Gadgetory

we attempted to fix the Coolermaster age 500p with generous usage of packing tape on the front of the case and that was for two reasons one it no longer really comes off like it used here so we've resolved that problem then - as far as air flow goes the actual reason for doing that was to create an extra maybe half inch to one inch spacing from the front of the chassis to the back of the front panel which would resolve some of the issue of those front 200 millimeter fan cowlings bleeding into the mesh area for intake where previously it was restricting air flow further then the case has already restricted by usage of its acrylic panels obviously in addition to that we've got some testing for radiator placement so we did radiator placement testing we did cooler testing for different fan configurations within the case and then we have a special project coming up either it'll go up either before this video or just after that should also interest you with this case before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a three hundred sixty millimeter radiator plus three 120 fans that are RGB illuminated the if then we'll take it rain fans at that this is a 4.5 done a detect pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below so for the cooling problems in this case a lot of it will really all of it comes down to the fact that the front panel is closed off we had some testing we can put the chart up now from the initial review where we showed that removing the front panel improved thermals in the cpu benchmarks by something like 10 to 13 degrees Celsius and again that's because you've got this massive 200 millimeter fan that is exposed to zero air it's getting air only in through the sides they're not particularly strong and static pressure to begin with and then only a small percentage of the blade is actually ever exposed to the air anyway because once the air goes in there it's basically immediately being sucked into the case it's not like there's just a bunch of it it doesn't have enough exposure to outside air hence the improvement in thermals when we remove the panel and part of this comes down to a general rule of thumb with air-pressure speaking with some thermal engineers in the industry we learned that generally speaking you lose about 30% pressure for every 90-degree turn that you make so not the best in terms of pressure and really not leveraging the actual 200 millimeter surface area of that fan to access air so yeah radiator test and we'll obviously perform better because you can pretty much resolve any thermal issue with water it's not the best way to solve a problem it's a brute force way to do it but you can get the case in a better positioning relative only to itself with air so compared to more open cases this is still not going to be the best obviously with liquid and a more breathable case you're still gonna be better than liquid in this one but we can get it to a point where it's reasonable now there are a couple of different radiator orientation options here and this is a question that's really commonly asked we've received it a lot for ask yen basically the question is where is it best to put my radiator in my case and the answer is it depends entirely on your case and everything else so this test applies only to this case keep that in mind when we tell you that the radiator is best in a certain position in this case don't run around saying oh the radiators best in this position in every case that's probably not true so just keep that in mind this is something new we're doing radiator placement guides on a per case basis we will probably only do it for the most popular cases if you want to see more of them tell us in the comments of the case reviews but let's roll onto this one for now starting with radiator placement testing and I'm moving on to the fan testing for airflow we're using the new EVGA at 240 c LC as i stand and for the top versus front mounting tests this measure is both GPU and CPU thermals throughout the process because the fans are such a major selling point for this case we've tested a few different means of leveraging them including relocation the idea is to attempt to keep the original fans when possible though we did run some modified tests for academic purposes where we got rid of the fans the EVGA pump and fans were set to max rpm for these tests as we're really just looking for consistency here not optimal noise performance and the CPU voltage and frequency were also set to their usual fixed values although radiator position testing is really only comparable to this one case some of the concepts will apply elsewhere but the specificity will remain stock to the age 500 P before getting to the first chart here's a listing that defines our test configurations for radiator placement the first is top mounted 240 millimeter cooler with the fans pushing from the inside of the case to the outside with both 200 millimeter fans and the original rear fan in their original positions the next is front mounted 200 millimeter fans stock followed by the 240 millimeter radiator followed by the radiator fans and a pole configuration so the fans are pulling air through the radiator with the 200 millimeter fans pushing air onto the radiator and for the third configuration we're looking at front mounted 200 millimeter fans with the radiator mounted internally on the inside of the case with a gap between the 200 millimeter fans on the radiator as if you couldn't fit the radiator for example in the front fan bracket the radiator fans are removed in this test using only the 200 millimeter fans for cooling the rad the next has configuration is a front mounted 200 millimeter pair of fans with the radiator mounted between the chassis and the fans so they are flush against one another with the radiator fans still removed and the final test is a top mounted 200 millimeter pair of exhaust fans with a front radiator using the EVGA fans in a push configuration with those fans inset into the case rather than the original protruding layout these tests are conducted with our thermal torture scenario which places both the GPU and CPU under 100 percent power virus workloads here's a results chart we found that the CPU thermals performed best when the radiator was positioned between the 200 millimeter fans and the stock EVGA fans configured in a push-pull setup with 200 to 120 s this brought our CPU temperature to 45 point 8 Celsius delta T over ambient with liquid temperatures at about 14 point 7 C over ambient the GPU meanwhile suffers a bit we're up to 57 C over ambient now with an ambient of roughly 22 Celsius that put us as nearing a DC for the GPU diode temperature not far from throttling this is what the twin froze our coolers at the 55% fans which is about where Genia coolers tend to max out their fan profiles you could obviously drive this temperature down with a faster GPU fan rpm but it may be better to just build things differently testing with the radiator flush against the 200 millimeter fans but with the EVGA radiator fans removed we end up with mediocre CPU and GPU thermals the GPU isn't suffering as much for this one but the CPU temperature has increased by about 13 degrees Celsius with liquid temperature of about 7 degrees Celsius the radiator fans were obviously doing a lot of work here and getting rid of them means that we lose some of these static pressure advantage of smaller fans right up against the radiator for the final front mounted configuration the radiator had a gap between the 200 millimeter fans with no radiator fans mounted we found this to be the worst configuration pushing the CPU toward 67 C over ambient or nearing ADC accounting for ambience and that's about where an air cooler would put you so obviously not a good idea the GPU is still quite warm here as well running with the radiator in the front with EVGA fans pushing and with the 200 millimeter fans moved into a top exhaust position our numbers output as 59 C over ambient for the GPU and 47 C over ambient for the CPU although decent for CPU temperatures the top exhaust fans are pulling the air away from everything else in the case so we lose any dissipation potential we had over the GPU backplate or anywhere else on the GPU it seems that the best configuration is to configure the 240 millimeter radiator in the top with the fans pushing up and out and then to use the 200 millimeter fans in their stock front intake position this results in a 51 point eight degrees Celsius CPU temperature and 50.5 C GPU temperatures over ambient that's ideal because our CPU and GPU numbers are now closer reflecting a better balanced cooling design besides we want our GPU as cool as possible a CPUs performance won't change much from an extra 5 degrees Celsius of heat but a GP is boosting performance we'll moving on to air tests we're switching back to our original core frozer cooler that was used in the review and using some slightly changed data analysis method so these numbers are not directly compared two previous tests with a stock configuration tested onto our new method we are measuring sixty four point five C over a mid for the CPU with the GPU at fifty three point four C over ambient remounting the panel with a makeshift 0.5 inch spacer by way of tape allows the mesh to better align with the front two hundred millimeter fans but doesn't help enough we're still at about sixty three C over a mint on the CPU or 51.5 on the GPU that's a drop of about two degrees for what it's worth but we can get a bigger drop by fixing cm's choked off front panel by either removing it or using inset fans if you remember from the review the two hundred millimeter fans protrude outward enough to kill half of the ventilation usefulness we installed two nfa fourteen fans and fixed them to the same decibel level as the two hundred millimeter fans obviously this is not a perfect comparison because we're using different fans with different specs but we're at least at the same noise level as the stock cased fans were and in terms of price they're pretty expensive as well so they're close in price and a noise level at this configuration this ends up with way better cooling for the CPU that was worse on the GPU due to the positioning of the fan you could do a bit better by moving it down more than we did but you do lose some of that airflow over the entire GPU service area which the GPU actually benefits from the CPU temperature falls to 59 C from sixty four point five C with GPU temperature rising seven degrees as a result of the more limited airflow over the cooler in the least the more directional airflow of a top 140 fan is outperforming the 200 millimeter fans at the same rpm so the primary takeaway from the radiator side is more or less what makes sense now we see a lot of people doing front mounted radiators on cases because technically yes it's going to be better for your CPU thermals but there's a lot more to a system than just CPU thermals and this case the way it's laid out there's not a really a good intake for air to get to the GPU if you mount your CPU cooler to the front because now that radiator is obviously radiating heat and the fans are pushing it straight onto the GPU so it's not really getting cool air plus we found with cases that have power supply shrouds like this one they tend to have a significant worse videocard thermals than cases without them and that's just because it's restricting your airflow and how much air the GPU actually has access to the fans can actually utilize which particularly matters with a dual axial cooler like this one so we would recommend and this would apply to two forties and two 80s and three 60s for that matter for when they fit we would recommend generally trying to keep your CPU cooler in the top as exhaust because when it's under liquid anyway it's probably not going to be that hot and as long as you're reasonably below t.j.maxx you're not losing anything from the CPU not anything tangible as a user anyway what you will lose is if you have it front mounted and you increase the temperature of the GPU by five to ten degrees Celsius at which point you've got potentially more limited boosting Headroom which Pascal is extremely sensitive to that and AMD Vega is as well and you also have potentially if you resolve for boosting Headroom allowed or GPU fan and those are gonna be smaller fans that make more noise than the front that whatever's in the front at the top so we would recommend top radiators if you're doing something like a 120 or 140 we didn't test that but just speaking from experience I would probably do a rear mounted CPU cooler because the heat coming out of the video card should more or less be taken care of by the 200 millimeter fan to the front you're gonna disperse most of that alternatively you can do a top mount for 120 or 140 but at that point honestly just whatever looks better but as far as air flow try and get more cold air to the GPU it's struggling the most for using us a tower cooler like this one still going to have problems with vertical GPUs obviously as we showed in the original testing but you're already decently well off with the stock configuration except if you felt like doing the change I suppose you can move these two fans up here as exhaust and then set something up in the front as intake that's more directional now we did plot higher GPU temperatures in that one instance we tested but you could get a position a bit lower and would probably be fine it's not really worth doing though ultimately this case the way it's built is to show off those fans that's the reason to buy this case they're really expensive most of the cost so you probably don't want to move those to the top they don't look quite as good but hopefully that gives you an idea more of a radiator placement guide than anything else the rest was just kind of out of academic interest and we do have another content piece on this one either out or coming out soon so keep an eye on that where we're gonna fix the case that's the goal here so thank you for watching as always you get a patreon.com slash gamers Nexus helps that directly or store it our gamers Nexus net to pick my shirt like this one this is the GN Graff logo shirt definitely subscribe for more so you don't miss the next parts of this case I'll see you all next time