Gadgetory

it's been one year since we saw the in when 805 infinity at CES originally a prototype concept for which in 'wind had not yet even declared a price in fact the end when team asked us to ask our audience what they would pay for the enclosure but wanted us to know that the case may never even exist today we're reviewing the in win 805 infinity picking apart to all of its many flaws and talking about its few well-designed features because it does actually exist now it's been made a real product this case is the already existing in win 805 including the same tooling the only difference is the infinity mirror effect with RGB LED strips to create that unique crack and like abyss on the front of the case but there are many flaws yet to go over with this one and before getting to those this coverage is brought to you by our patreon backers you can go to patreon.com/scishow and effect and that's $180 MSRP it's about 150 on new agate with current rebates gold same thing just this top piece up here is gold and that's the same price 180 bucks red same thing just with red $180 and then you get to the infinity one which is a debilitating $250 enclosure so that's an extra 70 bucks for the RGB effect and if you factor in the point that Newegg generally has this thing with some kind of discount it could actually be upwards of $100 more for the RGB LEDs and that's a tough sell with that $250 you get the same case but with LEDs and with fewer options internally the mesh front intake for example is replaced with a solid panel housing for the RGB LED strip and it's mirrors the strip uses adhesive to stick around the inner wall of the half-inch thick shell and is flanked on either side by mirrored surfaces creating the Infinity effect there's no possibility for front intake as this infinity effect requires the entire front panel to work its cables route internally and connect to an LED hub which in win' dubs the halo module and that hub splits into SATA power USB 2.0 for control through the Wes and another LED cable for optional strips and this leads us to cabling internally n1 provides this additional RGB LED strip actually have it right here but they don't do much to help you out with it this thing is 67 inches long and I don't know if that quite demonstrates it 67 it so it's a bit over 5 feet long and working with this in the case is not trivial you can't just sort of truncate this I guess you could try and cut stuff off of it but and then when you rout it there's really nothing to do with the routing other than try and go around the perimeter in which case it's kind of like well why didn't they do that for you so you go around the perimeter and what happens well as you'll see even in in one's own marketing materials because that's how little I guess they cared about this the strip will route over the fan that's bad for a number of reasons one is just that it's kind of ugly and that's really the only one that matters when you're talking about lights the other one is that if you want to replace that fan and you've got an adhesive bound strip you're kind of out of luck you got to break the adhesive and and then it starts peeling off as is also seen in some of their marketing photos and cabling is problematic for many more reasons take a look at these kale management pass throughs for instance the holes are massive large enough to fit a fist through and there's plainly no benefit to that you make a large hole in a case that you can fit bundles of wires through there's no other point of course and that is almost exclusively limited to the power supply area if you've ever looked at a case the largest holes near the PSU cuz that's where all of the cables are but it seems to be everywhere with the 805 and the 805 infinity which uses the same tool in also note that the pattern for cut out to somewhat haphazard leaving no continuous metal bars behind which you could easily hide the cables there will always be cables passing under or over one of the holes even within ones included but not pre-applied again cable management clamps and the clamps are good but they don't fix the problem this is one of the best things that case makers are doing today like we said with NZXT s340 elite but an in wins case it's not $250 good they're not pre applied which I guess get over and they're certainly not enough to make up for the distinct lack of kale management features in the case and this is particularly confusing because the n1 805 is another in a now long line of cases that use tempered glass on either side of the case glass here and glass over here and that exposes the cables which are not going to be clean so if you expose the cables at least go through the effort as a case maker to enable the Builder to clean their cabling up that's just really you could do it maybe but it would take a long time and it is difficult to close the panel afterward this is not aided by the fact that the n1 805 4 goes the trendy but not always necessary power supply shroud so they've opted out of that which is fine not every case needs a PSU shroud but in a case like this it does kind of make sense and that's again the tempered glass talking they do however have this artsy and clearly structural because there's holes all through the case power supply the half cover thing with holes in it and that goes there I guess so out of those at the way it's setup forces us to pull all of the cables right in front of the power supply older school style including any excess molex or SATA that you may have which you will have because the LEDs and the front of the case require one of those connectors each the bottom coincidentally is also our only source of outside air so cluttering all the cables there is not ideal and that's not being hyperbolic the top panel is walled shut the front panel is clearly preoccupied there's glass on either side panel and there's a single 120 millimeter exhaust fan near the CPU socket in one has even decided to use completely flat IO covers limiting breathing air near the GPU or SSDs if you have PCIe devices this leaves us with one option for intake the bottom again although in one says two 120 millimeter fans can fit down there the reality is that at best you're only going to fit one the first slot will be consumed by the PSU and its cabling for anything normal-sized like our Corsair RM 650 X and the second slot is covered by the hard drive bays by default you can relocate these cages to the radiator mount at the front of the case if you please but then you'd have no radiator then again losing that slot is irrelevant because putting a radiator there is a bad idea it can't breathe there's about a one-inch hole in the bottom front where the air could be pulled in but that's about it nothing on the top nothing on the sides any one is even blocking the radiator with their artfully cutout radiator fan holes apparently not privy to the fact that the radiator sheds heat in more ways than just direct airflow from the fans with this airflow setup keep in mind that putting this case on something like a carpet would limit your airflow and create potential dust problems in the future because again that's where all there is going to come into the case because there's only one fan and it's exhaust and also the power supply is worth noting because in configurations like this the power spot is used as part of the cooling system we saw this with the 600 C from Corsair in this case the PSU fan is not facing down like you might expect normally it's facing in so it's pointed internally I don't know if that was intended to be a functional decision or was just how it came to be but what happens is your air comes out either at the top back or it comes out of the power supply so if you're running a hot video card and you're running a power supply that you intend to be either spun down to 0 rpm when it's in sort of low load periods get rid of that idea because this setup will keep the power supply pretty consistently warmed and that's going to require that the fan on it is spinning you're planning to use a fan less power spot like a digit fanless I haven't tested it but I probably wouldn't recommend that either let's pause on the criticisms and demonstrate the issue with thermals just for a moment as always our full testing methodology for thermal testing can be found linked in the description in the article below and that contains the entire review for this case you can find additional testing there like some noise analysis which won't be here looking at CPU temperatures first we're seeing the n1 805 infinity running the CPU at its maximum temperature which is 99 to 100 Celsius and that's on a 6700 K with only a 10 percent overclock that's what we test all cases with 4.4 gigahertz the delta T over ambient puts us around 75 C load even with the NZXT s340 elite a case where we criticize airflow there is a significant drop in performance with the 805 infinity and this is a big deal too I don't think people pay enough attention when any website ours or others talk about thermals with GPUs and CVS particularly you see folks kind of just jump to the FPS benchmarks there's a lot more to it than that with thermals in this case we can see very clearly why it's important to have lower temperatures with the CPU running the single exhaust setup what we're getting at the 100 C 99 c load temperature is a reduction in the clock so the cpu drops something like 200 megahertz at times it's not consistent so it's an not it's not a stable clock it drops 200 megahertz so you go from something like 4.4 to 4.2 even 4.1 ish sometimes and that's because of the temperature it's trying to throttle down to reduce its temperature and prevent a thermal runaway or a thermal shutdown scenario where you're hitting t.j.maxx or something like that as for GPUs we're pushing the limits of what the Twin Frozr cooler can handle on this 1080 without exceeding its 55 percent fan rpm the card is hitting 58 C delta T over ambient or upwards of a DC when accounting for room ambient and this means higher fan RPMs which means higher noise it's also an indicator that no one should put a reference card from either vendor in this case and finally we can look at case ambient to see what kind of internal temperatures we're getting that puts us at around 40 to 45 Celsius when the thermocouple is placed semi triangulated between the front and the CP and the GPU coolers and that's with a room ambient pretty chilly one of 19.5 see if you're in a hotter environment if you're normally around 28 29 C for your room which is not unreasonable that means the interior is going to scale somewhat with it and that means higher CPU and GPU temperatures which results in either throttling or fan speed increases so just remember with this case if you do buy one absolutely no multi-gpu and be careful about PCIe expansion cards and things like that because what happens is with this setup it's just bad you'll get throttling or just not great temperatures that you really don't want and best-case scenario you go through the effort of removing that hard drive cage flip it and mount it to the front where the radiator would go because it's a dumb place for a radiator anyway let's be honest and so now you freed up a spot for 120 intake well even still unless you get a high rpm fan or something that pushes a lot of air the issue is that it's still just not enough a lot of it will be sucked into the first card and you're still going to have thermal issues we're sure it'll be manageable now and might not throttle in the same way but it's just not an ideal setup and when there are so many other cases on the market many of them for cheaper that have better cooling it's hard to argue for something like that where you have to fight for access to one fan and then buy the fan even though you've spent $250 on the case as for what the 805 infinity does well it's really just that infinity mirror the LEDs could be better perhaps using a light pipe instead of exposed strips with the uneven adhesive but it's still good overall the included additional RGB strip is also a nice idea and has good intentions behind it but it's largely useless even in when routed over the internal fan and their marketing photos if that's not oversight of a problem with having a five and a half foot long cable I don't know what is it's clearly too long considering the length of thin might as well just be pre-applied anyway because there's really only one place it can go okay wait I said we were going to talk about the good things now and got sidetracked and started talking about the bad things again the Infinity effect is good and the structure uses two millimeter thick aluminum I'm going to I'm going to hold off the urge to say comma but because there's a big one there and I guess I'm going to do it anyway it's that with this case you can use one millimeter 1.2 millimeter steel really wouldn't sacrifice any structural integrity that means anything to any reasonable user once it's built really it's going to sit on the floor anyway and one to one point two millimeter steel is still plenty thick it's more than most of the cases on the market in the $100 ish class and it's cheaper but even so aluminum and the RGB effect does not add up to a $250 case so there's big margins here for in wind they could probably still stick with aluminum and charge less and it would at least be a little bit more justified but still obviously a thermal nightmare and just to prove that this price is absolutely crazy let's look at the throne will take tower 900 this case is the same price $250 and you get a lot more for the money there's also more material put to use here not that that's a qualifier of how good a case is but it's more material and that costs more there's three glass panels there's way better cable management and the user cost what the consumer pays is the same the point isn't to say that you should buy the Thermaltake tower 900 instead because they're a bit different clearly different in design but to show that the 805 infinity is over valuing itself if a larger case with better cabling design superior cooling and more materials overall can run the same price n1 must be making good margins on this thing or have a pretty bad deal with their factory but we toured it and it seems more like a margins issue their biggest cost is probably the two millimeter thick aluminum or the glass those RGB strips are not expensive even be quiets dark bass 900 which we saw at Computex is the same price it's about $250 for the premium model with tempered glass and you can invert the motherboard tray and move all the components around internally and it's huge that's not cheap to do it's not cheap to make and it's the same price as this case and it definitely cools better now the look is different and that's half of what matters with cases but the price doesn't quite match so what I'm saying here is that the n1 805 infinity the front of it's really cool what I think should have happened is in when n1 showed off their prototype at CES 2016 and they showed this case with that front panel the conversation should have been more of a this is what our idea is do you like it or not and then when people said yes which they did in our comments for that video especially when people said yes and when should have taken that idea and stuck it on a better case that didn't already suck so and it's not the worst case in the world don't get me wrong the 805 base model is not bad you can certainly work with it it has all the same cable management problems because the same tooling but you have front intake on that it's a mesh front intake there's a dust filter all that stuff by your own fans and it'll work fine the thermals won't be nearly as much concerned as long as you buy fans for the front of the 8:05 but the 805 infinity because we lose that front intake now you have an issue not only with the kale management which is already a known issue even 2n when when we talk to them about it but you have an issue with thermals and the quality it's okay in terms of build quality it's just there's other points when you start lacking them it gets really hard to justify case especially when it costs as much as a GTX 1060 or RX 480 so if the price drops or if the only thing you care about in life is the front panel and it does look pretty cool then maybe it'd be justifiable as a purchase until that time what I'd like to see is for n when to take this write it off as poor design steal the front panel off and stick it on something that's better designed and I'll give out some free ideas here the first one would be to either cut some holes in the top so now you resolve some of your fan issues and this has been done before just stick an intake fan up there top front done it works fine it pushes air straight into the CPU cooler silverstone has done it for ages in some of their cases we've tested it it works fine even though kind of the standard approach is to do exhaust at the top because hot air rises doesn't really matter that much and testing the next thing is to figure out this mess up here may be a power supply shroud or if that's really hated I don't know maybe not do glass on the backside so that you're not so neurotic about getting those cables perfect because they can be seen so those are the basic thoughts on this case for now I would say probably pass if it drops 250 bucks it's worth looking into maybe buying if you really want tempered glass look at the s340 elite it's flawed but not bad look at the Corsair 460 X and look at the other Corsair case the 570 X which is more expensive close to this price point but larger so as always patreon link in the post well video if you want to help us out directly links in description below for more information subscribe for more check the review again and the scription blow you on the fall article with the charts I'll see you all next time you