Gadgetory

this is our new portable gaming land rig you know it's meant to be for land because it has straps on the top of it this is the Asus Helios ROG strikes case it's a case that Asus showed at Computex they originally worked with and when it goes the other way they worked within when originally to make the case and now issues has struck out on its own to find a factory to manufacture the strict Helios case that we're reviewing today it's a $280 case let's see how they did before that this video is brought to you by deep cool is captain 240 Pro closed-loop liquid cooler the new captain 240 pro comes with RGB illuminated fans and a pump easily synchronized to each other for color matching in your system the captain 240 pro radiator also uses a unique elastic pressure relief bladder in the water tank as a leak prevention mechanism it expands and contracts based upon liquid temperature to counteract a IO leak concerns the cooler is available now and you can learn more at the link in the description below so this is a pretty complicated case for really what it is it's expensive it's a high-end case it's got bits of aluminum a lot of glass it has a lot of steel and some plastic and it also has four fans it has some velcro and some straps on the top that are meant for transporting the case although really the best way to transport it at this point is probably for me to lower the table and then pick it up because frankly if you're lifting above your shoulders with this thing you're kind of screwed anyway so the case is heavy it's about 18 kilograms without anything in it as you add stuff to it it's heavier and that brings up the point of liquid cooling because something like this would be potentially better suited for maybe an open-loop setup although you'd have to pull a few parts out and shuffle some stuff around but it's an option it's not something we're testing today we're just you know for build quality for value competitive placement in the market thermally acoustically and looking at how issues did collectively to pull this thing together and see what points of improvement there might be and what points of what areas of the case they've excelled in and there are a couple of them so let's get into Patrick's build notes and then we'll go through the thermal section and the conclusions the case is packed with as many features as possible necessary or otherwise the most distinctive is the velcro strap placed over the top panel ostensibly an ergonomic and stylish handle as issues calls it for carrying the system to land parties it helps a little bit for hoisting the case up onto a table but this is not the enclosure to bring to a land party even for the rare person that attends more than one per decade most of the cases services glass and weighs 18 kilograms when empty at least the straps and the rails that they've loop them through our massive overkill tested up to 50 kilograms according to Asus so the most likely point of failure is the person lugging it around the strap is fastened with Velcro and can easily be removed before it gets dusty and gross and we'd recommend doing so since the case looks perfectly normal without it when we first received our sample the quotes multifunction cover over the cutouts to the side of the motherboard was knocked sideways in a way that looked like serious damage but fortunately for us it was just loose there was also a mysterious loose screw wedged into it which we later discovered was from the front panel so probably some factory control should be looked into for aces this is not typically something we make a big deal to point out but for a company that's just starting up with this there might be some inexperience coming into play here the cover slides backwards and forwards to allow room for EA TX motherboards and it contains a two and a half inch drive mount and built-in GPU brackets braces provided for the GPU are of limited usefulness since they mostly support the edge of the GPU closest to the motherboard which is already held up by the PCIe slot the rails for the supports are unpainted to allow the supports to slide up and down and stand out harshly against the black interior which is something we think could be improved GPA sag is a problem but it's one an elegant solution ASIS did not provide one here the cover functions normally otherwise but offers very little clearance for plugs on the edge of the motherboard and connecting the SATA cable for our boot drive was difficult the cooler master style rear cable cover is made of translucent plastic that's a deliberate decision to allow lighting from RGB SSDs to shine through while still obscuring cables but it removes even more of the purpose from a component that we already aren't wild about cable covers are good for hiding cables behind clear glass there are also okay for smashing down cable bundles so that they don't push the side of the path the panel itself off or make it bulge out a clear plastic cover is worse at both of those things than a metal one would be another case feature familiar to us from cooler masters H 500 cases is the power supply shroud which is a full length but can be removed in two sections this also came from the 1/2 X the front section slides back a little to loosen it and then it lifts out but ASIS missed a common trick here by not drilling a couple more holes and allowing users to screw the shroud down with it pushed backwards the rear section of the shroud has a plastic window for viewing fancy power supply cables and power supplies themselves iev asus rog power supplies of course underneath is a hard drive cage that can be moved forward or backwards for extra cable storage space as needed which is one of the better features the side panels are both removable with push buttons which we've praised on other cases in the past the panel swing out a few degrees and then support their own weight and can be lifted up and off it's a good system but it's strange that Asus chose not to use true hinges which is a go-to for cases trying to prove how premium they are like the SI 700 mm or the Evolve X each of the two side panels are tinted while the front panel is a clear glass with a tinted plastic film over the back it's possible that clear glass is necessary for the LED lighting which shines through the panel from one side it illuminates the painted ROG design which is cleverly biased towards the side closer to the LEDs the stock case fans don't have any lighting but it's probably to avoid clashing with the front panel illumination we didn't go too into depth with the lighting effect but they're smooth and even overall can be controlled the button on the front I Oh panel there's also a fan control button but we almost never use fan controllers for case benchmarks so we don't bother with them the front panel is intended to never be removed and the manual goes so far as to give instructions for cleaning the glass from the inside of the case but it wasn't really difficult to take it off in spite of this and also as a side note we saw this glass being made previously in our Houghton perd glass is made a factory tour taking out six screws and unplugging the RGB cable it releases the two pillars that hold the glass pane in place and that's all it takes the only ventilation for the front panel is the top and the bottom with 2.5 centimeters between the filter in the glass obviously that's not as good as it would have been with a mesh panel but maybe three intake fans is enough to brute force airflow check the thermal section coming up for that the filters are nice the bottom one ejects from the front of the case and the top one lifts straight up if the velcro carry strap is removed which it should be most of the time the number of cables in the case before anything that has even been installed is above average the front i/o panel includes four USB three plugs one USB type-c an LED and a fan control cable set as well as the normal audio plugs and the power and reset buttons the lighting and fans require SATA power and there are three fans at the front of the case with their own cables pre-installed velcro straps behind the motherboard make kale management fairly easy anyway although we had to cut through quite a few of the factory installed zip ties to get things arranged the way we wanted the front and top of the case speech a removable radiator mounts a feature we always like but the front mount became hard to work with when we installed the anoxia fans for our standardized fantast knocked to his fans you sleeved cables that are thicker than normal and he's in 140 millimeter fans that leaves almost no space along the side of the fan mount for cables to go through and makes it very difficult to slide the cage down into place however since asus has fully populated the front mounts with three 148 millimeter what 1400 RPM fans of its own most users will probably never replace that GPU installation this made slightly more complicated by the vertical GPU mount which is in set and obstructs the screws for the expansion slot covers two slot covers are held down with thumb screws and the rest with a normal case screws since there's not enough room between them and the vertical mount this actually is a problem so if you put one of the thumbscrews and one of the lower expansion slots it will collide with the vertical GPM out sort of a really odd oversight to make to install a GPU horizontally the vertical mount needs to be removed completely and then replaced afterwards the inconvenience is mostly made up for with a replacement vertical mount included in the accessory kit which is adjustable in height for different CPU and GPU cooler sizes and mounts the GPU much closer to the motherboard allowing significantly better cooling this is a good thing unfortunately there isn't a riser cable included even at this price which is again at odds with the amount of bells and whistles asus has already packed in elsewhere we did our usual thermal testing and the Helios but also a couple of extra tests like one without the front panel and one with the GPU mounted in the vertical slot but we use the slot closest to the motherboard which is a substantial difference than what you would see if you mounted it against the glass there are two options in this case thermals we'll start with just the ACS Helios on the charts then we'll move on to comparative benchmarks against other cases CV temperature average fifty four point six degrees over ambient on the stock torture test but dropped to forty two point one degrees with the front panel removed more front intake fans means a more dramatic difference when there's glass in front of them and it's removed and that's an extreme drop in temperature there's not a great way to improve on the stock temperatures other than liquid cooling unless you count removing the glass which much wouldn't Asus includes at four 140 millimeter 1,400 rpm fans leaving that little room for improvement with just fan changes that's both good and bad the good is that Asus sets you up with one of the best fan configurations out of the box but the bad news is that it could be accompanied with better ventilation the glass panel can stay too vented chamfered edges would also improve it to some degree the vertical GPU test was slightly worse at fifty-six point four degrees over ambient but that's a promising sign since we sometimes see CPU temperature improve when a vertically mounted GPU is really suffocated more on this momentarily comparatively an average CPU temperature of 54 point six degrees over ambient puts the Helios alongside the view 71 and the stock much of IC it's not a bad place to be in general but remember that the match if I see is way cheaper and it doesn't really come with any fans like not any meaningful amount if you add fans it gets a lot better so it's ridiculous really for a case with this many fans to be positioned here and even more ridiculous for the price the 42-degree delta t / ambient results with no front panel or filter is lower than anything else on the chart including the raven 0-2 and this case configuration with a well-made mesh panel would still be very competitive in the 50 degrees Celsius range thanks to all the fans available Asus could have done a lot better here and they don't have to go full mesh either but there are other solutions to improve airflow like a more clever implementation of the glass rather than just slapping a flat sheet of it in front of the fans the FIR mark portion of the GPU tasks raised GPU temperature on average to 49 degrees Celsius over ambient when stock looking at just the Helios right now for GPU thermals and this showed a less dramatic improvement at 42 point 2 degrees Celsius over ambient with no front panel installed the vertical GPU results at fifty one point two degrees delta T over ambient wasn't much worse than stock since we mounted the GPU as close to the motherboard as physically possible using the slot close to the glass would have abysmal results as it always does so we would strongly recommend if going vertical for an air cooled card use it near the motherboard if you use vertical mounting for an open-loop card it really doesn't matter put it wherever you want comparatively the stock GPU temperature is more competitive than the CPU wise since cases tend to fall down on GPU cool it the wall of air pushed by the three intake fans puts the GPU result between the PMO one and the Rosewill : in both cases that we've recommended on multiple occasions vertical GPU mounting with an air-cooled card isn't out of the question either which is rarely true just make sure it's close to the board the GPU temperature average during 3d mark firestrike extreme test was less than one degree higher than the torture test averaging forty nine point two eight degrees there's often an increase of a couple of degrees between the two tests so the Helios is even more competitive here placed between the cooler master age five mash and the rv0 - again the sheer number of fans contributes more than anything to the performance but we do have to give credit where it's due Asus is doing much better with the GPU thermals than the CPU thermals kind of a backhanded compliment but it is actually doing decently I miss 3dmark fire strike test so that's that's good but under CP testing average the CPU thousands of temperature over ambience of 39.2 degrees on the same level as the disappointing PMO - in our comparative chart there's a good front to back airflow pattern with the stock fans but there just isn't enough cool air coming in and through the CPU cooler as demonstrated with the huge temperature drop when the front panel was removed in that earlier test we've had cases do much worse but the Helios should be better than that GPU temperature in the blender render average twenty four point eight degrees Celsius over ambiens which again compares much more favorably to the other results it's tied with the RV zero two and almost with the RL zero six two of the overall best cooled cases we've tested the Helios holds its own in the category of GPU thermals by throwing fans at it which is by extension throwing money at it moving on to noise the Helios running at max case fan speed as it was in the baseline torture test measured 45 DBA or louder than any other stock configuration for the most part that we've tested other than the PM I want there are a lot of big fans moving air very fast and of course we have the system noise as well and so although the glass panel restricts air it isn't sealed in the restrict nodes as a reminder alternatively going with a more open panel design or just better airflow in general like a side intake for example as a means to still allow a flat front panel you would be able to drive down the noise levels by reducing the fan speed just because more air gets through and they don't have to fight as hard for the air that they get to be really straightforward with this case then the rog helios is a case for customers who are strongly invested in the asus rog product law and that's fine that is a market asus is big enough to create one like that so it's really meant to go with other rog stuff it's meant for people who buy basically every Asus component out there and go with or a sink for everything or something along those lines and it's it's it's hard to say how well a case like this will sell because the pricing is high and then the market is ROG fans there are a lot of those out there and a lot of them spend a lot of money on high-end motherboards we use them for our overclocking benchmarks and videos so we know the price of them so it's good in stock they're all performance in GPU thermals it actually is genuinely pretty competitive in GPU thermal is now competitive means two different things there's value competitive which it isn't this isn't a value case you don't buy it for value just like you don't buy the C 700m repiy for value and then there's there's just straight-out objectively competitive ignoring the price and it is for GPU thermals for a CPU thermals it's kind of rough this case could do a lot better it's a matter of just obstructed ventilation as it often is the space in between the glass panel and the front panel of the case to our recollection is better than we saw a Computex although we didn't measure it with a ruler at Computex so that's good if true and either way it's it's certainly better than we've seen for other cases with a glass front panel but there are things that could be improved here like finding some way to maybe I don't know you could chamfer the edges a bit allow some extra air to go in there for example without killing the glass as soon as someone figures out how to cut holes in glass that'll be great for her for case manufacturing but it's just it's too expensive it's not really happening anytime soon for ventilation purposes better off with mesh so side intakes another great way of doing this a bottom intake another great way of doing this and still having your glass front that you want to have so there are things that could be done but it's really not the worst and that is a compliment because motherboard manufacturers have a history of making literally the worst cases on the market so asus in the very least good job at breaking that trend it is not the worst on the market so seriously that's that is the motherboard manufacturers have done cases poorly for long enough now that every time we hear about one it's just like oh god no what do they do and stop it so this is an improvement over that it's still 280 dollars there are still better options thermally there's still more refined options in terms of just build quality and features issues kind of went the route you might expect a budding case manufacturer to go and just sort of threw everything at it got really excited about all the accessory options and bundled them all in there even though several of them really just are pointless or don't serve enough of a benefit to justify the cost of the addition so as patrick said this does tick as many boxes as possible it takes the GPU support box for vertical it takes the fan control box LED control cable cover carry handle etc it's beyond what most people would really spend on a case and even generously assuming someone would spend $20 on each of these fans you're still left with like a $200 enclosure alone just the box so the view 71 TG is distinctively RGB heavy and or can be the RGB version and tempered glass adorned so that's a competitive option if you would like to look around the cooler master H 500 m is another expensive high-end RGB focused option if you would like to look at that one and there are plenty others we've reviewed the C 700 series perhaps as well now any of these you would need help carry into a LAN party it's not the most expensive thing or the most the heaviest thing in the world when it's built it is rather unwieldy though and like that's not an easy thing what sits on a table to lift up so that's so bad once I have to figure out how to transfer to them okay so there's how the straps work the points I suppose the maybe rhetorical one is that this is either good for deadlifting or land parties if you really wanted to pee Oh who wants to go through this to show your friends how much you lift so anyway it's really not terrible and we'll probably leave that there so thank you for watching just like here is Nexus dotnet if you'd like to pick up something like one of our mod mats or you can go to patreon.com/scishow and access to grab a shirt like this one we should we should sell branded inhalers after that subscribe for more I'll see you all next time