Gadgetory

we're definitely losing money on this review and it's not just because we had to hire an intern to eat the 18 pounds of Reese's Cups that Coolermaster included with the case we tried hard to make the Q 500 I'll perform well in testing we tried to force good performance out of it with Patrick spending probably about a week longer on this case testing than we would typically spend this is cooler masters Q 500 l mini case for full ATX motherboards we're using the Q 300 tooling from a micro ATX case designed previously but shifting the power supply around to accommodate 80 export it's a unique approach to an enclosure and at $60 we can overlook a lot of limitations in favor of affordability but it really has to outweigh those limitations somewhere before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte Z 390 ARS master motherboard which comes equipped with one of the more powerful z3 90 V RMS for heavier overclocks on the new ninth gen Intel CPUs the ARS Master is also one of the few motherboards with a real heatsink this generation featuring a mix of high surface area fins and looks oriented hover blocks oh and it's also got updated RDV illumination learn more at the link below really quick overview of this case before we get into the build notes and a lot of thermal data we have more thermal data on this case and probably any other single case we've ever tested and it's because we were trying so hard to get it to do well but it didn't happen we'll talk about that later so the case itself it's a small box really small but it fits ATX boards it also fits our 150 millimeter Heights CPU tower cooler which is impressive and it fits a relatively full length video card the gaming axe MSI card which is among the larger ones up until you get into the three slot designs all of that fits in here in fact coolermaster has photos of this case as we'll talk about later fitting with their their massive thread ripper air cooler and two of the asus 2.8 slot video cards now not not particularly a good idea for how to use this case but it can fit so really what happened is it's it's tooling that's been reused and that's why the price is so low at $60 what they've done is take an existing case relocate the the power supply and you end up with something that fits ATX boards previously designed for micro ATX except the power supplies now at the front and the screws just going right there and then you cover the screws with a filter this is a custom one that Coolermaster made for us because they're playing around with the idea of doing custom filters for customers in the future but the stock one is like that so the case itself is really it's pretty simple internally it's a big empty box well it's a small empty box but it's an empty box nonetheless and you've really got support for the board and that's about it the oversights are many and we'll go over them in the build notes but just to talk about air flow momentarily what happens here is this is a stock it comes with one rear exhaust fan a large portion of that fan is blocked by the back side of the case it's got about eighty millimeters of actual space it can push air through and then in the front you end up with a filter on top of a bunch of perforations in the steel panel and unfortunately because this steel panel the perforations are so much more metal than they are not metal you end up with obstructions to airflow where really they shouldn't exist these holes should be larger to have a more proper mesh approach intake is also problematic on the bottom so there's really not much space here we typically want to see about an inch of distance between the ground and any ventilation that's supposed to be used but you can rotate the case like this and this is actually an intended use case so it's got these on this side panel the thumb screws have rubber feet on them you can sit it like that and you just pop the panel back on top and that's the end of that so let's go through the build notes by Patrick go through the thermals and then we'll talk about what the thermals mean in the conclusion of this review but it's going to be a long one the worst feature of our Q 500l is that it permanently smells like cheap chocolate no matter how many times I pay Patrick to wipe it down a much better feature is that clear masters focus on modularity as a parent although the cramped interior limits some of the potential configurations there's six different mounting locations for the i/o panel a power supply bracket that can be attached in multiple different locations and orientations and the whole case is tactically sort of invertible fans can be screwed on to the perforated panels pretty much anywhere there's space and magnetic filters can be slapped on to the top to hide the screws our case shipped with one magnetic filter on the front as well as several extras packed separately but we opted to use only the front filter in testing they fit neatly against the case trim and the case looked equally good with the filters on or off as long as there's nothing screwed into those panels once something is attached like a power supply using a filter to cover up the screw heads looks much cleaner for the final build once a position is decided on coolermaster also includes that small rubber stoppers that clip into the case and keep the filter centered the bottom filter is a little disappointing in comparison a rectangle of non-magnetic mesh that's popped into place using 8 easily lost rubber pins this is the only filter with cutouts for the case legs but if the legs are removed and the case is laid out horizontally a magnetic filter can be stuck here too speaking of those case legs they are exceptionally short this will come into play in thermal testing typically we find that a one-inch clearance is advisable for anything relying upon bottom intake or bottom airflow even in the stock configuration with no intake fans this case will naturally draft air in through the bottom by way of its negative pressure setup and the proximity of the GPU fans to the bottom cooler master should use taller feet for the next iteration of this design if there is one to get closer to that one-inch elevation one side panel is a thin sheet of clear plastic held into place with plain old thumb screws at each corner but that's not unreasonable at this price point it is a cheap case so that's fair the steel side panel is held in with four rubber range of screws that SS feet if the case is laid on its side which is a clever feature it'd be a bad idea to use this case as a monitor stem like the Kotaku for instance as the reversion to acrylic paneling means easy scratches on that side panel in a way the interior of the cue 500l is as simple as it could possibly be since it's just one big chamber installing the power supply proof more complicated because Coolermaster provides a ventilated bracket for the power supply that can be positioned in several different locations including the bottom of the case if a mini ITX port is installed exactly like the Q 300 L the stock position is inside of the front panel cables down and plug up with an extension cable running to the rear of the case our usual coursera RM 650 X was too tall to clear the end of our GPU so we were forced to use the power supply from our small form-factor bench the enter max revolution SFX it would also be too tall but the length is short enough that the whole power supply can sit above the GPU be aware that long GPU coolers directly affect the power supply clearance in this enclosure and colormaster recommends 140 millimeter power supplies to maximize compatibility it's also worth mentioning that with the power supply mounted on the front panel its size and number of cables directly affect front intake Coolermaster provided a photo in the review guide of a system with an e ATX motherboard and ATX power supply a massive thread report our cooler and to triple slot Strix GPUs which is an excellent example of what could potentially fit in this case could not should this configuration would perform exceptionally poorly especially for that central GPU nothing about this would perform well do not replicate the setup but you can see that a lot of things can fit in the case since there's no power supply shroud there will always be some number of cables that are visible inside of the case there's some cable management space behind the motherboard but we didn't make much use of it since the GPU and the 24 pin power connectors are positioned directly next to the power supply which for our build had short cables cable cutouts along the edge of the motherboard are surprisingly adequate given how it tight the constraints are and there are plenty of cable tie points but again everything was so close together in this case that we didn't need more than one or two of those we experimented with inverting the power supply for some of our thermal tests but moving the power supply lower brought back the same problems with GPU clearance that we had with the RM 6 with DX it was a struggle to get everything wet din it could be done but the power supply begins blocking the right half of the card and if your fins are oriented horizontally in the card that means exhausting straight into a wall a steel wall probably from the Paris fly the extension cable isn't quite long enough either to reach the opposite corner of the case unless it's routed through the interior which is obviously ugly making this orientation even more difficult to set up you'd probably want to get a different extension cable to make things cleaner we did so many thermal tests that Patrick spent nearly a week longer on this case review than we typically spend we are definitely going to lose money on this review it's worth it though because we really wanted to give the case a fair shot and we also retested the test bench in other cases that we've previously reviewed to validate that it's performance was unchanged and reliable and it did pass validation here's a list of those tests we'll I don't know put it on the screen or something or maybe show us some of the happened but there's a lot so number one torture no front filter power supply moved and one fan was another test since we used an SFF power supply we were able to flip it and put it cable end up and install it on the bottom half of the front panel under the GPU and put 120 millimeter Noctua fans where the power supply had been another test upright with two fans the next test on its side with two fans this is the same as above or previously but with the case on its side since there's barely any clearance for air intake on the bottom of the case with it upright number five on its side plus two fans no filters number six of eight better exhaust same as the original test but with the stock fan swapped out for a knock to oh on number seven best case test a last-ditch effort to make the case cool well with our setup and last best case with front exhaust because the results still weren't great we did one final test with the NZXT fan flipped around in the front to exhaust out of the front panel the stock tortured test was the worst 4cv temperature with an average of seventy four point four degrees Celsius over ambient under a torture workload so this chart is showing just the Q 500 L variations right now look at comparative data momentarily and remember that's over ambient so in reality seventy four point four degrees when accounting for ambient becomes closer to well about a hundred degrees when you look at the peaks this means that at times the CPU is forced to down clock which is something we rarely see in case reviews normally removing the front filter would significantly help but since the power supply was blocking the section of the front panel in front of the CPU cooler the effect on CV temperature is negligible and clocks dropped to about the same degree we ended up at a 74 degree celcius measure for this test not changing much at all other than the idle temperatures adding one fan and turning the case on its side helped a little bit but since the added fan was on the lower half of the panel it only lowered the CPU temperature by a couple of degrees to 71 point four degrees over ambient throttling was less severe but still present using the stock configuration with a higher quality knock to a 1500 RPM fan replacing the stock 1200 RPM fan helped to lower CPU dial the temperature by roughly the same amount down to 70 point nine degrees Celsius over ambient and also not enough once again to prevent throttling every test from here down kept the CPU cool enough to prevent down clocking which is good because they all used an additional case fan for cooling the CPU specifically either pulling air directly in from the front panel or at a right angle from the top panel into the CPU tower core will open up a comparative chart now but will port over the best results with all of our changes to the Q 500 out the best result was sixty one point four degrees Celsius over ambient with the case on its side two added fans and all filters removed and that's still among the very hottest results on our chart the Q 500 out with all of that extra help is still almost on the level of the SL 600 I'm in terms of CPU cooling and that's a case with a completely sealed front panel no stock fans directly aimed at the CPU cooler and only bottom intake which is very far away from the CPU and useful primarily for GPU cooling the bottom intake also has to get around the GPU so a bigger card will further restrict CPU cooling performance that should illustrate where the Q 500 I'll land everything in this case is in tight proximity and airflow isn't as good as it could be with a normal fan mount the perforated panels are great for allowing flexibility but they allow less air through than a normal hole in a case would and are comprised of too much steel and too little hole the tightly confined space doesn't help either with little room for radiative heat to escape but we've seen small cases manage decent cooling before the big problem is that with a full ATX board the power supply has to be placed on the front panel depending on where it's placed either the GPU or the CPU will suffer as a result three of the four hottest GPU tests were also the test where an intake fan was placed on the bottom of the case pointed directly into the GPU cooler where the GPU die is located in fact of the ten torture test passes that we ran in different configurations six of the seven worst GPU temperature results were with a fan added specifically meant to benefit the GPU common sense dictates that these should be the coolest results especially with the case on its side however with a positive pressure setup in such a small case a problem develops with where the hot air goes we initially thought that maybe the loose bottom filter was allowing the bottom intake fan to recirculate hot air from inside the case rather than pulling air in through the filter from the outside but removing it only lowered thermals by a couple degrees in terms of both temperature and average frequency the best result was achieved by just replacing the stock exhaust fan and leaving the rest of the case stock our observation is that this is a mixture of problems we have a scenario where a tall GPU is butted up right against the side panel on one side the other side of the card is against the power supply and so the air wants to escape at the rear PCIe slot and also into the power supply at the front because the fins are oriented horizontally the air hitting the power supply will get recirculated into the GPU fans causing the video card to pull in its own hot exhaust and recycle it there isn't enough exhaust away from the card to keep ambient low and so we hit run away scenarios where thermals keep climbing as the card throttles there isn't enough exhaust to balance all the hot intake and the fans on the bottom that are doing intake are really just pushing that hot air back into the card where it came from one key observation is that in the test where a fan was added to the front panel aim so that it would push air front to back underneath the GPU and the case was laid on its side CPU temperature lowered while GPU temperature rose the stock configuration the CPU cooler and exhaust fans drew hot air away from the GPU and out of the case worsening CPU temperatures in the process where you have radiative heat issues again off the back of the car when a decent intake fan has added the case goes from negative pressure to positive pressure which influences how the air paths form in the case when the GPU and CPU are both spinning their fans comparatively the queue 500l does poorly on our chart with all the other cases even when we tried hard to get it to do well it just didn't rank well on the stack and is one of the worst cases we've worked with in our entire case review history this chart of average GPU frequency tells more of the story we were hitting 84 degrees Celsius on the card regularly with our joint thermal torture which means dropping clocks to keep temperatures at 84 C this is Boost 3.0 at work performance starts to fall off as a result of this that is clearly an exhaust problem based on this sort of odd line up by first look and we are also dealing with issues of the CPU air flow and GPU airflow directly impacting each other more than in the other cases we've worked with this is due to a smaller interior and obstructions scattered throughout the case like the proximity to the glass panel and the proximity of the power supply you could brute-force things to make it work better like blasting the GPU fans be at 90% using the CLC for the CPU but they will still cool comparatively worse two other cases and will also become much louder we normally run only one fire strike test and the stock case configuration but since the stock configuration of this case caused our CPU to overheat so much we decided to try an additional batch the stock configuration resulted in a GPU temperature of sixty point seven degrees Celsius over ambient which is a number that practically ties it with the antec p8 and among the hottest cases on the chart it'd be difficult for a case to score a GPU temperature higher than this the GPU we use for testing down clocks in an attempt to maintain a max temperature of about 84 degrees Celsius and it usually does so successfully in the fire strike test but not always in the torture test if you had doubts about previous results because of how stressful the torture test is realize that fire strike is a gaming workload this is gaming performance and so we'd be dropping frequency and framerate even during just playing a game that's intensive enough CPU temperature in this test was 45 degrees over ambient we normally don't comment on CPU temperature at all for this test but the only other case that had a CV temperature over 40 C with fire strike was the wal-mart case the SiO 600m is up there demonstrating limitations with its design but it makes up for it with the best GPU thermals blender CPU rendering resulted in a CPU temperature of 45 degrees Celsius higher than any case except the Walmart one the additional fan had negligible effect at 44 degrees Celsius over ambient with an error here and this is just a cpu workload so once again it's it's hot even when only one component is doing any real work GPU rendering averaged a GPU temperature of 35 degrees Celsius over ambiens but there are a couple of cases on the chart that were hotter the antec p8 again and the corsair spec for the additional fan lowered temperature by about one degree Celsius but that isn't enough to beat out any of the other cases noise levels for this case aren't useful for strict comparison to other cases on the chart because we had to use a different power supply and the power supply fan is front and center on this case which strongly affects the results under load the little enter max fan brought the system up to 51 point 4 DBA the idle number is much closer to being useful as a fair comparison to the other charts because it's well it behaves similarly to the corsair fan that we normally use here in the power supply we normally use so under idle results are at 30 8.6 DBA which would put it at just about average that's with only one fan though stock positioned at the very rear of the case and as far as possible from the DB meter there's no noise damping in this case and the limited size and cooling capacity means that without liquid cooling most builds will have some small and noisy fans running at a relatively high rpm problems with this case you've seen a lot of them already but here's the big thing to get around a lot of the thermal issues we saw you would have to change parts down to smaller parts or go liquid and brute force it and once you're going towards small form-factor video cards for example you're probably spending more money you're dealing with more limited options on the market and you might as well just build an actual small form-factor system at that point there's a really small market of people who want an ATX motherboard an SFF video card SFF cooler and and for some reason still have extra PCIe slots so that is a small market and if you're starting to reduce components sighs just to make this case work thermally you should just buy a smaller case that's more appropriately designed for a mini ITX system and has better air flow channels setup so that's one of the issues the upside that you get with this thing is that it's small and at 60 dollars you might be able to justify using the case if you can budget a bit for a fan you should absolutely at least buy one extra fan if you use lower power consuming components if you are ok with maybe brute forcing the CPU cooling with a closed-loop liquid cooler it's not going to perform as well as a CLC would in a different case that's maybe comparable in price like for example you can get an H 500 from NZXT or an S 340 or you can get something like the RL 0-6 for reasonably cheap pretty close to this price point all those things would do better than this thermally they're a bit larger though and that's the downside the other downside though is brute forcing by liquid it's still not as good as using that same cooler in a better design case but it won't throttle so you can make it work it's just you start spending enough money extra to make this case work well that you really might as well just start with a better case and other than all of that the video cards are still kind of going to be problematic if they're anything even like mid-range or higher and because you start running into issues where there's just they generated enough heat and there's nowhere for the heat to go once it's created and depending on which way the fins are oriented if they are horizontal this way in the case you're venting air slightly out of the case which is good and then the rest of its going to go hit a power supply or going to be recirculated I'll spray it like we saw in a lot of our tests with extra intake fan so that's another problem if they are oriented the other way going into the case so you have a vertical orientation on the fins then the air will follow that fin path and hit the side panel at which point it again will get recirculated it doesn't really have anywhere to go so that's the downside of a small case like this it has all the other disadvantages of small form-factor cases it's just kind of generally fiddly to work with if you need to move stuff round it's not particularly easy to do compared to a larger case that's fine if you know what you're getting yourself into it's just that being an ATX board supporting case you don't necessarily expect those same limitations cable management is not bad really but that was primarily because we were using a small small form-factor power supply in order to accommodate the video card you shouldn't buy a video card that's larger than reference size you probably shouldn't be getting a car that's longer than 10 to 10.5 inches across the case because then you'll run into issues with a lot of the power supplies air coolers and even cooler master in its own guide for this case says quote thermal performance is dependent on the builds itself well of course that's why case testing is so difficult to do properly because it's the least scientific of all testing but we tried really hard to make this case not throttle and it was difficult you have to start spending a lot in fan cost just to make it work so if you're using really low end parts and you want a case that's kind of disproportionately priced to your low end parts it's not terrible it is small you just you need to use stuff that's low TDP low power draw otherwise it's gonna get kind of hot because even in fire strike which is a gaming workload it's not some insane torture workload on the CV on the GPU it's a gaming workload even and fire strike we were seeing issues with GP down clocking and excessive temperatures so this is it's an attempt at a sort of small form-factor ATX case we give coolermaster credit for finding a creative way to reuse the tooling keep the cost down and fit an ATX set of components into a small box but this isn't something we can really recommend trite now there are better options in the mid tower size you'll end up being maybe a couple inches taller maybe another two inches in that direction and you end up with a case that's significantly better and it'll cost about the same so unless you really really need this case we can't strongly recommend it and if you do want to buy it for the sighs then just make sure you're also budgeting for fans and think kind of think hard about the other components you're using consider that you might be at a higher noise level consider that you might want to brute-force with liquid and then it can all work out so yeah that's that's kind of it for this one at this point if you're going to be fitting the builds of the case then also consider just using a different case is what it comes down to so sorry this one wasn't better we know there was a lot of interest in the queue 500l because of that interest from you all on Twitter and YouTube we we tried to make it work but we couldn't it's just it doesn't get a recommendation right now as always you can subscribe for more you go to store documents access net to support us directly like by buying one of these Jian logo shirts the original shirt we made or patreon.com/scishow sexist to join our discord thank you for watching I'll see you all next time