Gadgetory

all right today we are looking at the Coolermaster H 500 P okay okay we're not gonna so this is the Coolermaster H 500 P it is not officially called a high airflow case but all the materials we've been given in the reviewers guide and presumably in marketing materials publicly has made references to high airflow design which obviously it is a bit of a callback to the half series one of the biggest cases I've ever worked with was the 1/2 X and this is the first major return to what is kind of a spiritual successor to the 1/2 line for Coolermaster though it's not really truly a high airflow case because it's got all the paneling so it has an acrylic panel on the front acrylic panel on the top and then tempered glass on the side so it is a bit of a departure but that's why this now falls under the master case series rather than an official 1/2 series but it is the H 500 P and obviously as a throwback before that this is brought to you by the EVGA 240 CLC which is a $120 MSRP closed-loop liquid cooler the EVGA 240 CLC has an RGB illuminated pump plate uses a thermal probe within the lower pump chamber for liquid temperature monitoring and allows customization through software it learn more at the link in the description below the case itself is flawed in a lot of ways I'll admit but with Patrick and I were disappointed in this case when we got it and we had much higher hopes just because of what we'd seen at Computex and later on at other shows but the thing is all those events we never got hands-on time building with the thing so you learn a lot about a case when you actually build in it and it's not just a display case so that says a lot about the configuration here it clearly is appealing to people this is the most hyped case since really any case I can remember recently in fact the H 500 P has gotten more hype in the industry in terms of new products probably then Vega and to some extent even coffee Lake I mean videos with this case have gotten more views than GPU and CPU reviews that's absurd and really speaks to something about the case partly marketing but they haven't done a ton of marketing so a lot of it is building on an existing brand half bringing it back after absence for so long and having something that obviously looks pretty good on camera that's what they've done well here what they haven't done as well is a lot of other things for example this panel is less of a concern than the front panel but the front panel if you pick it up touching the front panel it probably will come out so I mean once again just to kind of illustrate this there's the front panel the way this mount instead of having the normal alligator clips like pretty much any other case on the market they have hooks on the bottom and then they've got these that don't clip into anything they just kind of sit there also it creaks like McDonald's toy in terms of plastic quality so yeah not the best quality materials on the panel in general I mean just nothing about the panel is quality nothing about this panel is quality so cooler master is cheaped out in a few places with this case that are really just disappointing especially considering the hype around it and a lot of the hype does come back to you we'll just leave that like that looks fine a lot of it comes back to these fans these are 200 millimeter fans that have more or less been absent since previous high airflow design cases from Coolermaster they just kind of died and 200 millimeter fans are hard to make first of all there are four three or four different specs for 200 millimeter fans in terms of hole spacing and some of them were 180 some were 200 there was like a weird one in between there somewhere like a 193 or something there's a 220 so there are a lot of different specs and no one agreed on it which made them fall out of popularity they have a lot more weight in terms of just the blade so you need a more robust motor in the middle and bearing and they're expensive and if you do a cheap one it's just not going to perform well at all so this is a return it's gotten a lot of interest these things also suffer of it with static pressure and because of that your position behind an acrylic panel obviously no air comes through here but the side ventilation looks pretty sufficient it's actually about an inch or so of ventilation and in our testing in the past we found that's pretty much what you need to get good airflow with a case that blocks out front ventilation like the s 340 or HP 440 v2 where they breathe only from the side of the front panel so that's generally sufficient however if you notice these are actually mounted to the outside of the frame the chassis and because they're mounted to the outside the chassis actually less than half an inch of this about one the width of one finger is what the fans can breathe through so most the air ends up coming in through the top through the bottom and oddly there's sort of a skirt down here that's match a bit of it comes through there as well this skirt wasn't there at Computex I don't know if was added later but air comes through there and that's kind of a filter to some extent so they've got a serious airflow problem for being something that calls back to high airflow we'll be talking about that in the thermal section the that's much less of a problem though than the build quality the whole problem is basically it just puts it middle-of-the-road don't spoil all the charge but that's kind of where it goes the build quality you know this is stuff you only deal with lifting up the case probably watch it twice and once you figure out that the panel is loose like this it's not gonna bother you again you've learned it you're not gonna not gonna get stunned twice by it so it's less of a thing to complain about but it's still just like why and we ask that question we asked why wouldn't you do even just a cheap alligator clip made out of plastic and the answer is basically cooler masters planning things for this case for the future that we can't talk about yet but I still disagree with the decision even with those future plans the top panel more or less the same thing in terms of build quality just kind of I know this one much much less of an issue than the front panel but they are cheaper materials and that's disappointing to see I do really like the top frame for radiator and fan mounting they've done that well the fact that there's a frame up here to mount separately means you can really easily go through everything and install it and that's good the fans look good on the front as well they've got a 140 in the back I think yeah that helps with exhausting the heat and there's a vertical GPU mount following the trend there's tempered glass following the trend the fans are RGB so I've done a lot of things kind of right but they've also done a lot of things wrong and I mean on the on the good let's go through the good quickly fans look good looks in general obviously are subjective but a lot of you have expressed interests and desire in this design that they've got despite the quality of materials when you touch it it is again a bit cheap like McDonald's toy plastic but it looks ok and you're probably not gonna be touching it more than just a build so we we can try to brush that away to make room for other bigger complaints it's got a power supply shroud that can be removed in pieces so that's nice you can more easily work with it the bad a lot of stuff I've gone through already in addition to the other stuff we've talked about there's no RGB controller despite IO panel preparation for it there are actually fake buttons up here for RGB cycling similar to the C 700 P buttons but they don't actually work there's no controller you could buy one for 20 bucks from Oz I or something like that but otherwise you basically have to plug it into a motherboard not every motherboards gonna have RGB lighting headers it's getting more popular now so we'll kind of again brush that one a bit aside as a small complaint that's not really worth much in the grand scheme of things the tempered glass panel though I do have a bone to pick with it's wobbly like crazy like this is I'm just kind of pushing on it here and see that like this is this is kind of absurd and the reason this happens is because the panel is mounted with a screw which by the way is already losing its it's a finish it's getting kind of copper colored in there it's mounted by this screw it's just a turn so it's a hinge or a latch it's not actually threaded and so you turn it 90 degrees and panel loosens and then it's latched or hinge - down at the bottom as well and ultimately what this means is they've got fewer screws in the panel though there's one Center now it's more noticeable anyway fewer screws in the panel it lets them hinge the door rather than just kind of mount it on four rails and then the panel would fall off like you see on a lot of the other cases on the market so they've kind of fixed that problem in Windows it way better with the in win 303 we reviewed previously this one because the way it's mounted and secured there's not enough mounting pressure so the panel wobbles and it also protrude from the case and isn't flush with the panel's so it protrudes by about three or four millimeters and once we reassemble the whole case here which two cooler masters credit is incredibly easy but I would take not falling apart over easy any day of the week once we reassemble everything as you'll see in b-roll and here the case just has an overhang from the tempered glass where it's not flush so we've got a couple millimeters here sticking out from the rest so that just kind of bothers me it's borderline nitpick but it's just like it mitt it makes the panel feel like there was a last minute like tempered glass is huge we have to have it a type of addition I talked to them tempered glass was apparently always in the design so it's just kind of an oversight in that case not impressed not impressed with how wobbly it is not impressed with how it secures and mounts because it does really not secure at all and really not happy with the fact that it's not flush like this that's just kind of you know the argument for your case is it looks good and then you do this where where does the argument go it has to go somewhere else like thermals and it's not impressive enough to hold there on its own so a lots of small things here another problem GPU clearance is also a problem so the we talked about this with the thermal take view 71 pretty heavily it's only fair that we also do it for Coolermaster and that problem is if you have a MSI gaming X Twin Frozr card an EVGA FTW an EVGA FTW hybrid and asus rog Strix ZOTAC extreme series card or any number of other non reference PCB cards that have a higher PCB which is probably 50% of the cards we've reviewed in the last year if not more if you have one of those taller cards its taller than the PCIe slot and you install an air cooler even a small one like this one 20 millimeter cooler they're not gonna fit together or at least there's a very good chance they won't unless the air cooler is pretty damn small so you get away with a 92 mil but that's about it so we have this mounted by zip ties right now because that's the only way it would work it will not mount properly because obviously this is in the way you don't get a PCIe ribbon cable included and you buy that separately that's less of a problem because you don't need a mounting bracket or anything you just you can actually mount it into the case without a bracket that's nice but not if it's a non reference PCB that's at all so this works best if you have a reference cooler or reference PCB rather not necessarily cooler although you'll see later that reference cooler is actually better and works best if you do open-loop liquid or something like that which we didn't do but that would have a smaller height for the video card so yeah that's kind of it's a lot of a lot of really disappointing things with this case and at $150 I haven't mentioned the price yet that's what it is however 50 bucks you kind of hope that they can get some of this stuff right if not all of it I mean sure Thermaltake overlooked this problem too whatever there's plenty of open-loop options there plenty of reference PCBs go get one of those but then there's stuff like the panel mounting just being bad I mean look at this is that's so effortless for me to just kind of do that and it's not necessary at some point the modularity isn't that required it's not that needed that the case should be literally falling apart as I'm picking it up and yes you can obviously pick it up without things falling off I would recommend doing by grabbing under the power supply oh no don't do that that's that's actually bad though don't pick it up that way but now you grab it under the power supply and then have your hand under the eye oh so that's what we need is pay yeah a guide to how to lift the case up see ya a bit exaggerated for purposes of film but I mean really it kinda it is just this panel should be secured end of story so yeah let's go through the thermals that'll get us through the rest of this case review see how it does if it follows the high airflow line at all and full wrap-up we didn't do anything too fancy for additional testing this time just sort of functional vertical GPU mounting for example and taking the front panel off to see how much it limits the cooling potential we plan to do more testing in the future though we'll have a comparative data next as always but we're first starting with only the H 500 P this will give us a better understanding as to how the case performs under various conditions with the stock configuration and under a torture workload the H 500 P manages a CPU Delta temperature of 56 point 1 Celsius over ambiens with idle at around 4 degrees Celsius again over ambient removing the front panel entirely drops us down to 42 point seven degrees constituting the largest drop we've ever seen from this simple panel removal test this tells us that the large 200 millimeter fans have a lot more cooling potential than their being afforded here this is particularly noticeable as the resistance caused by the front panel is quite high and causes the fan rpm to drop about 50 rpm over the on versus off test ignoring that aspect though we can highlight that the front panel mesh despite being about an inch wide actually again only exposes less than half an inch of mesh to the fans the fans therefore choke on this limited space and are already challenged in the static pressure dept as these large fans often are installing the GPU vertically drives up a bit more than 1 degree Celsius in our cpu measurements this is partly because of the collision chorus between the CPU tower cooler and the video card and is not really a realistic user scenario because you wouldn't be zip tying a card to your case you'd probably just buy a smaller one or get a liquid cooler to account for the clearance issues we expect this to be better under conditions of reference size PCBs comparatively the Coolermaster age 500 P stock configuration lands at about 56.1 degrees Celsius CPU load temperature over ambient positioning it between the Cullinan enclosure and the NZXT s340 elite the SD 40 elite is a case we previously knocked for mediocre ventilation and so the age 500 PE falls in that same line despite numerous references to high airflow in quotes in the cases reviewed guide and elsewhere the enclosure offers decidedly less air flow than the $70 silverstone our l06 positioned at 48 degrees celsius over ambient or the corsair 5 70 x which is similarly sized even running at a slower 10 50 rpm fan speed when the case is capable of more this is even a bit worse than the internal take view 71 which is at fifty four point seven degrees Celsius over ambient the aged 500 P doesn't impress in the slightest here but isn't dismal either it's just kind of okay for any other case that be well it'd be okay but it's a disappointment on a case that clearly has the words high airflow attached to it despite moving away from that branding officially moving on to GPU torture temperatures that the Twin Frozr card manages fifty-four point nine degrees Celsius over ambient that's in the stock configuration this keeps it a couple degrees away from throttling so it's actually not too bad when stock removing the front panel expectedly improves thermals they're only by five degrees Celsius for the GPU CPU impact was much greater a vertical GPU mount suffocates our dual axial cooler on the card which is pressed up against the glass and now has to deal with radiative heat off the back of the GPU trapped between the CPU cooler and itself and this results in a 68 degrees all these over ambient temperature pushing us well past thermal throttle territory and into frequency decay now of course this could be accounted for by blasting the GPU fan rpm and fixed but then the noise argument goes out the window you'd be best off with an open-loop GPU cooler a hybrid card or a reference card with a higher rpm comparatively GPU torture testing lands the cooler master H 500 P stock configuration at fifty four point nine degrees Celsius which is just between the 570 X at its lower 1050 rpm or again stock 1550 lines at 51 C he and the be quiet dark base pro hundred-page 500p is cooling the GPU about as well as cases that are targeted at silence at least that's in these workloads and a lot of that is because of the power supply shroud which is limiting air flow to a dual axial fan couple this with the fact that the GPU basically aligns with the dead zone on the 200 millimeter fan despite the distance from the fan and you end up with a bit of a warmer video card than would be desired we've been on to 3dmark stress testing which represents a realistic gaming workload we encounter GPU thermals I'm about fifty eight point nine degrees Celsius on the H 500 P right alongside the $50 spec Oh for an Thermaltake g21 which is 50 to 70 depending on where you buy it to its credit CPU thermals are a lot better here at 30.7 celsius versus 36 and 39 on the two aforementioned cases this is because the GPU being butted against cooler brastias PSU shroud is again limiting the airflow particularly with that dead zone consideration CPU thermals position the case between the KL 0 7 and C 700 PE ultimately testing blender for a realistic production application our CPU worker rendering test positions the H 500 PCBU thermals as acceptable at about 39 degrees celsius delta T over ambiens that's because this test generates less heat than some of the gaming workloads that's down to GPU utilization which is 0% in a CPU worker blender test age 500 P still isn't impressive but it is in the middle of the pack and is perfectly acceptable as for GPU thermals with the GPU worker in blender where the CPU load is minimized we are again objectively in non thermally threatened territory we're not going to throttle but we're still middle of the pack age 500 P lands between the dark base pro 900 once again and the metruff I see from fractal surely then the noise should be better in this case as its larger fans do spin slower than the Y near fans of 120 millimeter and 140 millimeter sizes and our standardized noise testing the cooler master H 500 P lands at 38.7 DB a system noise so just before the jump into truly high airflow configurations that generate 40 DB A+ of noise that makes the H 500 P about the same an acoustic performance as the mesh by C given our configuration with the same test system and it's really just not impressive but not bad either so that pretty much wraps this up the case isn't the worst case anyone's ever made it's just that at $150 and with the amount of hype its received it's pretty disappointing this is what happened when a case receives the amount of hype as a piece of silicon and then the company ends up going cheap on some of the components so part of this is cooler masters attempt to stick to a modular design they've gone a bit too hard with it here it's cool to be modular but there's a reason that basically no one else does it in the market and while it would be great for Coolermaster to capitalize on that empty market they need to do it in a way that makes people actually want to buy the modularity and then trust it and yes the removal of the panels was a little bit of a problem it's not the worst thing in the world I maybe made it seem a little exaggerated but I mean again the first time you pick the thing up if you grab by the side of the front panel at all it genuinely will just kind of pull off it's it's it's not the best mounting mechanism but to be fair it's probably not as bad as we made it look initially it is about that bad the first time you work with it though this panel isn't too much of a problem you just don't grab it by the back and it's not going to come off but ultimately ignoring the panel mounting issues which I've demonstrated primarily for cooler masters benefit to try and convince them to put an alligator clip somewhere the next issue with the panel's is just the cheapness and the creepiness of it as a Creek enos again it's one of those things were like you're not gonna sit there and push on the panel while you're using the system but it just speaks audibly to the quality of materials which is not that high so yeah disappointed in a lot of ways a wobbly tempered glass panel not particularly secure there's like a 1/2 millimeter gap between the glass and the chassis the fans don't get a lot of air through airflow through the mesh of the front panel because of how the fans protrude from the front of the case GPU clearance doesn't work with taller video cards and I think that's most of it on the upside the cable management is pretty good and I guess it has a look that a lot of people like so if you like the case and how it looks we're not going to tell you to buy something else because really not much else exists that looks like this case it's fairly unique in that aspect and color masters done well there it's also one hundred fifty dollars and you need to go into it knowing that there are some build quality issues in terms of quality materials and components but once you have it built it's gonna look the way it looks and that's the end of the story you're not gonna be taking it apart every day that said some aspects will always be in your way like the non-flush side panel and the limited airflow so you're gonna need to plan for those in the build but yeah it's just you know look this is again not as offensively bad a case as some of the others we've reviewed in the past it's just that at this price point at this level of marketing with these specific language used with how the case came together ultimately it's just disappointing and that's all there is to it so hopefully the price comes down a bit because that may be 120 somewhere around there it'd be reasonably competitive even with the quality control issues and concerns but at 150 there's too much good competition for us to give it a hard recommendation unless you're buying strictly on looks alone and that's where it stands so as always if you like this type of coverage you can go to patreon.com/scishow to helps out directly you can also go to storlock gamers nexus net to pick my shirt like this one or our graph logo shirt thank you for watching and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you