Gadgetory

courser decided to release this the 280x it's a pseudo small form-factor case but it fits micro ATX and mini ITX this was launched during Computex and we originally shot our review before leaving for the show but held publication to revise for accuracy upon seeing launch marketing materials the case is a micro ATX tower that accommodates a mini ITX and an m-80 ax in a sort of small box like a mini tower but doesn't promote itself heavily on the small form factor or ITX front for this case we use our I TX test bench for imperfect testing of something that wouldn't accommodate our ATX bench obviously although we are considering adding a micro ATX test bench for the onslaught of cases throughout later this year in the meantime consider this a study on air flow using an ITX test bench useful for basic concepts with the 280x although you should ultimately use it for micro ATX if you're going that route before that this video is brought to you by us and the gamers Nexus anti-static mod map the GN anti-static Mada is a four foot by two foot surface two millimeters thick of high-quality industrial grade anti-static material and it includes a common ground point for earth a grounding wrist strap and it has on its electrical wiring diagrams that may prove useful a GPU silhouette and grid for your teardown efforts and other useful items go to stored on cameras nexus dotnet to pick up a GN mod mat today so for this case basically even though it's kind of billed as an MIT X case you could also kind of Co the micro ATX route it is a larger case so mini ITX maybe not the most appropriate branding for this type of build it's a large box if you measure in terms of litres which is the most appropriate measurement for mini ITX or small form-factor systems this is one of the largest ones we've reviewed thus far if not the largest by quite a bit it's significantly larger than the Thermaltake core v1 which is already in debatable territory at 20-plus litres for its size it's way way larger than the SG series silverstone case is the Raven series Silverstone cases so it's quite big and that poses for tests and it means that unfortunately the testing that we plan for with many ITX cases is not as representative of most real-world cases as we would like in this instance we're still going to do the tests I'll walk you through the results just keep in mind that because this is a larger case you can actually fit a small tower cooler on here you're not forced to use a downdraft cooler like we are using for our standardized test and have to use for standard eye test testing so you can use a smaller a small tower cooler you could use a CLC mounts at the front it's got to front fan options it has top fan options as tempered glass covering all of those unfortunately it also has a couple of mesh filters some of which make more sense than others the one on the top for instance doesn't make a whole lot of sense because it's already set up as exhaust so it really should be an optional filter it's not gonna be filtering much dust there's a glass sheet on top of it and it's blowing air out but it's there nonetheless it does restrict air flow a bit it'd be nice to just put it as an option but either way you can take it out yourself and we would recommend you do so if you leave this in the stock configuration the top exhaust fan other than that the side panel the other side panel does have filtered well you can put a fan there if you wanted to otherwise the other side is for the power supply and this is a carbon part metallized case so the left side compartment my left you are right is where the power supply the SSD is the hard drive and the cables are housed it's very large actually you don't need a mess of X PSU we're using the N arm access of X PSU for a standardized testing you can use a more normal sized ATX power supply if you wanted to the right side is also pretty large for the type of case that it is and houses the rest of the component stock it comes with two fans one on the front one at the top and we're gonna go through Patrick's build notes for the rest and then get into thermals and noise and some concluding thoughts the - ATX is a bit similar to eleven dynamic and appearance and layout just less so in terms of fitting ATX motherboards the larger section of the case houses the motherboard and GPU CPU of course and the smaller chamber to the right holds the power supply the drives and the cables jogger support is as good as many mid towers with a hard drive cage that can hold two three and a half inch drives and another cage that can hold three two and a half inch drives both of these cages are removable and held in by a thumb screw which is nice but there was plenty of room even with the cages installed for cable management and other endeavors the PSU and hard drive cage are stacked on top of each other and are accessible from the rear of the case which makes adding and removing hard drives extremely easy repeatedly opening the case during testing got old very quickly the top and side glass panels are held on with four thumb screws apiece but we've seen better designs from coarser before and we'd like to see manufacturers move towards more convenient ways to fasten glass panels some have others are lagging behind a bit the rubber washers that pad the glass are held somewhat captive in the panel which is also nice and they hold the panels away from the case so that there's a little bit of airflow much like the view 71 except not that much the front glass panel isn't intended to be removable and is unfortunately held captive by plastic pegs and sticky tape in order to remove the front filter either remove the front fan or the whole front panel assembly must be removed removing the glass would be much quicker and we suspect that it may have originally been intended to be removable but they end up putting sticky tape on there for some reason instead making it much harder to take out and of course limited in the amount of times you could take it out cable management is excellent since there's so much room behind the motherboard there a cable tie point scattered around but there was so much room for loose cables that we didn't need to use any of them cutouts are huge well placed and more plentiful than they are in most full-sized cases even but micro ATX boards will cover two of the largest cutouts towards the front of the case there are two 120 or 140 millimeter fans each on the top front and bottom of the case and one more on the non glass side the side mount isn't particularly useful but it's better to have too many family occasions than too few neither of the bottom mounts are filled in the stock configuration but a bottom intake configuration would be a good fit if this case had actual legs of any length unfortunately because there aren't any included that are longer you really shouldn't be using the bottom for any kind of fans because there just isn't enough clearance we'd like to see at least an inch there and optional feet would be a good way to achieve that as it is airflow is just as restricted from the bottom as it is from the front but for different reasons moving on to thermals noise for additional testing for this one we limited ourselves to a noise normalize test and we also had one test of the top filter removed the top filter is completely unnecessary in the stock top exhaust configuration as the glass panel prevents any or most dust from passively settling into the case anyway and I recommend moving it for anything but a top intake configuration for the noise normalize test we generally turn the CPU fan down to 80% and then adjust the case fans down but the 280x was quiet enough that we were able to run the case fans at 100% and the cpu fan at 90% and again I want to be really clear here if you missed our mini ITX mini roundup a bit ago you should watch it but basically mini ITX is the least scientific type of testing possible for the most part and that goes for micro ATX testing as well particularly because we don't presently have an M ATX test bench but we can still look at build quality airflow patterns and overall value today in terms of case reviews especially mini ITX this is particularly difficult because you're dealing with things like this and it looks pretty good but it's large and the thing is when is this large it can fit way different types of coolers and other components different types of video cards even and then we have things that we more prepared for like the Raven series or SG series or really anything actually small and small form-factor and those require much more condensed componentry you're working with downdraft coolers you're potentially working with half length video cards although a lot of them support full-length and so the problem again is that as you change cases your options change and we can only do so much to try and standardize for ITX case testing before at the end of the day you just switch to a better cooler like in this instance where with this case you could probably stick a decently sized mini tower cooler on there or just some kind of CLC although it would be quite suffocated with the glass position the way it is on this case so keep all of that in mind we're not saying that the thermal data here is necessarily representative of the way you're going to build but in any case where we can compare like with the core v1 for example which can fit basically all the same hardware to this case those are pretty much linear comparisons we may end up looking into some other options for ITX cases though maybe do something like downdraft cool or really small build for SFF proper k and then have a slightly large build for oddities like this course or 280x anyway for the torture test and we'll start there and go through the rest of the numbers average CPU temperature was 71 degrees over ambient celcius for the torture test and looking at thermal so d1 degrees is the highest CPU Delta on our chart but we've only tested three small form-factor cases previously the stock intake fan has pointed directly towards the CPU cooler but hot GPU exhaust must travel upwards directly past the CPU in order to escape and the top exhaust fan drags GPU exhaust through the cooler above it the CPU cooler that is and because we're using a standardized downdraft cooler we also see significantly warmer CPU results than in cases with less aggressive top exhaust the glass front panel also doesn't do the intake any favors removing the top filter which we recommend put CPU temperatures on par with the Cryobank Taku and a couple degrees below the stock thermal take v1 moving on to tortured temperatures for GPU testing average GPA DT under torture workloads was fifty five point eight degrees Celsius in the stock configuration and wasn't significantly affected by the adjustment of the CPU fan or the noise normalize testing which we'll look at later comparatively fifty five point eight degrees is nowhere near as bad as the GPU temperatures were in the Taku but 51 point six degrees with the top filter removed is the lowest GPU temperature among the four cases now on our chart the size of the case means that the GPU has plenty of room to breathe and the conventional airflow pattern means that exhaust freely flows both out of the back and out of the top of the case an additional intake fan under the stock one at the front of the case could help even more but an intake fan directly under the GPU would be better but again you probably want to elevate the case a little bit for that we do strongly suggest removing that top filter though as it's unnecessary when considering the exhaust nature of the stock fan 3dmark as a gaming stand and presents the two ATX at fifty three point three degrees celsius gb delta temperature and puts it close to the thermal take v one better than the cryo rec taku and worse than the silverstone SG 13 it's possible that with the top filter removed the two ATX could beat them all CPU temperature was twenty seven point four degrees Celsius a few degrees higher than the other cases despite the CPU not really being loaded during this test more evidence of GPU exhaust heating the CPU cooler also we have some information on the frequencies of the GPU during this test and fortunately the 280x did pretty well it held steady and didn't really drop a lot of clocks average CPU temperature during the blender CPU render was forty five point seven degrees actually cooler than the other cases on the chart with the airflow pattern in the two ATX GPU temperature appears to have a strong effect on CPU temperature since much from the GPU exhaust must travel up and pass the cooler again when the GPU isn't under load CPU cooling is decent average GPU temperature doing the GPU render for blender was thirty four point seven degrees Celsius again close to the v1 and a couple degrees off from what it should be because of the top filter see the temperature during this test was twenty five degrees warmer than the other three cases and again that's because of the exhaust noise normalized coursers to ATX naturally reduced noise emissions versus our other tested cases granted by it glass everywhere at a fifty five point six degrees ET result or seventy two degrees c p results this is unimpressive overall as the reduced noise output meant we could run the fans faster but the choke the nature of the case prohibited improved results for vrm results under a tortured test we observed the 280x placing vram at low temperatures at fifty five point eight degrees the warmest of all thus tested and vs RC at 57 degrees remember both of these numbers are well within spec way below spec but the point is to build a comparative data against other cases open air testing is represented by the Taku with the drawer open and shows our baseline floor at about 40 degrees the 280x was quieter than other cases on our chart at 44 DBA despite to stock 120 fans 44 is still objectively loud but this is a result of the CPU cooler we're using for testing and is why we might make changes to this bench later but it's a learning process that's why adding ITX took so long the glass panels do an effective job of damping the noise directly in front of the case and course if fans are fairly quiet to begin with the 280x is smaller than a mid Tower and larger than most ITX cases so its market it's somewhat limited it's an interesting case though the compartmentalized nature of it is something that coarser as well and has done for a long time it's actually a layout that we're a fan I've overall but this case is a bit large it's got glass that's really choking the fans so completely regardless of how you test ITX cases there's absolute truth that the filter placement is a bit unnecessary in some instances and probably should be default off with an option to add it for the user the glass is way too close to the steel of the chassis so this top glass panel could be elevated a bit the side panel here should probably boost it away from the steel a bit like in the view 71 for instance which cools abnormally well and as because of the gap between the glass and the steel the bottom should have optional feet to elevate it for better air flow and the front also while I mean the front glass panels just kind of bad in general in terms of how its installed and looks like it was a last-minute decision to secure it maybe they had a shipping issue or something like that we don't know but it's using adhesive to secure the panel to the front which seems insane so there are a lot of things that could be improved at this case overall though just to be clear we do like the overall look of it we like the build quality of it Kayle management is trivial because it's so large and it gives you a lot of options which cases of a small ish form factor don't necessarily do and also cases of a small ish form factor don't exist in many of the higher quality tiers of cases you generally either get forced over to a mid tower or forced over to SFF properly and not everyone wants that so this serves the mid step between them it's just that's about the only audience it serves if you are in that audience excellent it's $110 case not a bad price for what it is quality overall is good you can make a couple improvements manually if you want but be careful in choosing your coolant even with better cooling than we have it is still restrictive and that's because of the way the glass is mounted however they give you the options to improve it and that's a good thing we would however like to see added optional feet to boost it off the table a bit or wherever it's sitting so that you can get some extra airflow through down from just underneath to drafted a sort of stack effect style anyway overall it's not a bad case at all it's just sort of oddly sized and whether or not that works for you is up to you as a case in terms of build quality we like it in terms of kala management we like it in terms of thermals it has a ton of places to improve and then it's got one oddity that really stands out and that's this front glass panel otherwise if you can deal with the downsides that were mentioned here it's okay and just make sure it fits otherwise buy something smaller if you want a terse just get a mid tower otherwise because it's it's a really strange market but they didn't okay job at trying to create one so that's it for this time subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow sexist helps out directly and go to store that gamers nexus dotnet to pick up one of our mod mats which at this point are probably on backorder again because you all keep buying them but we do greatly appreciate the support and we'll get them back in as soon as possible i'll see you all next time