Gadgetory

we reviewed a lot of cases this year and have tested more than 100 configurations across our benchmark suite we've seen some brilliant cases that have been marred by needless grasps at buzzwords excellently designed enclosures that no one talks about and poorly designed cases that everyone talks about cases as a whole have gone through a lot of transformations this year which would seem somewhat surprising given that you'd think there are really only so many ways to make a box today we're giving out awards for the best cases in categories of thermals silence design overall quality and more before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor hot liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below so this is basically an end of your awards show for cases we have a few of these coming up and for this we are focusing strictly and entirely on cases we've reviewed in the last year so before anyone's like but where's my case it's because we didn't review it probably and we have all the individual reviews on the site and on the channel for these cases if you are interested we'll have links to the cases in the description below if you want any of them and then we'll have a link to the review for each one of those the first award is for best out-of-the-box thermals contrary to the name of the award title we don't actually just point an IR gun at the case when it has literally just come out of the box No this award is for best thermal performance in a stock configuration meaning no added fans or removed panels we reviewed the silverstone redlined 0-6 pro back in May and for the past six months now the RL 0-6 Pro has remained fully uncontested in its top position on the charts the case is being kept around for a standard in our benchmark suite as its thermal performance is second to none in its stock state with what we've tested this year this performance is a combination of silver stones at triple fan intake thin metal mesh front panel and mid tower layout the mid tower layout keeps everything close to the fans and exhaust but the front mesh is where the case pulls ahead other mesh panels and case with mesh have tried and failed to outmatch the are l06 this year and that's largely because the red line uses a mesh that's not overly dense in its creation the red lines euro-6 maintained a 47.8 degree cpu temperature and our CV torture test planting it firmly ahead of everything else the next closest case stock was the Corsair 570 X so honorable mentioned there with its three 1500 rpm fans the silverstone our l06 pro only gets beaten when we start adding $20 fans to the metro phi which of course would also be outdone by the red line if we replace its fans with $20 units GPU temperatures have remained fully chart-topping in our torture tests as well with a forty seven point one degree readout in the torture workload the next closest was the thermal take view 71 at forty eight point seven the case offers no frills and focuses entirely on air flow it's also $70 and it's noise levels are decidedly unimpressive but not insultingly loud either honorable mentions go to the throne will take view 71 for GPU thermals when it's horizontally mounted and that's a case that surprised us and it's neural performance overall another honorable mention goes to the corsair 570 extra stock cpu thermals but the 5 so DX really just achieves it by brute force with a lot of high-speed fans in the front panel in contrast to best thermals we now look for best silence the be quiet pure bass 600 coming from an aptly named company has maintained a set of high ranking and top ranking results for the silence benchmarks at low rpms which would primarily be used for idle or low load operation the pure bass 600 measured at 29 DBA for full system noise the top result our noise floor is about 26 DBA so this is only barely audible over room ambient at these rpms of course thermal performance isn't great so you might flip the switch to go up to max RPMs for gain performance during these higher load scenarios the pure bass 600 maintains 8 33.7 DBA knows level and the minimum fan RPMs give us absolute silence for the most part which allow us better noise levels during idle operation we'll give an honorable mention to the BitFenix Shogun at 1000 rpm this case is high polarizing in its design but as overall sturdy construction quality with moderate performance it's not for everyone but worth considering the next award is for best overall design this award it looks strictly at the construction quality layout and design of the case and its panels this award goes to the NZXT H 700 I the age 700 I took a bit of a beating for it's coupled smart device which raised price unnecessarily wasn't fully intuitive and barely worked and that can easily overshadow the case itself we asked in our review for an H 700 D D for dumb because the case is brilliant in all of its aspects except for the smart device panel construction quality is top class avoiding plastics nearly everywhere and the panels are both easily removed and securely fastened and the XTS designer made artistic use of ventilation holes to pattern the entire case top to bottom inside out with a metal ventilation mesh in the top panel front panel and atop the power supply shroud this is both functional and good-looking cable management makes use of mounted routing channels making rivers of cables along the backside of the case and the eject button on the rear panel makes for the most easily secured and removed side panel that we've worked with this year and the XE is a build quality and ease of installation features our top class with the H 700 I and although the case is marred by its smart device which worsens the value proposition it is otherwise well designed if NZXT makes a dumb version of the H 700 I in the 120 to 150 dollar price range it'd be a go-to choice for sure for now we give the chassis itself the best overall design award for 2017 our next award is for best full Tower and focuses on looking at our reviewed list of cases for the overall feature set and performance that you'd want in a large case this one goes to the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 enclosure with a very close honourable mention to the likes of the view 71 we first reviewed the be quiet dark based pro 900 this year with the white edition of the case the enclosure has a fully invertible motherboard layout but does it in a way that doesn't ruin the rest of the cases quality the enclosure uses thick paneling and glass to trap lower-frequency hums which can only reasonably be contained with that thicker paneling and a larger chassis it secondarily uses foam damping for higher frequency noises like coil whine and the dark bass pro 900 has a few unnecessary frills to it like the Chi charter that we don't really find necessary or that useful but its construction quality takes the win for full tower categories a mix of reasonable airflow and lower noise outputs although not chart-topping for either aids the dark bass pro 900 in its winning for this category again the view 71 isn't really as full of a full tower has the DVP 900 but it's worth looking at as is the c 700 p which is just a very specific case depending on your use cases but the c 700 p is another large one that we looked at this year our next award is for best presentation of the pc where the case is more of a showcase than anything else this one goes to the Thermaltake Corp III it's less of an enclosure and more of a set of guidelines to mount the components to if they're on take Corp III II can be wall-mounted configure it as a flat test bench or stood up normally the case is basically a large steel box inside of which are where the cables hide and it's accompanied with liquid cooling mounts vertical GPU support and component arrangement that focuses on showing off ion PC this is an example where trends our next topic can be put to actual use because the case is best suited for liquid cooling configurations and showroom style setups the open air presentation works the vertical GPU mount is distanced enough that it doesn't trap thermals too much and the case even works fine for air cooling of course it's not great if you have pets for example but a wall mount mostly fixes that best all-around goes to the fractal mesh if I see a case that we ended up buying for review following its popularity the metro facie is a remake of the define C which we already liked but had called warm in our review although the mesh light doesn't do much to resolve this in its stock configuration the case ascends the charts rapidly landing toward or at the top once adding fans to the front the open mesh front has a unique look but also accommodates additional fans exceptionally well pushing all that air straight into the nearby components we already praised the define c4 it's cable management ease of installation process and overall build quality and an intentionally subdued design and the Metro fire is an extension of all these things but with better air flow for additional fans what puts the case into the best all-around category though is its affordability the measure V is $80 presently making it one of the most affordable cases on this list that also implements reasonable airflow with its more strategic use of tempered glass and industry trends the next award goes to the dumbest trend the dumbest trend goes to form over function which includes things like excessive and needless use of tempered glass RGB LEDs in every corner and crevice a lack of USB type-c support closed off front panels with zero ventilation and raised GPU clocks as a result and the industry is desire to throw every single fad at a box without thinking about why they're doing it vertical GPUs are a good example they can be pretty cool but they often incinerate against the side panel of a case each of these trends has its place in an enclosure but a line must be drawn when it's clear that a manufacturer is just gluing panels and LED strips to a case while hacksaw in out a vertical GPU mount in a case that's clearly not built for it followed up by sticking a 1980s cartoon robot front panel onto the enclosure oh and not to mention that tempered glass panels that are painted black and stuck on the cable side of the case are kinda silly too so that rounds out our case awards for the year the next look at cases will be more of a a very specific focused look at one aspect of cases coming up soon this panels kind of chipped and broken actually came like that speaking of trends though yeah trends overall for the case industry very clearly form over function for this year it's probably gonna continue a bit for next year but we'll have a separate piece that talks about trends for the industry as a whole closer to CES which is coming up in January and of course as always plenty of other content between now and then so if you like this type of content you can subscribe for more support us directly on patreon.com/scishow we can buy more strips like this from China and you can go to store that gamers nexus net to pick we show it like this one or one of our new decal stickers thank you for watching I'll see you all next time