Gadgetory

we're taking a break from $150 plus case reviews to look at something more reasonably priced this is course there's the 275 R it's an $80 case with the tempered glass version or 70 for the acrylic which more or less becomes a 270 R at this point the predecessor to this case so the main changes from the 270 R which we've actually previously given an Editors Choice Award and have recommended several times the changes primarily are tempered glass of course natural progression of the industry vertical GB amount is available there's a change front panel and that's most it there are a couple other changes we'll go through as well but those are the major ones before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently use to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below let's go over the basics and then we'll get through the gripes and the good stuff as well along with thermal and noise results first all basics if you likes the 270 our this is one of those just with the class there are some other changes as I noted one of them is the power supply shroud it now fully covers the bottom that changes some of the airflow dynamic as we'll find in the thermal section and there's rubber grommets as well so that's what's the changes in terms of cooling it has two fans of both 120 s they are located front Center middle slot here at splits between the CPU and the GPU and then the rear exhaust and there are options for an additional one 120 at the top one 120 in the bottom and some slots at the top for cooling as well so that's the that's all the cooling very basic now I've been holding this allen key and I've been dreading this moment because we need to open the case to take a look at the rest of what's inside of it and Corsairs gone with allen screws now I've been a foreigner to allen keys I build bikes literally every screw on a bike is one of these so I don't have a problem with them where they belong I don't know why they're on panel of a case though and there are four of them so what we're gonna do before progressing I'm gonna take this panel off we're gonna speed up the footage and then we're gonna talk about the process that's my favorite part of the case we'll talk about that more a second okay okay got it sorry that took a while so that's the side panel removal process basically the the problems I have with this case primarily revolve around that and it's not a bad thing to have your primary concern be four screws cuz you're probably taking it off once or twice I guess and that's hopefully the last time you'll have to deal with it it's not the most egregious thing we've seen in case design of the last year but it's annoying and let me give you the reasons why reason number one these rubber grommets two of which just fell out I mean we recorded the process all I did was unscrew them and yes I could have held the glass in place but even if you do that these rubber grommets will fall out because they just kind of sit in there and they're only pressure fitted by the screws themselves so there are four grommets they fall out it's very annoying it's even more annoying to put them back on the glass and then put the glass on the case and this is something coursers done in the past with other cases so I'd like to see a better solution to these grommets that fall out so easily secondly typically with glass panels on cases you have two primary solutions to mounting them one of them is something that Thermaltake does of all people where they hook on the bottom just with plastic or whatever material they're using down on that part of the case steel or plastic that's just a hook and so when you release it the glass leans at a 30-degree angle so that's a good solution another solution that courser has even done in the past I think including one of the recent cases is you standoffs so you can use standoffs on these four corners and actually we tried to do we tried to put case standoffs in there they're not the right thread but that's another good solution to and then you get rid of this problem as well so there are solutions to these problems and they're not being used and I don't understand why on top of all these other side panel and mounting complaints the tempered glass panel is just slightly longer than it is tall so it's easy to get halfway through the reassembly process and realize that it's on sideways so overall not the easiest thing to put on or take off the case we asked why allen key is that specifically or Allen screws were used for the glass and the phrasing of the question was more or less why not thumb screws the answer to that from Corsair was because they don't want or they're trying to avoid users getting fingerprints on the glass when removing a thumb screw couple points here one of them unless you're a gorilla removing a fat enough a sufficiently fat thumb screw we'll call it the the sft coefficient for a thumb screws a sufficiently fat thumb screw unless you're like a monster when you're trying to remove it you shouldn't be making contact with the glass in the process secondly that doesn't answer the question of why why Allen why why not Phillips and again I don't have a problem with allen keys I have probably screw specifically and how long they take to remove now I could go get my own - all but that wouldn't be what the user would be doing that's not the biggest issue there the biggest issue is just like it's it's kind of just like oversight in general because rubber grommets fall off as soon as you remove the panel panel falls off the case it's over all clumsy and doesn't make sense because Corsair themselves have made far better cases and panels on things equally priced so I don't get it I I'm I'm just I'm just confused but that's the panel we don't need to talk about that anymore the rest of the case is not that bad so they have a white and a black or gunmetal version pretty standard the white overall is a good color white is notoriously difficult to color match so match plastic and metal is difficult enough but Coursera specifically is dealing with kind of alright it looks like they're trying to simulate a brushed aluminum design on the front almost which makes it even harder to match it's pretty close it's close enough to not be like something's that really call too much attention to but it is slightly off not a big deal in this case they've done better than a lot of white cases we've looked at you can see some of the primer actually on this side I can see primer still or whatever the underlying plastic material it is I don't know if they prime it but either way it's a it's clearly a an unpainted plastic basically so some quality control stuff there nothing really major you'll never look at that part of the case once it's on the floor you're not gonna see it not a big deal for the front of the case it's pretty easy to access which is always a good thing it's just a pull on the panel like usually so we like that of course pretty simple though there's a good dust filter right here generally easy to access the the other quarter case we just looked at the 500d which is way more expensive has those nice side pole filters but for an $80.00 case that's pretty standard nothing too special there but nothing that they've done wrong so we like that overall I guess I'll mention as well there's an LED here too and we actually like the way this was implemented so it's not like the Silverstone one where you get the the under glow logo it's just under glow in general it's just I think it's just a white LED and it connects via cable just to the front IO or the top IO so you don't need an extra cable for the LED which is great this is a problem on some cases where you end up with a lot of extra cables just for some aesthetic LED why there so you think about it there's zero reason that an LED needs to take up an entire slot on a motherboard somewhere or a molex connector they don't draw that much power so of course their job well done here we like that it's integrated with the i/o PCB so it's all nice and clean and the user doesn't have to anything take-up motherboard slots with it we like that on the interior the 275 R is functionally identical to the 270 R which is a good thing we like the 270 R it's functionally identical though not literally we tried switching the 275 R's tempered glass onto the 270 R but the chassis is slightly too big the cable cutouts now have rubber grommets and well-placed cable tie points around them on the 275 R and the power supply shroud now extends the full length of the case but otherwise it's fairly similar the cutout in the shroud for the GPU power cables is a feature we'd like to see more often and one that we liked a lot the interior features the direct airflow path TM cooling which is apparently a trademark able phrase that relates to not having Drive cages in front of the fan but I mean you can have direct airflow paths insofar as I the the panel I guess not allowing it but their version of direct airflow path means there's no stuff here in the hard drive cage area it doesn't mean a literal direct airflow path like straight into the fan and straight into the CPU but whatever it's just marketing so overall we do like the interior layout of the case there are the usual 2 3.5 inch drive sleds situated in the bottom under the power supply shroud pretty standard these days and there are also two 2.5 inch SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray so you can fit a total of four drives and then thankfully the 3.5 inch cage is also attached by screws rather than being riveted which is another problem we have with a lot of cases and the screws of course can be removed so if you need more space for a longer power supply or cables are just getting messy they're not using a hard drive you can get rid of the cage pretty easily before getting into the thermal section first some discussion on the 270 R versus this case this is basically a refresh it's in the same family they've added five numerically to the value so it's obvious as refresh and that's fine it has tempered glass it's made some other changes that we actually do like quite a bit it's made some changes obviously that we don't like but that's the nature of any product revision now in terms of thermals and other differences acoustically there's not really going to be any difference because there's still the two fans that are basically the same specs spin at the same rpm with the same front panel situation more or less thermally there are differences in some tests and to give you an idea before getting into the charts of why they are different keep in mind that the front panel is significantly different on the 270 are where there are mesh guidelines on the front sides and it's a different size different depth and a different angle of intake for for the panels so this swoop on the side is slightly angled and then more importantly the power supply shroud again is longer on this case that will impact GPU thermals additionally as a small note the 270 R has a grill in the front of its short terminating power supply shroud which also impacts thermals so you will see differences between the two cases despite being basically the same family the same fan configuration and the same layout internally we went overboard with the additional tests this time again but it couldn't be helped our initial plan was just to test the stock configuration an additional 140 millimeter intake fan and vertical GPU orientation which would make six test runs along with our 3d mark and blender tests when we installed the 140 fan though the resulting temperatures were higher than they had been before fitting the extra fan into place required moving the stock intake fan down slightly but logically there should have been more airflow across every component retesting showed the same results multiple times our theory is that in the stock configuration one intake 1 exhaust our CPU tower cooler independently pulls cool air in through the large top vent in the case adding the 140 millimeter nock to a fan in front of the CPU cooler created a positive pressure inside the case which meant that the cooler would now receive air only from the intake fans as opposed to drafting it independently through the top vents which were only a couple inches away from the CPU tower fan because of the extremely closed off front panel the intake fans probably recirculate some warm air from inside the case raising the CB Richard to verify this we did more tests with the top vent taped shot and by the time we were done with everything we'd done more than 12 test runs and figured it out though starting with 275 are only for torture testing our CB torture test average 55 degrees Celsius over ambient for the CPU temperature with the stock configuration taking the front panel off lowered this to 50 point 2 degrees Celsius delta T over ambient as expected and that's not the worst Delta for a panelist test that we've ever seen so really not too critical here couple degrees 5 degrees is certainly decent but it's not like 10 as we've seen on some other cases Corsairs panel isn't as much of a limiter as its stock fan configuration is here but it certainly isn't helping as mentioned before adding an extra fan actually raised this temperature to fifty eight point eight degrees delta T over a mid and one test and fifty eight point nine degrees in another we saw consistency we knew that taping the case shot would make temperatures warmer overall but if our theory was true it would flip the order of results and a test with an additional fan would be cooler taping the top shot in stock configuration raises the CPU temperature from 55 to 61 point four degrees with the extra fan in place taping the top shot had barely any effect and the temperature only grew or increased by 0.1 degrees over the stock test that's well within margin of error a vertical GPU orientation also resulted in a fifty eight point eight degrees Celsius delta T with warm air dumped out of the GPU cooler and into the CPU above partly radiative heat off the backside and partly the open face design spewing air into the glass so before we get into the comparative chart for CPU thermal is just to make that perfectly clear basically what we found with our very specific configuration this is not universally true case testing is the least scientific of all testing because there are a million variables so with that said with our specific configuration a 140 millimeter fan here didn't really help anything for CPU thermals and we strongly believe that the reason for this after taping off the top and doing additional validation runs is that the CPU teracle is so close to this top vent that it's able to just pull air in through the outside and shoot it out the back as expected when we put the knife to a fan here what's happening is the the pressure going into the case now exceeds the pressure going out of the case we have a positive pressure setup the air from the front is partly coming out of the top on its own and some of that's making it to the CPU cooler the CPU cooler is no longer drawing air externally that's our hypothesis additionally we believe that the open-faced cooler on the card spoken from experience is pushing some of its warmed air into the power supply shroud we've found that this these shrouded cases do have the impact of increasing GPU temperature it pushes its air into the shroud that air will get recirculated because it has to get out of the case and unless it's getting out through the minimal amount of cracks and the i/o covers in the back of the expansion slot covers what it's doing ultimately is getting pulled back up through the CPU fan and pushed out the back of the case so that's what we think is happening comparatively for CPU temperature 55 degrees Celsius is approximately what CV temperature was in the 270 are with the case fans running at 10:50 rpm but running them at full speed like we do with all of our stock tests that lowered the temperature in the 270 our two fifty two point eight degrees the 275 R and 270 are not significantly different in thermal performance from one another generally but when we increase the fan speeds to max on each we are seeing some difference and the fans do run at the same rpm spec the vo 71 and s 340 elite are all serve on this temperature range but the similarly priced mattify C and cheaper plastic sided redlines euro six are both cooler CPU temperature was 57 point one degrees in the torture test with a best-case delta-t of fifty three point three degrees with the front panel removed as with the CPU adding an additional fan raised the temperature to fifty seven point eight and fifty eight point four in two tests although the increase is smaller and therefore less conclusive existing within error margins there is somewhat of an increase that we saw a couple of times with the top taped shut and in stock configuration GPO temperature actually drops it to 55 degrees exiting the margin of error and that establishes that the pressure patterns in the with our specific cooler and videocard created the behaviors we saw elsewhere temperature also increased back to fifty eight point one degrees Celsius within margin of error of stock baseline with the additional fan added back in GPO temperatures are already difficult to compare thanks to frequency boosting but there are also some very specific airflow and pressure patterns at work here and there effecting results in some ways that are very subtle but we can say for sure is that our system is behaving in a way that is influenced by the pressure almost more than that extra fan and that's going to depend on which fan you use as well naturally mounting the GPU vertically resulted in a comically high temperature of sixty nine point seven degrees Celsius over ambiens which was almost a welcome return to sanity no matter what vertical gb amount sucked for open phase cart accounting for ambient that puts us into the nineties and GPU throttling hits hard at eighty four C and again at 60 degrees Celsius so we're well above both of those numbers comparatively the baseline fifty-seven point one degree measurement is much warmer than the 270 r's fifty one point six degrees and more comparable to the pure base six hundreds best results or the in win 805 i it's on the warm end of the chart definitely but doesn't cause the runaway thermals we see with for example vertically mounted GPUs of course there's previous cases performed better for our configuration with GPU cooling which we believe to be a factor of the front panel changes primarily and the very significant power supply shroud change along gating it and the latter is more likely to impact GP performance most heavily the two seventy-five are landed at the high end of our 3d mark results with the GBO temperature of sixty point one degrees celsius that's in between the BitFenix ENSO and fractals to see series cases which ship with a similar fan layout cases with full shrouds that rely on a single intake fan to push air above and below the GPU tend to do poorly with GPU cooling in our tests but a case like the mesh of icy can scale up performance with additional fans better because it does have that mesh front despite being not perfectly flat rendering with blender on the CPU CPU temperature during the test was thirty nine degrees Celsius that's average equal to the dark base pro 900 M between the KL o 7h 500 P neither of which or cases we praised for cooling the measure Phi undefined cases were slightly warmer than the 275 are here rendering on the GPU G via temperature during the test was twenty nine point six degrees Celsius that's close to the define are six a case with one more fan but it's also pretty close to the age 500 P and stock mesh if I see again but cooler than the stock define C for once and finally for noise 37.4 DBA is on the same level as the spec oh four and two seventy are with the stock fan configuration at Matic speeds both fellow Corsair cases with 120-millimeter front mounted fans the front panel may be sealed but it's still made of thin plastic with open gaps on either side more fans added to the front of this case means more air trying to rush through those narrow gaps which also means more noise like the Silverstone pmo to that we just reviewed the Corsair 275 are needs to justify its existence against its own predecessor this is a matter of course sir battling themselves as Silverstone just did for the 270 are in the conclusion of our review what we said was this based on it's 60 to 70 dollar price point and assertive posture against nearby competition we awarded it an Editors Choice Award and we went on to use it in our November budget build in 2017 and in accidentally in 2016 as well both years we didn't mean to use the same case but we did because the value was really good and 2017 it was down to 50 bucks and even now it's 60 ish this case is $80 the acrylic version is $70 the acrylic version changes even less obviously than this one does from the 275 are the change at that point is this it not even just this it's it's this it's the whole what you're getting for $10 more is less plastic basically or metal meshing or whatever other than that it's relocated i/o and a slightly longer power supply shroud these are not things that you spend extra money for over the two 7er which is still a great case we still recommend it highly so all that said then where does the 275 are stack up well coarser has a history of dropping their case prices slowly over time as most companies do and over the course the next year we wouldn't be surprised to see this case followed by another $10 if it does it has now become the 270 are and that case stops production or maintains the same price be what worth buying one of these I suppose but at $80 for the tempered glass version there are a lot of cases in that price range that can boast tempered glass now if that's what you really want so this is becoming a trend now with our last few reviews for cases basically when it comes down to is how much do you like the look of this case versus other cases in the same price range if you have your heart set on this case and you really like it there is nothing comically bad about it like with other cases we've reviewed in the past year it's not bad the case itself is fine it has a few things we didn't like obviously the tempered glass can be the butt of a joke but realistically you're not removing the glass that much as much as I hate the way it's installed and the test to the choices to use the screws and the grommets they did it's not that big of a deal so playing it up yes but that's not a big deal so then ultimately there's nothing terribly wrong with it the coins not great it's okay if you're building an $80 in an $80 case you're probably building with budget components you're not worrying about a 10 atti is worth of heat not worrying about an 80 700k is worth of heat so you have less thermal concern in that department which means that this configuration may well be fine for the system you're building if you're building something that is higher-end then probably add fans to it just know that with any case that has a panel like this obviously you're gonna run into limitations but this case is just fine so it's kind of the trend lately it's okay we'd like to see it cheaper it's odd that courser is competing against a 270 are in some ways because it is really a good case at its price and that's why it's good the two-seven er is specifically good because of its price this loses that so at $80 we wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you really like it in which case it's fine don't feel bad about buying it but if you want to look at other options there are things that do everything a little bit better the are l06 once again is the best cool in its class and is actually a little bit cheaper just realize that it's like ten bucks cheaper the other options Corsair zone 400 see if you're willing to spend about $10 more that's a great case it works pretty well thermally from our testing it has some build features and the ease of installation features we liked a lot and it's just a bit more expensive there are plenty of other options as well we had them in the charts if you're interested in them or check Patrick's written review in the article below or we'll have a couple of extra discussion points on this case and its competition so that's all for this one basically it's okay that subscribe for more as always go to store that game as exits net to pick up a shirt like this one this is the GN 10-year anniversary edition shirt and I'll see you all next time