Gadgetory

people keep asking us to make our own case well we're working with bit wit technologies group we've now made our own tempered glass and RGB case the case even comes with a front panel that opens so it is a hinged front panel and there's a there's well it's a prototype there's a fan on it and so the fan is actually mounted to the front of the glass we thought this was a rather innovative approach to case design because most of them if you look at the cases now normally the fans are behind the glass but then you can't really see the fan very well so we're hoping to work with Noctua to get one of these license for the case and we're gonna mount it to the outside you can actually feel the cool air coming off of it which is really nice when you're gaming when the system is just getting really hot and you can feel the cool air hitting you it's a prototype just work with me here before getting to that this video is brought to you by synergy the software that lets you share a keyboard and mouse between multiple systems if you have limited desk space and multiple computers to command synergy removes the need for separate peripherals or a KVM and works as over the network software use our link below to get 50% off the home or provision with ssl so this is our case it's got tempered glass on the on the side at the top and we've got RGB elements so this is our version of the modern case industry so here's where we get real this is an address to the case manufacturers the case PM's the marketing folks who have some hand on how much cases can cost and what they're sold for this is addressing all of you and there are a lot of good trends in the case industry that have come up over the last few years I remember not long ago when a case review would praise a case for having thumb screws that was the thing and if a thumb screw couldn't be unscrewed by your fingers then well that was just bad marketing it was false it was not actually a thumb screw it wasn't a tool that's design but the point is that was what we would talk about in case reviews it was a function feature of the case function focused and not long after that you start getting cable management as big point of praise where traditionally you'd have like the Antec 900 was a hugely popular case but men it had awful cable management if you go back and look at it now but it wasn't really a thing then and now it is manufacturers have improved in that department they've improved and a lot of things really and one of them is just stepping away from all of the unnecessary extras like those included for example the hue that used to be included in the 820 that was eventually removed and turned into a separate unit because really a case doesn't have that many jobs and once you start complicating it it gets worse it costs more but now the thing is as we all know tempered glass and RGB LEDs and that's fine too there's absolutely a place for both of those things unfortunately what's happening is these manufacturers are getting so crazed / checking the tempered glass box and checking the RGB box that we're forgetting basic things like a computer needs to be able to breathe and you know this is our mesh model age 500p this is not an attack on the H 500 P there are plenty of other cases that have these problems lots of them the BitFenix and so that we saw at Computex and put in our needs work category that was one of them the Antec p8 that's another one whatever the new and tech one is called that was announced like three days ago that's another one so you know not every case needs to have a mesh front panel that's not what we're asking for but there are some design elements that you can use to keep the function of some breathability enough to keep your clocks up on a GPU without turning it into a full mesh panel and we actually have numbers and data on all this so I thought I would kind of compile it into one video to share with the manufacturers so that they can use this as some research or some ammunition internally to make changes so we've got information on the balance for example between mash and glass and how wide the side skirts of a front panel should be we have that information we also have information on for example the threshold the tipping point for when as you are trying to suppress the noise of a case and clamped on how much noise comes out of it you also have to kind of up the RPM on the fans and get louder fans in there potentially to to counteract and counterbalance the noise suppression or the noise damping element so there's a trade-off there and at some point you pass the threshold we're sealing it off isn't going to be better when you have louder fans in there also there are instances that I think in the thermal world that manufactures these days being that they are in the case industry and not in GPUs and CBO benchmarking may not even realize that by putting panels on cases like these and like what we've done here by doing that you actually can worsen the FPS of people playing games think about that it's not so this this thermal thing when I talk about thermal is in all these case reviews it's not just because we're trying to find a point of data to nitpick a case about it's because there are actual differences to your experience as a user when the temperature is higher of the components in the case a lot of them one of them is noise noise goes up because you're trying harder to cool everything GPU fan spin up case fan spin up another one is just simply the power consumption as heat goes up you have more power leakage another framerate and clocks so let's talk about that one I'd like to present this idea to the case manufacturers so that everyone is on the same page for what happens when you suffocate a case with a panel that might look good but could have just added another quarter inch to the front side skirt so that it could breathe better that's really all you need in a lot of cases but looking at the numbers you know we have older data from the Titan XP when we overclocked it by about 120 megahertz and just for example in Ghost Recon at 4k way back when we ran these tests originally the difference was about 8% in frame rate going from 60 to 65 FPS average and when we went to 1440p the difference was about 9.5 percent and that's from a non overclocked to a 100 to 120 megahertz overclocked on the GPU so that particular 1440p and since was 95 - 104 that's about a 9 to 10 percent gain but why mention 100 megahertz where does that number come from why this magical number well if we look at some of our frequency over time plots where it's like I said as a prototype the frequency over time plots where we have temperature and frequency plotted for the entirety of a KS test what you'll see is that the GPU frequency actually Falls so this is very true for Pascal where it's ultra sensitive to temperatures every 5 degrees Celsius can get you something extra Vega is going the same direction and E is starting to do similar stuff with their version of boost so both GPU manufacturers are on board with this idea of effectively pre overclocking GPUs as high as they can be based on parameters such as temperature and voltage and power so on the vote on the temperature front you have for example hitting close to the throttle values on open phase cards that are dual axial fans like the gaming acts that we test cases with perfectly normal fans use for a GPU and when it starts throttling at around 82 to 84 degrees Celsius what happens is the clock will drop and you can plot it and see about a 100 megahertz decline in for example the Antec p8 versus for example the H 500 P with no front panel at all so I'm picking those two because the anti p8 was a case that throttled quite a bit and the Coolermaster won the H 500 P when we took this panel off obviously it's going to have the best airflow it can case is inherently worse in your performance from open air that's just how it works but you can do things like directional air stuff like that all that notwithstanding they generally will worsen your performance so removing the panel and having the best GPU performance we can for that case we were keeping about 100 megahertz higher clocks than the anti p8 stock and so the point of pointing that out is that the difference in buying a case that has a front like let's say that silverstone PM a one case difference between buying a case like this that breathes and buying a case that's closed off in the front like the antec p8 or the age 500 P or the Enzo or any number of other cases the fantex ones some of the NZXT cases everyone's pretty much guilty of this with some cases but the difference is buying a better case can get you a couple percentage extra performance in terms of frame rate like between six and ten percent depending on what kind of GPU you're using how much you're dropping clocks what kind of temperatures you're running things like that and yes you can absolutely counter that you could increase your GPU fan profile to go at it more aggressive curve go up to 70 percent sure that fixes the problem insofar as working around it but it makes everything louder - and the real fix would be a case that doesn't suck so that's what we're trying to get here and to think that your case purchase can impact your frame rate just like it's it's not something that you necessarily think about until I saw the data a couple years ago I didn't think about it either and I don't know that the case manufacturers necessarily think about that so here's the thing let me give a couple pointers here now that we've gotten some of the hard data out of the way let's talk about power leakage so power leakage we've gotten the clocks out of the way that impacts frame rate on the power front for every 10 ish degrees Celsius you drop in CPU temperature you also reduce power consumption by about 4% this is a somewhat goes to power leakage and power efficiency of the CPU we found this when testing deleted CPUs we've consulted with others in the industry this seems to be a general good rule of thumb so by running a case actually we can show data for this - let's take our recent Nhu 14s air cooler knock - air cooler for thread Ripper it's a pretty good one let's take that and put it against the NR max 240 lick tag liquid cooler and in that chart you can see a difference of about 9 degrees Celsius so that 9 degrees Celsius if we plot it in terms of the power consumption for each test with a known workload and a known power requirement to complete that workload we see a difference of about 11 watts so the enter a cooler with the threader for 1950 X at 4 gigahertz 1.3 5 volts consumes about 320 watts CPU load during its average peak for that test whereas the Naga Wan it's not much lower but it's 310 312 somewhere in there and some of that comes down to efficiency how the CPU is or how the cooler is dealing with the heat and how efficiently it's getting the heat away from the CPU so that I can continue operating without the additional heat load and the power leakage and things like that so this is all to say that a 10 degree difference in a case although it may be a difference between let's say 80 and 90 degrees so a case manufacturer might say well who cares it's outside of throttle territory anyway just remember that can impact a lot of things on a GPU 80 to 90 degrees even even 70 to 80 degrees on Pascal will show a difference because it's so sensitive to temperatures and Vega is kind of go in the same way and then the power difference is just extra on top of all of that noise of course is a concern to you increase the fan RPMs we actually we've got data for this one as well uh-huh so there's I think four back when we did a bunch of Vega testing we had some PWM versus rpm and noise response charts and one of them shows the the noise level per 10 percent increase in fan PWM so you go from twenty to a hundred percent what's the noise increase we can show that data and it's really it's not an insignificant jump in noise levels to go from something like forty percent fan speeds to something like sixty you start getting a lot louder when you do that and that's what case manufacturers are asking you to do or if I'm addressing the case manufacturers that's what you are asking us to do is either through automated curves in the GPU v bios or through manual efforts increasing the fan speeds thereby increasing the noise levels thereby making your case like a whole hell of a lot worse once it's in an actual real use case so that's what we're talking out on the thermal noise and power side willingly nuking performance by upwards of 10% with the worst case cases is insane and it's clearly not intentional it's just not well researched and it's a byproduct of an industry that's trying more to keep up with trends than they are to keep up with things that should be standard which is a computer that is used for gaming and I mentioned that because everyone just so crazily brandishes all of their cases with the word gaming a computer used for gaming if you actually know the audience you know the people you're trying to sell to it's gonna generate heat and when you generate heat you really need something to work with it so let's talk about some of the solutions here obviously this case we made is patented so don't copy it but other than that you can try things like for an example most of these panels really just spacing them in our testing and again in consultation with some of the thermal engineers I actually trust in the industry to design a good product generally speaking in our tests and we find that about a 1 inch gap on the side is enough to compensate for a flat non-ventilated front so let's take something like the H 440 that case came out with a version 2 H 440 steel as new I'd calls it orjust h 440 version 2 the reason that came out with a version 2 other than a couple of small changes internally is to increase the breathability in the mesh on I believe the top and the front and that's because they increase the distance a little bit between the chassis and the front or the back rather of the front panel so if you have a panel like this let's just pretend that the front is closed off so we're just gonna say maybe they've done something like that and you have a closed-off front panel a good solution as we've found is to take the side like this one this is a pretty thick side so we can take this and cut about a one inch hole all the way down you can add some filtration if you want you know our master for as much as they screwed up on the age 500p this is a good direction to go it's just not enough for a whole lot of other reasons that we discussed elsewhere but you do something like that on the side that basically solves for any severe throttling issues and of course you have to have intelligent fan placement and make sure that makes sense too especially if you're dealing with all like static pressure variables or negative versus positive airflow what you want in the case things like that but generally speaking that will help a lot so an example of a case that's done that well would be the coarser of 600 C it was one of the best thermal performance with our old case bench and that had a lot of ventilation space on the sides of the front panel but the front was still a solid piece of plastic so you've achieved both the the sleek look that everyone wants now and also still having a breathable case that actually performs really damn well and that's because of their fan placement because they're fans and it's because of that huge ventilated side of the front panel and the other panels on the case another point of consideration is power supply shroud so PSU shrouds look good I mean they hide all of that cable clutter everyone wants that and there's a reason everyone started doing it after NZXT did the I think the aged 440 was one of the first with it and later that's 240 and of course they've got competition now from fan tax Corsair BitFenix silverstone coolermaster antec everyone else also so it's obviously an idea that everyone likes and consumers as well but keep in mind that any time you add a power spy shroud to a case when the video card is within a couple inches of that shroud the open face cards particularly they start to increase in their temperatures so we can show this in some of our reviews for cases where you see a CPU temperatures might actually be great they could be super competitive but when you've got a shroud in there the GPU temperatures climb a little bit it's not always bad because the ventilation can help a lot the front intakes obviously can be aligned with the fan to help with those problems but something you can do to help get rid of the heat is when positioning the fan make sure the dead zone of the fan isn't sort of directly in line with it where the fans intake on a GPU assuming the top PCIe slot mount and - I get a fan down there to begin with so you got a fan kind of lower down maybe between the prototype GPU and the CPU or just straight across on the GPU but the hot air needs somewhere to go and those open face cards obviously just kind of blow it everywhere in the case so radiative heat off the back of the backplate should more or less be dealt with by any fans cooling the CPU so we can kind of ignore that and there's often a rear exhaust that just gets rid of it anyway so you can cut some mesh holes in the back or use the PCIe slot covers that are ventilated they have all the holes punched in them that helps with getting the heat out and away from the video card when it's done cooling itself another point to consider the video card vertical mounts are popular now for good reason they look good but the problem with these also is that video card temperatures go up quite a bit when they're not positioned correctly two good examples recently would be the thermal take view 71 which we found first was the the first problem with this that we saw and the other I think was either the C 700 P or actually they think it was the aged 500 P as well and the problem with both of these cases is that the distance between a dual axial faceplate of a card and the glass is often like an inch or less and with a blower fan it probably works a bit better those slots work really well for open loops obviously that's better what they're better designed for because you're not dealing with air problem solved but if it's actually an air cooler which is what most people use especially in the cheaper cases that have vertical GPM outs keep in mind that spacing further from the glass panel is going to help a hell of a lot because otherwise all that heat kind of turns comes off the fans hit the glass and just gets trapped in there so that's another point of consideration that we've noticed recently is a potential cause for concern where the GPU can start heating up to a point of increasing fan RPMs to compensate for throttling if you've said it more clamps down fans being curved so just to reiterate here a few things one you don't need a mesh front to be a good case in our eyes you don't have to do something like this although this is one of the better cases you don't have to do that to be good and we've demonstrated with other cases in the past we've demonstrated in the past that with cases like fractal for instance fractal gets a bit warm with the defined C but fractal to their credit does a pretty good job at balancing between making a case that's fairly closed off and does do that discrete sleek look that is so popular while also maintaining some level of breathability that is acceptable and within what you would expect to see in a hundred dollar case so there are ways to do this sleek look or clothes off glass look without killing the performance and the define see we liked a lot there are plenty of other cases similar to it that we've liked a lot the s340 is one of the cases that needs a rework at some point looks like the h7 100 I and 400 I 200 I will do that but that was one where man it was a great case but it doesn't have some thermal concerns we complained a lot about the s3 40 elite and its potential thermal issues but it's all stuff you can work around as a user because they've at least designed the case in a way that it's got the ventilation there they're just leaving it up to you to add some fans and fix it and that's not the best solution but it's better than not having the ventilation there at all and having no good way to fix it without just raw brute force and high noise so hopefully some of that data helps the case manufacturers I bring it up because I know what it's like to have a job that is hyper focused on something like designing cases in that instance I know that when you have a job like that you lose sight of what's around you in terms of the rest of the industry in the ecosystem and losing sight of the rest of the ecosystem means that you may not realize that the clocks on a GPU are so sensitive now that the extra couple degrees can cause a drop that impacts your framerate so hopefully that kind of puts that data out there and a more digestible or a consumable way for the manufacturers and the marketing people but uh yeah I guess that's really all I've got to say so hopefully there's some improvement in the case industry in terms of thermals you know we've gotten the looks thing down pretty well this year the last year has been all looks all the time that's made some progress in a lot of instances it's time to do a little bit of a pendulum swing back the other direction and find a balance point in the middle and try and do the function aspect of cases improve the thermals even with fan placements or with just better panel design and again this is patent pending so hands off thank you for watching as always you get a patreon our comms logic game as an axis dubs that directly if you like this type of content you can join us on discord by doing that where we talk with the community alternatively store dock gamers Nexus dotnet to pick up a shirt like this one subscribe for more you'll want to see that what comes after this one I'm sure I'll see you all next time