Gadgetory

a major shift from the fractal define r6 we're now looking at the Cougar conquer there it is what you see is what you get with this one it kind of takes some pages from the core series core p3 core v5 from Thermaltake in that it is effectively an open-air case you are one step away from being a test bench at this point and that step is rotating it and maybe removing the glass so this is the Conqueror it's a $300 case we did the usual thermals and noise although noise is obviously not really a big point of this and went through the whole assembly process because it's basically build it yourself once you buy it and all that stuff so we're gonna review this today and see how it does on the bench versus everything else that's 300 ish dollars before getting to those that this coverage is brought to you by EVGA and their 10 ATT is c2 which we've recommended fairly highly for its build quality and the icx sensors which are kind of fun to play with you can check our full SC 2 review for the 1080i if you're curious to learn more or you can click the link in the description below to find the product page for the 1080i SC 2 so this case is obviously not really something that you're buying for value so we can just kind of strike that immediately we're not reviewing this for value today subjectively you're going for looks that's up to you what I can tell you about is the build quality the assembly thermals and noise so build quality it's all pretty thick paneling so they have 4 or 5 millimeter thick tempered glass for each side and then aluminum bars that jut out from a central aluminum frame and the assembly is all done when you get it so it does not shift built so you're you screw together the bars these feet provide a wide base to provide some stability but ultimately you actually need this glass panel on for complete structural stability up until that point it does kind of wobble and flex a little bit and it's pretty easy to knock it over however once you have the glass panels on there is no knocking over issues whatsoever this thing's not going to move at this point it's moving the table more than anything else so that's kind of its kind of what you get once you buy it just be aware that you're basically building it it's not difficult to assemble it's really not that much different from the core p3 or p5 except in the visuals and obviously they speak for themselves now in terms of other things on here it's got pretty easy access to everything so you just remove a couple screws and you can push the entire front panel up like that just hinge it like a helmet or something then at that point you get access to three 120 days koogler technically recommends in their manual that you install one fan up here as intake and then two in the front as intake we did testing with that versus all three in the top intake will have numbers three in a moment but the thing to keep in mind with a case like this is because it's basically open air and there's holes all over the place for the air to escape the closer the fan is to the target the destination the better and the way it's set up now is basically with two intake fans that air is dispersing across the case before it ever really gets the components with any meaningful pressure left to the airflow putting a fan at the top here you're forcing air straight into the CPU cooler so that's obviously gonna work a lot better so that's what you need to keep in mind thermally in terms of the assembly process and the build quality the aluminum is about three millimeters thick in most locations and typically you would use that as a bragging point to say we damped the lower frequency noises pretty well but obviously that's irrelevant here and the assembly process has you putting the power supply in the front so it's mounted in the front bottom which is sort of interesting for a few reasons one of them is that because we're in taking from the bottom and the power supply is exhausting towards me right now it's pushing that hot air straight into the GPU however couger actually did something here that is pretty clever they just have a simple shield basically that redirects the air down to a point where it's not really causing any trouble at all so that's good they've done well there to think that through and not caused problems the rest of the enclosure has you routing cables kind of through the left around the back and it's a little bit troublesome with the 8 pin or the EPS 12-volt cables we're actually using an extender here because our cable for the power supply wasn't long enough stock so something to keep in mind and that may be true for some of the other cables as well that's just the nature of having a power supply mounted in front and then kind of hiding your power cable to the wall and all that stuff the sort of elephant in the room with this case though is raid backs probably never thought anyone would say that raid max has come back from the dead or wherever they were and they have a case that's really similar to this in fact it has almost identical if not identical tempered glass side panels that have just been installed in a different way they're basically flipped the other way around and the feet for the case are almost identical if not identical that case is called the raid max x08 theoretically it has a lower price point than this one which is 300 to 350 2-pound where you look the raid max case is pretty hard to find but also we spoke to cougar about this and if you kind of look at Cougars Twitter feed they've been a little bit I believe the internet comments ours would say salty lately but really it's just kind of tongue in cheek or or really frustrated or pissed off sarcasm would be how I would describe it where they've had tweets replying to raid Maddox basically saying ours is the original design so we talked some about this because it's not uncommon in fact it's actually very common for case manufacturers to use the same tooling between them rebrand it change some colors change some fans and sell it for roughly the same price that we've seen with the the Silverstone cases that we talked about recently the old red line zero five we've seen that with the char Coon ones that came out afterward with the antec case there's about six cases that use that same cooling this however is different so we talked to cougar about it and they alleged that the original patent and they sent me the the Chinese original patent text is assigned to cougar so apparently this design according to them is patented by their company and it's supposed to be made exclusively by them or their parent company more appropriately so we also asked if the same supplier is making the rate max cases and didn't really get a firm answer yet but they're working on an official legal statement for us that we can share and we'll see what's going on but basically it sounds like cougar is alleging that raid max is basically a knockoff my word not theirs so that's what I'm taking away right now it's hard to say if that's accurate or if they're just using the same supplier I'm not in a position to answer that we haven't been able to talk to max about this yet so take it for what it's worth but basically there are two versions of the same case is what you can take away from it and one is cheaper but it looks a bit different so with that said let's talk through some of Patrick's billed notes here and his thoughts on the case during the build process you can find his written review linked below and then we'll get into thermals and noise after that starting off the conquer is a huge case it's easy to underestimate its size and pictures because of its unusual shape but it's large enough to easily fit a full ATX board at a diagonal angle making it both taller and wider than standard cases the vast majority of the chassis is constructed from three to five millimeter thick aluminum and glass on all sides making it much heavier than the skeletal frame implies it's technically an open-air chassis but with a case like frame providing mounting points for several fans the cases appearance is a large part of what will make users love or hate it the price being the second one the translucent orange fans included with our review sample we're lit by red LED is not the most pleasant combination but otherwise looked fine if you consider that color to be good with your build the Cougar concur does fit in visually with the rest of Cougars product line but it also bears a close resemblance to the raid max again X is zero eight this is something to keep in mind if you want to find alternatives however again it's a matter of whether that case is available and also whether it remains available depending on pending legal discourse building the case is straightforward if the instructions are followed and no parts are missing Construction is solid the body feels a little wobbly during installation without the added support from the glass and the balancing beams but once they're in place the case can be safely picked up and moved by pretty much any point except for the power supply and the PCIe brackets the brackets do their job just fine but they aren't heavily reinforced as the rest of the case is the glass side feels somewhat token given that the case is basically open to the elements but they must be installed for the case to be fully stable good looking cable management is a real nightmare in this case because of the dual sided glass panels but there are plenty of cutouts available for strapping cables too and that helps make it a little bit easier but you're still gonna have to put in some effort to make it all tidy the power supply is mounted towards the front of the case so cables need to stretch a little farther than usual especially again the eight pin connector going on to thermals and noise the conquerer would probably still be usable even if it didn't include any fans at all it would rank around where the Thermaltake core p3 falls but it does include three fans we installed them according to the manual which shows two intake fans at the front of the case and one intake at the top pointing down towards the CPU cooler we wouldn't always choose top and take primarily for dust reasons but the angle of the motherboard means that it's the most practical way to push air into our CPU heatsink otherwise you're just fighting each other for air for additional testing we put all three stock fans the top intake slots since the two intake fans are fairly far away from the actual system and possibly limited in their effectiveness as the air will again just sort of diffuse across the entire chassis and find the nearest exit the active cooling and big open holes combined with the lack of filters makes the conger potentially dusty more so than the passively cooled open-air cases like the thermal take Corp III but just make sure you do preventative maintenance focusing first on the stock cooler conquer configuration versus our top three intake setup CPU temperature is forty eight point five degrees Celsius over ambient when under a torture workload and forty-two point four degrees with all the fans in the top four intake blowing down to the CPU cooler the top intake position is in a great spot to help the CPU temperatures and the more fans the better in this configuration the stock top intake fan is placed directly below the cutout in the top panel of the cooler case removing any barriers floo comparing against other cases 48 point five degrees Celsius is a lower CB temperature than any other stock case we've tested except for the Silverstone RL zero six and forty-two point four degrees is lower than anything on the chart altogether the concur has the cooling advantage of the Corp III being that it's open-air and you can't get better than that really anything else is just a box that insulates it but it doesn't rely solely on passive cooling to pump the heat out of the case although it could our l06 maintains its lead because of the huge volume of air pumped in a straight line through the case and is only outperformed when three fans are positioned inches from the CPU intake most other cases we've tested try to balance air flow with noise suppression or visual style and these two are clearly outliers from that norm GPU temperature is fifty point nine degrees Celsius in the stock configuration with fifty three point two degrees measured for all fans at the top of the case the top intake fans are exclusively over the backplate while these stock configuration with two intake fans in the front direct air directly into the GPU cooler the distance from the front of the case to the GPU lessens they're affecting this somewhat but the temperature reduction is measurable one subtle but important feature of the conquer is that although the PSU is mounted at the bottom of the case with no shroud and angled aluminum metal shield directs exhaust downwards and away from the GPU fans comparatively fifty point nine degrees Celsius is an unusually low GPU temperature among the best on our chart even unlike the CPU temperatures this has relatively little to do with active cooling even without the benefit of fans directed into the cooler fifty three point two degrees is still a respectable score here the biggest contributor to GPU cooling is the fact that the case has no bottom to block out cool air no a shroud to block access to air for an open-face card those side panels to keep the air trapped in and that there's no sealed top again that would keep the air trapped in struggling to get out fast enough the GPUs heat is able to naturally find pathways out of the case keeping it cool over long up times the 3d mark firestrike extreme test lasts longer than our torture test and typically results in higher average GPU temperature the conquer managed fifty three point six degrees Celsius just slightly better than the previous champion the view 71 TG we haven't tested every case with fire strike but it's safe to say that the Congress Tinley allows good GPU cooling that's what you get with open air with blender next and with the CPU render benchmark we saw thirty six point one degrees Celsius delta T over a mint for the Cougar conquer which supplied better CPU cooling than most of the other cases tested but the RL zero six does keep the crown for now rendering on the GPU average the GPU temperature of twenty four point six degrees it barely beat the RL zero six here making it the new leader both of these scores are extremely good but the Concord is still impractical for business use because of the lack of hard drive space the lack of filtration not to mention the size the price and the look it could also be impractical for pet owners or those of you with children for streamers youtubers anyone who's an enthusiast and doesn't have the risk of external sources messing with your exposed components it would be a good case for showroom or production use if you're trying to make the most of what you have in terms of visuals and showing off as expected with noise the Conqueror is a noisy case with three 120 millimeter fans at full speed and with nothing to silence number block the noise thirty nine point eight decibels is similar to the Coolermaster H five hundred P and scores between other well ventilated cases that like the Fraxel metruff IC and the third will take me to 71 given the cooling performance overall though there's no reason to run the fans at full speed or even install all three fans you could run without them and then your noise level would be system noise so it's a pretty good case overall in terms of thermals and things like that noise maybe not so much but again when your temperature performance is as good as this is you don't even need the fans real you run them at a lower rpm and you'll be about where the other cases are with similar or better noise levels depending on what you're using so it doesn't really come down to thermals and noise it comes down to price and what it is this is going to be a highly polarizing design you either love it or you hate it based on the visuals and then the price at three hundred to three hundred fifty dollars from both retailers does immediately price out a lot of the market this is a showroom case it's similar and competes most directly with a company like in wind freeze Appl the other competition would be something like the dark Bass Pro 900 200 to 250 dollars it's more practical it's a bit more traditional and it's format but still has some flashy elements to it you could also look at something like the thermaltake view 71 it's got all the tempered glass so it has some Flair and it's a lot cheaper but neither of them really look quite like this so this is pretty unique and there's not a lot you can find other than the clone raid mattes exhale wait that would provide a similar look so if you if it's the look you want really there's nothing that I should or could say that would sway you otherwise because there's no other options but if you're just looking for an expensive good case again we'd recommend considering this one versus some of the in one cases they have a lot of them that are in this price bracket you could look at the dark base pro 900 you can look at the view 71 if you want an open-air case that's really cheap and can be used as sort of a semi test bench or wall mountable machine the core series from Thermaltake is very good and much cheaper but again they don't look quite the same that said the core p3 core p5 would be great options if you really just want something accessible that's still vertically mounting your computer so overall performance is great but that's not the point and you're also not competing with something like the redline 0 6 which offers similar performance if not better in some cases and it's 75 dollars it's just not even the same category of competition different divisions altogether so the conquer is certainly no bargain but it's a unique look that's up to you whether you like it or not and the raid Maxx xo8 depending on how you feel about their current pending legal dispute between couger and raid max that might be a cheaper option as well but that's we'll see how that goes so as always if you want to help us out directly you can go to patreon.com/scishow to store it I gave his Nexus dotnet slash mod match to pick up one of our new mod maps like this one on the table they are anti-static and come with a grounding strap as well subscribe for more I'll see you all next time