Gadgetory

this is the seventh case that Coolermaster has made this year there's the H 500 and the SL 600 M it is in fact a non 500 numbered case so one of the more interesting ones we saw it at Computex and it's interesting because it tries to use the bottom the top intake path which is actually it's done pretty well in the past so we were excited to try that with this one it's not an inverted motherboard layout like the R v02 or anything like that so all we're doing here is taking what would typically be in the front in this case 200 meter fans 2 of them putting them in the bottom and allowing the air to go straight up and out so very interesting airflow path will have a lot of thermal data on that and at $200 it's also pretty competitive with a lot of the other $200 cases that have come out this year this year seems to be pretty big for those higher-end cases so we're going to look at this one today and see if it's actually worth the price before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly's high-end thermal paste and liquid metal thermal Grizzly's cryo knot is an affordable high quality thermal compound that doesn't face some of the aging limitations of other pastes on the market cryo knot has a thermal conductivity of 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin focuses on endurance is easy to spread and isn't electrically conductive making it safe to use on GPU dies thermal grizzly also makes conductor not liquid metal which we've used to drop 20 degrees off some temperatures than our dee-lighted test by a tube at the link in the description below so this case then at 200 bucks it's competing with a few things get those out of the way first first of all there are plenty of h5 series cases from Coolermaster itself so you're competing with their own H 500 be matched about 150 really good case at that price the H 500 M which compared to the mesh's feels a bit expensive but it's about this price and then NZXT is got their age 700 everything has an H in it is the rule here and there are a couple others as well but fantex has the Evolve ex that we just looked at the non upgrade kit that's 200 bucks as well so there are a lot of $200 cases this year and this one let's go over the main features before we go through the build notes and the really dense thermal section this time four core features obviously we got to talk about the front panel on the back first now if you've already typed your comment it's probably time to scroll down and delete unless you want to leave it there to increase our engagement because no it is not actually a closed-off front panel with no intake anywhere it is a closed-off front panel with intake on the bottom but they've left enough room here a significant amount of room where it can actually breathe pretty well and we tested this so we we have a trick we do when manufacturers say we use chimney effects or stack effects cooling and they talk about how it's all just natural convection hot air rises all that stuff what we like to do is we like to take the case and do this and now that's the front and that's the back it's hardness testing okay so this stack back this chimney back yes it's a real thing absolutely there's science to it of course we know that but the point we always make is hot air rising doesn't really overcome the power of a bunch of fans and directional airflow and so if you flip this case does the chimney effect still matter it is now a horizontal chimney it's more of an exhaust pipe really and so with this Pat air path as you'll see in our numbers it performs about the same and that's because ultimately what you're dealing with is just some big 200 millimeter fans and then the internal case fans pushing the air wherever the air ends up going after that so the Front's closed off and the more valid reason to this not one of marketing chimney stack effects whatever cooling the more valid reason to do that is for noise isolation because now you're blocking off the only real exit path for noise to where the users sitting which is the front of the case and of course the top if it's on the floor next to you the back is closed as well and this is something that maybe should be a little more open than it is and the power supply then because the back flows the Front's closed and the bottom is occupied by 200 meter fans power supply ends up in the front and it's fan is not really so the manual kind of recommends installing it in a way that with this PSU fan ends up kind of pointing the front panel it can pull air in certainly from the bottom it's fine the power supplies can take a lot it's not completely isolated but a bit better access to air for the power supply would be a decent idea if you're doing anything with like really high wattage systems with lawn uptime something like that other interesting features so since coffee tax we noted that context that we'd like to see the top panel be have an option to be more breathable because you're gonna do bottom the top bear has to exit somewhere you can't just take the typical clothes out front design and stick it on the top so they did actually make it so that you can even just sit this kind of elevate it or remove it completely and we'll give them props to that it doesn't even look that bad when you remove it either looks just fine so completely usable in that fashion another thing here orienting the CPU cooler is a big item of consideration and one that we tested but the results are not what you would expect and we'll leave that for the thermal section so in this current setup the last test we did was with the cooler oriented vertically this is opposite what we don't really do where it's rotated about 90 degrees at counterclockwise so different testing there to look at we have numbers on that but you'll want to carefully consider your cooler choices and how you want to orient them because RAM clearance becomes a bit of a concern and then how fat the cooler is versus how large the video card is can also be a conflict if you're not going with a CLC so cooler masters done a lot of things right with this case they've done something it's kind of weird like for example the rear because the power supplies in the front you have to run a cable to the back that's fine the dark base pro 900 does it we'll talk about that more later but they really should have a power switch back there and you can do that pretty easily you just hook it right in to the cable and make it a simple toggle so that could be easily done they don't even have to run some crazy cable all the way up here they don't have the power with SATA nothing like that just a switch that hooks into the extension cord and tells it am i open or closed right now and that's all it needs but there plenty of good things to the looks are very interesting they've got some cool features up here like a motion detector for the LED or for the LED that is over the USB ports and then the rest of it comes down to a unique approach to cooling and noise and sound isolation so we'll go through the build notes and then talk thermals both the bottom and top of the case have removable fan mounts although the bottom mount is larger and a bit more difficult to remove the manual depicts installing a radiator and intake fans on top of this mount and just leaving the to 200 millimeter bottom intake fans in place which is possible but we consider moving the large fans to the top of the case in such a configuration to better allow for high pressure on the radiator since you probably have fans with it anyway the case legs are extra long to allow clearance for the bottom intake and the bottom of the chassis is lifted five point five centimeters off of the table service there's support for three hundred sixty millimeter radiators at the top or bottom but installing a full length radiator means that the PSU cover can't be extended to its full length which in turn means a more restricted cable management the front panel USB ports illuminate with white LEDs when a proximity sensor is tripped it's definitely overkill feature but it could still be helpful for finding the ports in a dark room or something like that it's not really that necessary of course but it's something unique we were able to activate the sensor from nearly 30 inches away with movement so there's a good chance that the LEDs will just stay on during normal use at least if there's any kind of movement in the room at all but it's still a cool idea and it's not on an insanely expensive case so that's good to the normal SSD mounts behind the motherboard work just fine but the combination of three and a half and two and a half inch amounts could clutter the interior depending on where they're installed sticking them on the inside of the front or back panels are good options but putting them on the bottom of the case and obstructing the intake fans is not a good option the metal plate on top of the case is pressed into place with metal pins and started into rubber washers the plate can be lifted out and then rested on the post so that there's some extra room to allow for air flow while preserving the overall look of the case or it can be taken off completely this is the change that was made sort of live during copy taks where coolermaster already started making the decision to allow for this semi modular top panel it's nice to see Coolermaster offering an option again for better cooling even if strictly looks focused users may not take advantage of it it's good to have there you never know when you might need it extra couple degrees for some really work intensive tasks the front of the case is dedicated to housing the power supply and is unventilated this is by design the back of the case is also sealed as tightly as possible and bow decisions are intentional Coolermaster wants air to enter the bottom of the case and eggs at the top with as few complications as possible the aluminum front plate is secured to the underlying frame with screws but unfortunately a couple of these screws didn't make contact in our sample and the plate arrived loose not a big deal and easy enough to fix there was also a small piece of plastic broke off from the inside of the panel so it was shipping damage it's okay it's not gonna happen to everyone but we did want to know it it may be cool air mask can make sure it's packed extra carefully for that front panel either way though easy enough to work with and easy enough to retighten if it did arrive loose and your scenario the floor is lava in the SL 600 there's no power supply shroud at the bottom which would be the usual spot to hide extra cables and there are 400 millimetres of spinning fan blades instead the power supply is housed in a two-part cover at the front of the case which can be adjusted to take up more or less space as desired we have a lot of loose cables in our case review system so we set it to the maximum possible size and still found it a little cramped Coolermaster did a good job of providing plenty of tie points along the front and bottom edges of the case but this case still requires more care than usual in strapping down every loose end to get the panel on and make sure nothing falls by way of gravity into the fans one very minor points related to the power supply placement is that there is no easily accessible power switch on the case SL 600m uses an internal extension cable to reach the power supply just like the dark base pro 900 did but the DBP added a secondary power switch to the rear of the case since the real power supply switch was inaccessible Coolermaster should have done the same here it's an oversight it's a small one but it is an oversight by Coolermaster and something that we think they could fairly easily improve for the next iteration coolermaster mentions the quote chimney affects multiple times their marketing material the idea is that since hot air naturally rises it's better to push air bottom to top rather than front to back the foundation for this is fact but it is overcome by the power of forced airflow can't really beat thousands of rpm with just natural rising of hot air as we discussed in the RV zero to review it really doesn't matter all that much for cases like these PC cases are metal boxes that are covered in fans it completely upsets natural convection as with the RV zero two we tested this by flipping the case onto its front panel and seeing whether that changed anything and you'll see those results momentarily even if it doesn't though that doesn't mean that the layout isn't beneficial it's just for other reasons not that specific reason of hot air rising we also tested with a top panel popped up the top panel removed and in the vertical GPU configuration we chose to utilize the SL 600 ms rotatable pci bracket window to mount the GPU as close to the motherboard as possible for optimal airflow getting it closer to the motherboard and farther from the window will increase the amount of breathable air in front of the card which is counter it's what we typically see with these configurations there are two slots already vertical in the stock configuration appropriate for liquid cooled cards but otherwise rotating the bracket window is a better and functionally identical choice the main advantage of using these stock vertical slots is that it also allows installing PCI devices in the normal horizontal slot simultaneously whereas rotating the window means that every usable expansion slot is vertical and requires a riser cable for the best thermals it would be ideal to rotate the CPU cooler as well so that it lines up with the case airflow in theory anyway and so we decided to rotate our cooler from its standard configuration for a couple of passes a vertical orientation on the cooler as well note that we had to change our memory due to memory clearance issues with air cooler rotated this way but also memory doesn't really impact thermal results in any meaningful way talking less than a watt of difference in most scenarios so unfortunately this is a temporary change of configuration but we wanted to note it be aware that the CPU temperature is it will be more sensitive in these two different types of configurations to your cooler selection than anything else compatibility will also depend on your configuration for RAM clearance and should be a consideration when buying we'll be using our standardized test configuration in the ancillary benchmarks the cooler oriented front to back for these and we'll use the cooller orientation only for the CPU and GPU torture tests let's start with just the SL 600mm cpu thermals and then look at comparative data after that we have a lot of benchmarks for different configurations here including a quote best-case configuration with the cooler oriented vertically with a vertical GPU below it CPU torture testing with the fully stock configuration brought CB temperature to sixty two point six degrees Celsius over ambient flipping the case on to the front panel and negating the supposed chimney effect actually brought the temperature down a bit falling to fifty nine point two degrees over ambient this is just outside of our error tolerances the temperature decrease is a change in impedance to the now front panel rather than pulling from a tabletop the 200 millimeter intake fans were pulling from open air that's not a huge difference though and if anything it suggests that cooler master provided sufficient clearance at the bottom of the case for vent any major problems well done by coolermaster they're popping the top panel up had approximately the same benefit to cpu cooling with a temperature of fifty nine point three degrees cells he's over ambient while removing it completely slightly lowered it again down to fifty eight point two degrees delta T it was the vertical GPU tasks that provided the most benefit for once ranking the lowest CPU temperature of all of our tests at fifty five point five degrees for this case anyway this is because mounting the GPU vertically moves it out of the way the incoming air which is more easily able to travel up to the CPU cooler and out the top of the case Eric can get around both sides of the video card which has an added benefit of providing some backplate cooling as well because the backplate on this card contacts the back of the PCB and does conduct heat so we have extra cooling advantages keep in mind that all of these tests that we just named or with the cooler in our standard position front to back we then ran two sets of tests with the cooler removed and reapplied each time with new pastes each time and with a curing period for those tests validate the data was accurate by comparing the runs to each other and to our baseline performance the new tests were with equal or vertically oriented in this configuration the tower cooler is breathing air in straight from the GPU exhaust despite being seemingly superior it actually ends up more without a specific configuration we're at 64.6 degrees over ambience approaching the 90s when considering a 22 degree room temperature and that drops to 62 degrees with the cover removed we ran this test again and validated the results let's get some shots of the case on the screen again if you're wondering why it's behaving like this first keep in mind that every configuration will behave differently and so this is representative of configurations similar to ours where you have a tower cooler not a CLC and where you have a an open face video card or something similar to this one it's pretty straight forward otherwise although the case would theoretically benefit from the cooler being oriented vertically something that Coolermaster also suggests the reality is that the cooler is now breathing and the open face card exhaust directly previously that exhaust only radiated toward the fin stack where the higher pressure of the CPU fan would push the radiative heat away from the cooler and toward the back of the case where it eventually drafted up and out an open face video card cooler is among the most common and those coolers exhaust air out of the fin stack it's getting the full exhaust of the video card here rather than whatever drifted around to the front of the cooler previously back to the comparative data though with a different chart as it is with our configuration the stock CB temperature is just bad its equivalent to the Antec p8 the case with the cooling capacity of a toaster even opening or removing the top panel still leaves the SL 600 mm at the upper end of the charge the twist is that with the GPU mounted vertically CPU temperature becomes more acceptable closer to the stock land cool want there are a few reasons for this performance again the CPU is now the most distant device from the fans rather than a typical configuration in the case where their air hits both the CPU and the GPU at roughly the same time and it's probably not been preheated by another component we've got a configuration that creates a much shorter distance to the video card in the SL 600 M that's the whole design of the case that card also partially obstructs air intakes of the CPU it pre heats the air and if it's a longer car that can cause other issues the CPU is left with breathing and warmed radiative heat off of the backside of the GPU and circulating some of the heat from the GPU but the GPU does very well stock GPU temperature was 45 degrees Celsius over ambient when loaded this changed to 45 point two degrees delta T when the case was flipped onto its front and as well within margin of error the intake fans blast to the GPU cooler equally well regardless of case orientation and hot air rising and case orientation really have nothing to do with this behavior its its fans within inches of the front of the video card opening the top panel without taking it off resulted in a temperature of forty six point one degrees within margin of error and test variance there's functionally no difference for GPU cooling which makes sense when considering the proximity to the bottom for the card and that the exhaust is really of no consequence to it this is reinforced by looking at the top removal data where forty five point five degree result tells us that these do not meaningfully affect the cheapy performance we knew mounting the GP vertically would hurt their own performance somewhat because it would no longer be directly facing the intake fans but the jump to forty eight point four degrees Celsius dollars he over ambience is reassuringly minor and sees plenty of air still makes its way into the cooler comparatively the stock GB result in the SL 600 M is a new best on our chart thanks to the extremely direct cooling from the bottom and take fan so congratulations to Coolermaster for that placement the vertical GPU temperature those slightly worse was still among the best results we've seen that means that using the vertical expansion slot closest to the motherboard is still great for GPU cooling and does a decent job at allowing CPU cooling so we definitely recommend this layout for systems using the air cooling that don't need any non GPU PCIe cards installed moving on to 3d mark using our standard I set up firestrike GPU temperature was just slightly above torture thermals averaging forty six point three degrees Celsius over ambient that's again technically better than any case on the charge although the half X is close enough as to make no difference between the two CB temperature during the test was thirty four point nine degrees which is pretty high for a benchmark that doesn't really put any serious load on the CPU that's close to BitFenix and so territory which is partly due to the airflow configuration in this case and how the video card is now an item of consideration where you're creating a wall but also dealing with radiative heat in a more significant way than is typical for the 3d mark chart the case is simultaneously the best and the worst on the chart the blender CPU rendered test raised CPU temperature to thirty eight point nine degrees over ambiens under a reasonable workload the relative performance was it better than it during the torture test because the GPU doesn't generate really much heat at all here but it's still on par with the mediocre silverstone klo 7 in performance this test does confirm that the main problem with CPU thermals isn't the heat that it generates on its own it's also the heat that the GPU generates all that extra power has to go somewhere and it isn't being circulated out because the airflow path is blocked again the vertical GP amount helps to solve this in some ways and is illustrated in our earlier charts the GPU render a verdict Riis celsius over ambient on the video card a full degree below the previous best temperature in the 1/2 X the 1/2 X is CPU temperature during this test with 26.8 for consideration while the SL 600m was thirty point eight degrees Celsius over ambience moving on to noise with the fans at max speed the SL 600m reached thirty seven point seven DBA given the cooling performance that's reasonable it's around the Obsidian 500 D or the s 340 elites the size of the two hundred millimeter fans gives the case a bit of an advantage in this area because a bigger fan can spin slower to move the same amount of air through a wider hole placing the fans on the bottom also helps here as does sealing the case in the front and the back because those are the panels that would most likely impact what the user picks up audibly cluemaster zone h 500 h 500 p and h 500 m cases use the same fans but are all marginally louder because of the case laughs the fans position toward the front of the case where the user is most likely seated according to cooler masters marketing materials where the review guides things like that that they've sent out the SL 600 M is intended to keep quote both professionalism and performance intact while also taking on noise reduction and airflow presumably not reduction of airflow that's it's a decent description of what's going on here the case does definitely look interesting and depending on how you feel about it it's probably leaning towards the good side it's it's a very unique look I'll leave it to you whether you like that or not as that its objective so they've done something different there it does kind of have that sleek professionalism motif that's going on now and other than that with the right layout the interior of the SL 600 M can definitely act like a wind tunnel which is a good thing while staying relatively quiet so they've done well their component selection is important so as we've always talked about case testing is difficult because every single component is a variable and there's no avoiding it and so for our testing we found that open-face cards positioned vertically actually do really well if you don't have other PCI devices you need connected we would recommend that configuration tower coolers are a bit rough so to fix the CPU thermal numbers we had here what we would recommend is probably put another exhaust somewhere in the case and maybe even leave the cooler oriented that way really it has to test it see how your specific configuration does but for ours it would be best to rotate the cooler back the traditional way contrary to what you might think cuz there's no exhaust here put a fan up top and then as it blows the air out it'll help get rid of it but it's tough because really what we'd like to see is still a hole in the back here I mean really closing it off you get an SSD mount or drive them out there but at the end of the day this back panel being closed is not contributing in a major fashion to noise isolation because it's not gonna be near the user at all so we'd like to see this opened up and then have a fan mount out in there instead because then then you can have really good GPU cool I mean the the GPU thermals and our charts were the best so cooler master has chart tops now for GP thermals and that's great for them and of course they've done well there but the CPU thermal it's like it's the best and the worst case for cooling simultaneously CPU thermals you can cut you can conquer them two ways you can get a CLC in there or something like that and relative to other cases it will be warmer but it'll be cool enough that it's not really that important or Coolermaster perhaps consider in the future doing a whole back where it goes here and allowing an exhaust fan and that would free up a lot of the thermal Headroom for the CPU that we lose from shoving all the GPU heat into it so some items consideration we like the case overall it does fine it's got a lot of competitors age 700 is a great one to look at H 500 P mesh is another good one to look at if you want to say 50 bucks and get some more cool InFocus age 500 M if you like Coolermaster and want something that's a bit different looking on this and then fantex evolve X is another one to consider we have reviews of all those cases on our channel check them out if you want to see more but this one's done quite a few things right and as a consequence of being unique it's also got some really peculiar thermal characteristics but ones which you can overcome just plan for them and you'll be fine but this configuration is great for GPU and not so much for CPU so that's it for this one as always thank you for watching go to store documents X it's not net to help us out directly by picking up something like one of our mod mats or our almost sold out limited edition shirt and you can go to patreon.com/scishow cameras x elves out there as well subscribe for more I'll see you all next time