Gadgetory

of course there's new spec Oh for case uses the same internal tool and as the spec oh one from a few years back borrows from the newer respect alpha but lowers the price point to $50 and reduces fan count to one one twenty millimeter intake pre-installed fan for lightweight box at fifty dollars it seems suitable for ultra budget PC build but we'll soon find out how it performs thermally acoustically and how the quality holds up to a real build before getting to that this content is brought to you by v1 tech comm who make the custom backplate shown in our b-roll on the screen of the MSI gaming X they've also got plenty of on the back plates you can go to their website and use code gamers Nexus 5 for $5 off click the link of the description below for more information we've got a lot of testing for this case in this one including some frequency versus time plots we don't normally need with cases but we'll show you why in a bit and then we also have some tests but what happens if you add a fan in the front or in the back slot but going over the basics first before getting into the testing it's a $50 enclosure that means that obviously you can't be too picky about the different small things on the case that you might gain a larger more expensive case for but with this one what you're looking at is a budget target build the tooling is the same internally as a speck of one if you know the spec of one you pretty much know what this looks like internally the spec alpha is not too different it's a bit different in the visual Department exterior wise but internally not too many changes for this case there's a drive cage in the bottom front it is separable you can remove it and if you do that you could add another front impact pen at the bottom potentially helping with GPU cooling there's a front intake fan option in the top but the included intake fan is a 120 millimeter with an off white off blue white LED dead centre that splits there between the CV and the GP we'll test that in a bit the top there are two mounting options but the clearance on the top is not that great as you've noticed this is a pretty small case and being a small case that means that your movement and your ability to fit different things up there is going to be limited based on the CPU cooler you choose and other things like that there's also a rear exhaust option if you wanted to install a fan on the back and then for the rest of the case we're looking at limited side panel cable management but enough to get you by with a budget build and bottom oriented PS you know PSU Shroud whatsoever which helps save on cost not everything needs a shroud anyway in terms of the dimensions this case is 492 by 201 by 433 millimeters it weighs four point two kilograms empty so it's pretty damn light and it's a small box the front panel IO has one USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 ports rather than from million two USB 3 into one cable which is what you normally find they've gone with one and one USB 3 and USB 2 so not not a favorite there but really not that big of a deal the spec alpha has 2 USB 3 if you preferred it and is currently available around 60-63 dollars not that much more expensive other than that cable management isn't bad it's really nothing to write home about it's not dismal you can hide stuff in the back there are cable tie points in the back so you can hide stuff and tie it down but it's not necessarily going to be the prettiest without a lot of work so you'll have to put some time in managing cables interior is pretty straightforward build process nothing is special here nothing is different from normal PC building the back the rear i/o and the expansion covers have the offset screws in the back of the case rather than inside the case which personally I prefer that's more of a subjective preference thing but I do prefer when they've exposed the screws for the expansion devices like the video card through the outside because then you can get at the screw without cross threading so that's always a nice thing to see and it's just it's a small thing but other than that is the standard case will just roll straight into the testing for testing methodology as always check the article links in the description below where we've also got Patrick Layton's written review of this case he's one who worked with the build for the most part and then for testing we've got a few new things here so first of all we've been slowly rolling out some new thermal tests for these and that includes a blender pass on the CPU and a blender pass on the GPU that gives you a real-world scenario to look at rather than just stress testing and we've also added a 3d mark pass which sort of simulates gaming because it's load on both the GPU and the CPU but it's not as torturous as the power virus workload that we run for our torture scenario to see where the the maximum potential is for all these cases in term of thermals so that's been added we have the normal noise testing and we've also up front got some extra fans we positioned an extra fan in the front top up here which helps with CPU airflow for the most part we also position one in the back they're both 120 millimeter fans we did not do more than one fan for the extra fan testing because honestly if you're spending $50 on a case and then $8 on a fan you add a second fan you're basically spending 20 more dollars you might as well just buy a better case so there's no real point in testing that from our standpoint even may as well look at something like a 270 our windowed version for 70 bucks save yourself the trouble and get something that's better out of box altogether anyway so we tell us with one extra fan top front and back and then the stock configuration let's start with the extra fan testing and is a competitive testing against other cases starting with the CPU torture test temperatures for extra fans that we see that adding a fan to the front grants and immediate performs up with about 10,000 reducing temperatures to 57.8 tell these delta t / ambient this helps dramatically in CPU temperatures and brings us down under throttling territory unfortunately the fan is partially obstructed by the front panel so its ability to improve thermals is limited by this and for that reason the rear exhaust configuration also helps about the same amount marginally more just outside of our test resolution and can be explained by ridding of radiative heat off the GPU backplate in addition to being less obstructed as the front fan is either way adding one fans the case helps tremendously and would be worthwhile as an investment for 8 bucks 10 bucks but no more than that here's a look at TV frequency versus time with these configurations with the stock configuration we can see clear throttling as the CPU enters 90 to 100 C range of our torture workload keep in mind that this will vary heavily based on the CPU cooler you've selected and also will depend on the type of workload you're putting the CPU through we're using a torture scenario here so it gets a bit better after this this is one of the worst cases adding a fan in either configuration removes the throttle event and smooth things out for the CPU overall looking at GPU temperatures after adding an extra fan we see a reduction from sixty-four Celsius LT over ambient which is roughly the throttle points after you factor in ambient to around sixty point five celsius delta T with an extra rear fan or around 60,000 with an extra front fan performance between these two is then significantly friends meaning that they are within peasant has variance and resolution and accuracy of our testing the two are effectively the same for GP performance and we can't really claim with definitive advantage between the front and rear mount options especially given that case testing vary so much based on configuration what we can say is that adding a fan is definitely worthwhile especially being get one for less than ten bucks so that the case doesn't really exceed the sixty dollar mark 3dmark is one of our new introductions to case testing we're using a looping fire strike extreme test for in half an hour here producing a load on both the CPU and GPU but unless torturous of a manner than the one done in the extreme burnin that was just shown previously this more closely resembles gaming workloads for extended periods of time and as the tests are new we are still adding to the charts and only have two devices presently plotted the corsair stack of four runs with CPU temperature thirty eight point nine Celsius Delta Z over ambient to the 3d mark burnin which is about nine Celsius higher than our open-air Corp III configuration effectively the resting state of where you'd be testing without an enclosure the GPU temperatures run about five Celsius higher with a delta T of fifty nine up four Celsius on the Corsair configuration to get a better idea of how this looks in reality let's look at a frequency versus temperature chart like we do in our GPU reviews in this chart we can see how a GPU frequency response to rising temperatures our fan is fixed in 55 percent rpm which is around where the GPU fans tend to configure their maximum profile before sacrificing frequency rather than noise but the times I want you by of course technically you could run a higher DP fan speed and solve for this frequency throttling problem but you'd be drastically increasing noise something to the effect of T times perceived noise increase depending on what video card is to use if you start watching the 80 to 90 percent fan speed territory regardless there's a clear downtrend in core frequency until a point where it fluctuates between the high 1700 to 1800 results in 784 cells his maximum desirable GP core temperature the V bios begins throttling back performance to sustain this temperature target under stock configurations which means losing frame rate due to heat and again this isn't a torturer workload it's just 3d mark moving on from the torture workload and from 3d mark we can list a blender next which are real use cases for 3d animators everywhere with CPU rendering enabled we see the Corsair spec code for with a single famishing the CPU to 43.5 celsius LT over an inch with our cooler about 6.1 qaulity is warmer than an open Thermaltake core p3 configuration which runs a load cpu DT of about 37.3 Celsius idle temperatures are also a few degrees higher on the GPU which isn't doing work in this scenario but is still humming along in the box moving the blender GPU rendering we've only got two case on this chart as it's still new but it's a good first look the corsair spec code for with its single fan at 1300 rpm runs the CPU DT of about 35 cells he's over ambient with the GPU load L temperature at 37.6 Celsius over ambient the silverstone are l06 at 1,000 rpm with its three 120 millimeter front fan and one 120 millimeter rear fan configuration is able to sustain a 20 T Salty's delta T CPU temperature and 24.7 Celsius delta theory' m8 GPU temperature and for an extra 15 dollars that's a significant reduction in thermal so they're almost matter to you you're going to be running 100% workloads on one or two of your opponents at any given time it's worth considering the upgrade finally for torture workload tests check our article in the description below for more information on this but we can briefly go over them this chart shows the CPU temperature under our GPU and CPU torture scenario placing the corsair spec of four toward the bottom of this chart for the cpu load and idle temperatures running 868 celsius Delta G over ambient value the GBA tortured temperatures are also among the worst pushing us up against the 84 Celsius threshold for this card before we start throttling on the clock this is the same tortures workload that we used for the initial extra fans test and again case testing is the least scientific testing of all four components just because there are so many configuration options even between blower fans and dual axial fans or just the component power draws the CP and the GPU but from this we can still garner a baseline performance based on where we fall with the other cases that we've tested on our bench and the torch our codes kind of give the biggest look at that but we're expanding the 3dmark workloads as well what we learn here is that maybe if you had a GPU like a 10 to the or 1050 Ti you would be okay in this case it still certainly be warm depending on how good that GPU cooler is but you'd have more Headroom to work with than a higher-end device that said if you're planning to run your CPU at 100% we're cool or high percentage utilization at any given time for example you're doing blender rendering any kind of benchmarking or if you're just running applications that are very CPU intensive like Excel when it's crunching all the formulas then you might want to consider adding that extra fan to the front top because again a 10 Celsius decrease with this configuration which is not an abnormal one that we tested for someone buying a case like this it's a worthwhile investment and when I said not an abnormal one you might not buy a GTX 1084 the case of course but for the cooler you're probably going to have a tower cool or not dissimilar from the one we used which is about a $30 tower cooler if you bought a hyper 212 it would be the same sort of configuration in terms of how the air flow works stock coolers a bit different but stuff colors can be worse anyway so if you're running a stock cooler that further solidifies that you should get the front fan extra for a couple bucks and call it a day but there's a reason we look at temperatures beyond just the thermal reasons we also look because noise so even if you're going to be running a GPU temperature of 60 to 70 Celsius for a lower-end card it doesn't mean you have to run the higher noise output to sustain that temperature if you have a better case so what I'm saying is if you get something like a better case maybe the are l06 you can get away with running slower internal fan RPMs on the CPU cooler and especially the GPU cooler and therefore a lower noise output provided the fans in the front of the case are obviously within a reasonable noise output as well so you've got more noise variance and reigns there that you can control for if you have a better case and a better baseline cooling to begin with if you don't care about noise and you don't have to care about temperatures then disregard all that by what looks best the corsair spec for by a nature of running a single fan is able to get away with a lower noise output though than some of its neighbors so let's look at the noise chart the case doesn't make any attempts to contain noise especially with that front mesh intake but it also doesn't emit much given system components that are reasonably inaudible we measure about 36.7 DBA output with the spec oh for placing it effectively equal with the 270 our 1300 rpm which has two fans and Silverstone's our l06 at 1,000 rpm Silverstone our l06 today with a cool significantly even at this reduced 1,000 rpm number and those so while retaining its similar noise output that said it's also an extra $15 so it just comes down to a cost argument and how much the noise and thermal is matter to the user this is a fine case for $50 it's certainly warm warmer than the other ones we've tested but those tend to be better for thermals they're more expensive they come with more fans or just better sort of airflow path design if you can call that whereas this one's got half the front panel blocked off so you lose some performance there because of that but it's an okay case if you're building a $50 ultra budget machine something like a g4 560 with maybe a 1030 or a 1050 TI it's a good pairing what you might want to consider again at $8 so it's really a $58 case by a fan with it that's certainly worth it and if it's within range consider some alternatives the alternatives of note would be Corsair zone 270 R which is a case that we liked quite a bit when it came out it's got two fans for the windowed version the design is good enough that you're going to get better cooling overall and of course doesn't all come down to fans it has a pretty good noise control as well because the front panel is largely blocked off but it's got there's wide side intakes on the front another option if you still want Corsair the spec Alfa currently is about 63 dollars that's a rebate which brings it pretty close to this one and it's got a similar aesthetic that's really why you're looking at this case and finally the Silverstone R l06 at 75 dollars is a really good buy if you care about thermals and not much else which depending on what you're building and who you are and how you're using your system if you're going to run CPU or GPU at 100% when doing renders and things like that it's a worthwhile investment to just go that extra $15 get something that'll keep it cool while still being portable compared to some of the more expensive cases so those ones to look at this one is okay it's not offensive in any capacity just add a fan stock it's probably not the best thing you could buy but once you add a fan it is a good purchase so that is all for this one as always you go to patreon.com/scishow and Isis to help to help us fund more testing like this one it is quite in-depth to do stuff like what we're doing with cases lately you know store dock gamers next to snot net to buy shirts or guarantee isil's botnet for the site subscribe for more thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you