connectors facing the front of the case there's absolutely no room to plug in any of the cables however if you flip it around then all the SATA cables say the data and power cables are pretty much encroaching on either of these rubber grommets which doesn't seem like a great design choice so my two cents personally additionally we've got plenty of room for a power supply I believe this one is the 650 watt g2 from EVGA I think it's a hundred and sixty-five millimeters but I wouldn't recommend anything longer than that because then you start to run into clearance issues with the drive cage which does have two plastic trays I think you can fit a three and a half inch or two and a half inch drive on either of those they're fairly cheap I mean you got a cut corner somewhere and these are made of full plastic they look like they could probably break easily if mishandled but we haven't run into any issues so far and then additionally you've just got some more empty space here at the front again if you wanted to mount another fan at the bottom or if you had an extended radiator over here right smack in the middle of our motherboard tre kind of hard to see with all these cables in the way is our RGB hub it's already wired up to connect all the RGB elements in our case it's a small and discreet doesn't take up much room and it's SATA powered thank God thank God for an $89 case we're not seeing molex anymore definitely staying with the times here happy to see that but that's pretty much the back of the case now let's talk about acoustics and thermals so as I mentioned to you guys earlier I was a bit concerned about the ventilation and the sort of airflow at the front of this case in particular because the only opening we have is at the bottom and it seems to be really far away from the only fan that we have here at the front so I kind of copied what gamers Nexus did with the H 500 P from coolermaster where they actually did some a B comparison testing for thermals with and without the front side panel so first off we've got some specs here that I need to read off you've got a risin 5 1500 X being cooled by a wraith spire stealth and that is not overclocked completely stock and we've got an R X 480 that's an asus strix model also running stock everything here is air-cooled of course and then I fired up Unigine Heaven 4.0 for about 15 minutes with and without the the front panel installed and what we found was on our CPU we actually dropped about 4 degrees Celsius going from 68 to 64 C which isn't a huge drop we saw a bigger Delta with our GPU going from 76 to 69 degrees Celsius so a 7 degree difference there which is quite a bit it's noticeable especially if you're you know looking at something like GPU boost a 7 degree difference is potentially going to keep your GPU from maybe overclocking itself another 10 20 megahertz for example and that can potentially lead to a couple frames loss during your gameplay however the results here were not nearly as bad as I anticipated so that's actually a great sign however that also goes to show that if you were planning to put a high high wattage consumption CPU in here and you were intending to overclock it aggressively it might not be the wisest idea inside of this particular chassis unless maybe you're slapping on a heavy AO and you're doing some custom fan tuning too sure that everything's in proper thermal order so some of things up here I honestly had a pretty nice time building inside of this case I didn't run into any major snags if anything there were a couple minor annoyances that I wish could be changed but for 89 bucks pleasantly surprised with the building procedure in the end so here however there were a couple areas of the case that I feel could be improved in the quality department some of the steel feels really thin the drive trays are really plasticky and cheesy just certain things that you wouldn't ever find in a case over $100 and the fact of the matter is you can find $89 cases that are higher quality than this one hands-down build quality just construction overall look and feel however where this case gets it right is that you're getting tempered glass on your side panel as well as addressable RGB lighting at the front of your case and an RGB fan included these are typically premium features that most builders have to pay over $100 for to even scratch the surface of and here it is for well under that price point so it's really gonna boil down to what kind of builder you are are you interested in things like RGB and tempered glass or would you prefer a bit higher quality and maybe a bit smoother of a building experience guys let me know what your comments are and opinions are of this case down below and feel free to toss me a like on the video if you enjoyed it have a good one I'll see you all in the next one