Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexis dotnet and this is Corsairs brand new a 600 C case this is a $150 case and it's got some interesting points about it like the inverted ATX design which we'll get to in a moment this case comes in two variants there's the 600 C which has this window that's probably reflecting me right now in the camera and then there's the 600 Q and the 600 Q is sort of effectively quiet that's at least what I translate the cute I mean and it has no side panel window it instead replaces that space with some sound damping or absorbing foam and that's the Q version both of them are priced at $150 and they both have the same chassis and frame of course so let's dive into this thing first of all it comes with three fans all 140 millimeters two in the front one in the back these are intake that's exhaust and then it's also got space for a 240 or 280 millimeter in the front if you want to put that alongside those fans or replace those fans with that the back you can do a 140 millimeter radiator does support those and then the ATX design is reversed so normally with an ATX form factor case you obviously first of all this is the right side of the case if you haven't noticed that so first of all this is on the wrong side and normally it's obviously on the left side as you all know when you install the board the system in the left side the GPU is sort of half way down CPUs up at the top we call it the north of the board and then power supply these days is often on the bottom of that was once different so Corsair has gone back many years in time and they've put the power supply at the top but they've at least updated it to a point that it makes more sense than it used to in this instance Corsair has taken a page from NZXT YZ book with the H 440 and they've put a PSU shroud in there so there's a big crowd covering the power supply covering where the cables go and actually covering the hard drive bays as well so that's the next point that we're going to look at here the drive bays are all in the backside and the power supply the cabling is on the back side so this is a compartmentalized approach to system building which improves ease of installation in general especially in my experience with all of these cases that do this really and that the drives are located three of them on the rear of the motherboard tray those are for 2.5 inch SSDs and then you've got your standard 3.5 inch drive bays up towards the front of the case under the front panel input devices so the main thing here is the focus on the inverted layout this is very similar in some ways to the Raven rv0 to the Silverstone case that we reviewed some time ago couple years ago and at the time it was the best performing case we'd ever reviewed in terms of thermals now that case did something a little bit different it still inverted the board a bit rotated it this way and the intake was all in the bottom in the RB 0 2 so you had three intake fans I think there were 180 millimeter off the top of my head they push the air up and out through a single fan and through the power supply area where where this is installed right now that is the stack effect for cooling that's what it's call it's called the stack effect and that basically just takes all your air channels it in the bottom forces it out a tiny hole in the top so like a smoke stack that was very high performing especially for GPUs because you're funneling all of this air straight through that sort of grilled intake on the average reference design GPU it's rotated a different way that intakes in a different spot but it does remind me a lot of that case for its performance and the reason it reminds me of it is because you have your two intake fans here they pull the air in and the air stream splits so we have the power supply fan pulling it up here that is the only fan at the top there's a GPU fan about this height then you have your CPU cooler fan here which pulls most of the air in and out through the back to cool the CPU of course the GPU it does have a blower fan in there with the reference design so that's pulling air in and the power supply is pulling air up in toward it as well so your air channel is actually very efficient and as we see in the benchmarks that I'll throw up here in a second the performance impact is definitely noticeable the one thing to look out for is passively cooled power supplies so I would definitely opt for an actively cooled power supply in a case like this even if it spins down during idle times you do want it to spin up under load to make sure that GPU is getting as much air as it can possibly siphon away from the CPU cooler especially if you use a tower cooler on there because those are pretty aggressive on their fan RPMs with the radiator support one thing to note here that's pretty important if you opt to install a radiator in the front you will be forcing heat into your case that's how it works so with the radiator if you push the heat into the case it's not normally too bad depending on how hot it is and what CPU you're cooling if it's an fx ninety five ninety your problems are a lot amplified first this cooler TDP CPU so when you're forcing the hot air in it's not going to impact CPU temperature too much because that's basically an isolated unit under the CPU block under the cold plate but it will impact the GPU temperature so I would watch out for that let's jump into the benchmarks and look at how this thing actually performs in terms of numbers and metrics and all of that stuff we have 8 total charts four of them are thermals at equilibrium and for our thermals over time you can see them all in the written review linked in the description below which may contain additional information not discussed here the methodology is also in that review if you want to know how we tested it and see if you can replicate our results of course there's 600 C enclosure stands Supreme for its GPU cooling ability dominating our charts and this is especially noticeable with multi card configurations as you'll see in a moment with a single video card the 600 C leads the competition with hate staggeringly low 2.4 for Celsius idle delta T over ambient and that was on our reference GTX 980 which was a relatively warm card already and that beats out the other three cases on the bench using the 600 C's a high fan speed setting to push the full 12 volts to the fans the GPU operates at 53 0.44 Celsius delta T over ambient of about 21 Celsius or so ambient and low falls slightly behind at 54.3 9 Celsius so you have about a 1 degree difference between low and high which is a good thing if you want to run the lower rpms for noise reasons Rosewill is a b-2 spirit which was previously our best of bench enclosure for its chart-topping thermal performance has been knocked into second place at fifty five point three three Celsius with GPU benchmarks and the Delta between the 600 °c and the b-2 spirit is about three point five so it's not huge but definitely enough to be measured and not anywhere close to margin of error the b-2 spirit is on this chart but I want to emphasize that is probably not the most linear comparison because it's about the same price maybe 20 bucks more depending on when you buy it but it's massive it's more of a server size case and that means the people who are looking at this thing might not be looking at the b-2 spirit but I included it because it's a very strong thermal performer and I wanted to see how a larger case compares to something like this that's optimized for air flow but smaller looking against a more reasonable case something thats on would more likely be considering a purchase of the h4 40 v2 which is the new version of the h4 40 runs considerably warmer at fifty nine point two eight Celsius and this is the cooler version of the h4 40 and noctus 450 which is actually a good deal warmer than the h4 40v to the Delta is 10.4% here so that's definitely a gap that's becoming noticeable particularly with warmer GPUs and looking down to the bottom of the chart we see ant xp3 80 that's really that's a case we weren't too fond of at its first unveil at CES and it ranks the warmest on the chart throwing a card in for physics processing this is something that partially blocks the primary GPUs blower fan and we see thermals rise about 10 Celsius on the Corsair case the b-2 spirit still stands just barely behind but gains a noticeable two Celsius in idle temps over the Corsair 600 C and the Delta between the h 440 v2 and 600 C shrinks 28.2% with multi-gpu setup so it's actually better than it was previously but the GPU diode on our primary 980 is now sitting at about 90 Celsius so that gap might actually be wider based on our data because the GTX 980 started throttling its frequency and voltage to keep the temperatures down so Nvidia's card was actively throttling itself to keep those temperatures at or below 90 and that's where you might see a temperature rise if you're using a warmer card like maybe an AMD card this is certainly very impressive GPU performance on Corsairs new case I'll throw the thermal overtime GP charts up here momentarily if you want to see what those look like but the average data is the same once it hits equilibrium moving to the test methodology briefly as you look at these what this shows is our custom in-house scripted benchmarks so this is an automated test it is fully automated down to the second which means that we can perfectly execute the beginning of the load test and the beginning of the idle test every single time that's why you see these bars all lining up effectively identically on the chart moving on to CPU is at the b-2 spirit thoroughly trounces all competition on the chart landing at forty point five seven Celsius load and fourteen point seven four Celsius idle so the 600 C is in second place with its high setting and third with the low setting both of which outpace the H 440 v2 and the P 380 the 600 C sitting at about 47 Celsius under load and there's roughly a 1 Celsius gap between the high and low settings which scene is pretty acceptable for users who want to reduce fan noise at the cost of a degree of temperature rise it's really not a big deal so again it's worth noting that the b-2 spirit is a massive case and forces a ton of air through its for fans so it isn't necessarily a linear comparison here it's a bit louder to subjectively but if you're looking at to high-performing cases that's about what they look like the 600 C on the b-2 spirit with two GPUs performance is very similar even marginally better in some instances though it becomes a blurry line whether that's margin of error which we have about 1% of or if the second GPS fans are actually changing the air dynamic enough to improve or decrease GPU and CPU cooling performance based upon the aerodynamics and air channeling of the case so a few things wrapping up here we don't currently do objective noise and decibel level benchmarks which I'd love to do but I've said it many times now in the comments we don't do them because noise audio it's very hard to do correctly you have to have a perfect environment you have to control a and noise outside to influence it we just we don't have the equipment or the environment to test noise confidently right now and if we can't test it accurately I don't test it at all I can tell you that subjectively with fan speeds on low this is about where most other kind of silent cases sit like the aged 440 it is a bit loud with the fan speeds on high but if you've got it on the floor you're not gonna notice too much of its up sitting on your desk more next to your head at that height or something like that then it will be more noticeable but that's all very subjective and probably not super useful so I will leave the objective audio and DB level testing to folks who have the equipment to do so let's talk about the stuff I do have available though and that's thermals and design and overall ease of installation with the 600 seat started with ease of installation pretty easy to install the standoffs are all pre-installed which I'm a big fan of by the way but the one thing I think Corsair could improve on are actually a couple things on the same point here would be some sort of cut out in the PSU shroud for the PCIe cables to the GPUs this is something that NZXT does and I'm in love with it OS 340 because you can route the cable straight up through the shroud and into the GPU and one it looks a lot better too if you've got more restrictive cabling setups like surprising it with the enter Mattox 1300 watt PSU as they have shorter cables then it will a it in both of those instances but really it's mostly just a thin with aesthetics it looks better if Corsair can line it up so that you can route a cable straight down through the shroud and into the PCIe slots on the GPU I would be very happy with that change to the cable management now you can to their credit route it through the hard drive cages but you've got to either remove them or sit there and fidget with it for a few minutes and it won't line up as perfectly because it's coming down way in the front of the case and I want it moved back a little bit so that it lines up better with the GPUs other than this maybe a cutout just sort of in this angled bevel thing going on right there that would probably help but something in that range would be very good for cable management the next thing to build quality things here pushing on this panel is pretty flexible it's a little bit bendy there I don't know if you can hear that on the audio but picking the case up and moving it around you will feel that flex a little bit so it probably could be a bit sturdier but how often are you really going to be sitting there doing this while you're playing games so it's it's really not something I can knock them too hard for because overall you get a large panel clear panel and you're not really going to get that without affording some of your resilience in terms of structural integrity because you have this huge piece of plexiglass or whatever it is so that you can see into the case so you're sacrificing all this steel that would normally surround it so I can give them a pass on that the next thing I would comment on in terms of the build quality is the power supply mounting so there is a small bracket on the back of this it's a steel bracket and you screw that in to the power supply just like the NZXT cases and I think maybe the fantex cases do it too at this point but there is it's not thick enough at the top and the bottom so the lip that you get that goes over the power supply and slots into the case can bend very easily and that can happen just trying to install the power supply if you don't line it up a hundred percent perfectly which it is pretty foolproof and you should be able to line up a power supply perfectly because it's a rectangle hole in a rectangle box but as we found out if it's not a hundred percent perfect then that steel will bend with the slightest bit of force because it's it's not very strong so you have to sit there and kind of hammer it back into place which is doable and you can get it working but that is a point of quality I think course art could potentially look at in the future other than that I do pretty much like everything in the case the thumb screws can maybe be torqued a little bit less I think they're plagued by the same n60 problem where the thumb screws are not actually toolless they require tools because their torque too tight but it's a good case at the end of the day and this is something I would recommend at $150 price point overall despite these small things I just listed off very high build quality there's a kind of nitpicks the cooling performance is superior to everything else we've currently tested other than the b-2 spirit with its CPU cooling and that's a much larger case at potentially a different market so the Corsair 600 C the one with the window is a case that I would say is worth looking at for the enthusiasts $150 price point on a case your next options to look at if this does not interest you for some reason or if you just want to do research on your options which is always good would be the age for 40 there's a new v2 that is either shipping now or will be shipping soon that's a bit improved over the age for 40 v1 there's the another NZXT case the Knox's for 50 if you want something more gamer aesthetic looking than this or the h4 40 and if you look outside of NZ I've seen Corsair there's a p38 II which is an Tex case I'm not a huge fan of it but it does have a sort of neat aluminum thing going on in when now has some cheaper cases at this price range it's just new for them that's worth looking at - and the rows will be two-spirit if you want something sort of massive aside from these the next one would be the silent base 800 from be quiet which we tested and liked pretty well it's very quiet as the name would hopefully indicate and it performs pretty well so that would be the range of cases I would look at if I were buying 150 ish price point plus or minus 30 and that's all for this one if you like this content hit the patreon link in the post roll video the review is fully written and on the website if you want more depth you want to see those charts longer thank you for watching I will see you all next time