Gadgetory

in one's a one was one of the first cases to feature a wood finish which seems like it be the new in thing to do for twenty eighteen that fat faded as the wood panels are apparently a lot more involved in manufacturing than anyone expected it'll happen eventually but for now anyone is pushing the normal version of its a1 Mini ITX Mini tower meant for use as an HT PC box with IKEA influenced design if its marketing language is anything to go by which says something about being Scandinavian and plain in other words IKEA today we're reviewing the inn when a one for build quality layout and thermals before that this video is brought to you by NZXT is new h 500 case which we recently found to have an impressively effective cooling setup that is entirely negative pressure when stock the h 500 is the successor of the s 340 and s 340 a LEED offering high build quality that's all steel and glass and kale management features that are also a top class for the $70 compact mid tower case H 500 is a part of NZXT Zanu H Series lineup which also features options from mini ITX micro ATX and full ATX builds learn more at the link in the description below we've showed the a1 a few times at this point originally it did have that wood finish on the top or the front or something like that and it's probably still going to happen but n when basically said that the manufacturing process for the wood paneling is very difficult and expensive because it's time consuming on the machines so for now they have this version with an acrylic top and the case is overall interesting it's a cube format case not too different from the Thermaltake v1 we looked at previously or the Silverstone SG 13 for example the interesting things here couple small features like just having two buttons on the side panel are really nice surprisingly nice actually in a world where people are using Allen heads and flat heads and all kinds of different screws for no apparent reason to get the glass panels on and off and winds just gone with clips and buttons because I guess it doesn't weigh that much so why not otherwise the case itself once you get the panel off you see that inside it does have an included power supply and this is where things get a little bit annoying with the case so the one has a fine form-factor it's it's really nothing to complain about it's again some way to the SG 13 which is okay it's not a smallest case in the world but it's pretty damn small you can put it in a living room and it'll hide out of the way with this one though rather than being something like a 70 or 80 dollar case which is about what it looks like it includes zero fans that's okay you can buy them and yet it's $170 or so and the reason it's $170 is largely because it includes a power supply so includes a 600 watt power supply by power man of course one of the best-known manufacturers in the world I think it's an f SP unit basically so it's a Power Man six hundred power supply that you probably didn't ask for and it has a semi proprietary shield on this side so it's like a power supply shroud almost except not exactly and then the power supply also has coming out of it a USB connector you could run your own if you preferred but the USB connector goes into a Qi charger on the top but you probably also didn't ask for but it is there and the power supply basically plugs straight into the Qi charger the reason they do this they say is because the Qi charger can then be used you know when the systems off so the power supply still provides five volts or whatever it is standby to the Qi charger so you can still charge your devices while the system is not activated that's what they say is the reason for including a power supply more realistically it's probably because if you want to actually install a remove a power supply it's kind of a pain it's not the worst part of a build that we've ever seen but in this one you do have to remove the front or top i/o in this instance in order to get access to the screws to put power supply in the case again not the worst thing it's certainly something that everyone watching this channel is capable of but it's just one of those small annoying things that you have to deal with with an ITX case that has limited space available to it so anyway at 170 bucks it's a hard sell even before we get to the review we're not even there yet and it's already tough to sell because there are really good cases in this form factor for under $100 and I have a hard time believing a 600 watt 80 plus bronze power supply is worth a hundred bucks so you're paying a lot for power supply and for a Qi charger and no fans and then a bunch of acrylic basically in when though of course is no foreigner to high costs cases it's kind of the thing they do it's what they specialize in so those are the basics we'll go through Patrick's build notes here and then get into thermal and acoustic discussion as well and see if this thing's actually worth buying the a1 is a small and uncomplicated case which is good because there's no physical manual just a card with a QR code on it the power supply is pre-installed so a big portion of the build is taken care of before the case is even out of the box as we pointed out at CES the advantages of including the power supply are ease of installation and avoiding compatibility issues with larger power supplies the downside is that the case is built with one specific power supply in mind and it's not intended to be swapped out we use an SFX power supply for mini ITX case testing and to install it we have to get rid of the plastic shield they call it a top PSU chamber and that's placed between the power supply and the glass panel modular power supplies like ours may be more difficult to fit than on modular since the case isn't tailored to that arrangement of cables like the Silverstone SG 13 that we reviewed recently cable management boils down to bundling cables together and hoping they don't touch a fan blade which is another reason to stick with the pre tidied up power supply that n1 provides the other reason after that is because you paid a lot of money for it the bottom line is that the power supply is definitely factored into the overall cost so don't buy this case with the intention of replacing the power supply it's 600 Watts 80 plus bronze and non modular and if any of that is a deal-breaker don't buy the case simple the steel panel on the side is held with captive thumb screws at the top and plastic tabs at the bottom and in one feature that we've appreciated in the past the glass side panel uses two extremely easy to use plastic snaps at the top it's a bit overkill for a panel that's only a foot wide but it's a great idea and we hope anyone makes use of this on some full-size cases in the future the Qi charger is powered via micro USB cable as indicated previously and a stock power supply has a dedicated cable for this purpose if the stock power supply is used the charger remains active at all times the bigger problem that we had with the charger though is that here's the thing this is supposed to be a small form factor PC so it's probably going next to a TV or something like that you're maybe sitting six to ten feet away from it on a couch if it's being used as intended and as an inland zone really marketing discussion so then why would you want a Qi charger ten feet away you might as well plug it into a cable at that point because ultimately the idea I think of Qi chargers as someone who doesn't use them is that generally you keep it kind of next to where you're sitting and you get a taxed and you can pick it up on tethered and reply and put it back down on the charger but at 10 feet away what's the point kind of loses all of it so maybe that's okay for some of you if it is great I guess you could buy the case without any issues but otherwise it just it seems like an oddly positioned feature for a case that's not really meant to be next to the user when it's in use and further the Qi charger itself is underneath a giant sheet of acrylic so whenever you're pushing any kind of inductive charging through an interface or through some obstructing material you're dealing with slower charging because less current ultimately getting to the device on the other side of it and even on mouse pads with Qi chargers like the Corsair one you can really only lift the thing up like a millimeter or two before it's just not charging anymore or not charging adequately so on this there will be a ultimately lower current that is going to that where the charger is where your phone is sitting to charge your phone so it's not going to charge that fast so it's a slower charging Qi charger as a result of the extra thickness that the current has to travel through and it's also just kind of odd to be on a case that's going to be sitting 6 or 10 feet away from you so the a wand again doesn't come with any fans and then when other cases like the 303 don't either so it's possible to run the case with no fans it's just not a great idea you should probably buy some we had to choose some kind of stock fantastic configuration to go with this because just testing it without any would incinerate everything so no real point in that because ultimately you shouldn't be using it that way so all fan slots are 120 millimeters there are two in the bottom there's one in that side panel and then there's one in the rear slot as well so we have a couple of things we did for thermal testing and a lot of it was just trying to figure out what made the most sense because it is a blank slate for you to work with so everyone knows a case will get hot without fans you don't need to prove that point we added the NZXT air F 125 doubt of the H 400 KS from NZXT and the stock configuration so-called that we settled on was it with one exhaust fan in the rear and then one intake fan in the front bottom and our GPU is a short card which we'll talk about later because that comes into play as well we also tested some other configurations so we tested two bottom intake and one rear exhaust we tested one side intake and one we were exhaust and then we tested again the stock configuration except with the case flipped on the front like that and the reason for that is because the side skirts here have such little gaps in them that we were curious whether or not they were impeding airflow in any meaningful way because you've got the fan cage sticking down out of the bottom and then you have a dust filter which is actually fairly fine it's got more holes than it does not holes so that's always a good thing and then the side skirt extends down pretty low as well so that's potentially an area of impedance and something we want to test by simply flipping the case just like this because then you no longer have that impedance so let's get into the thermal numbers start with the CPU torture testing cv comparatives and then go on through the rest a verge of CPU temperature with the configuration we chose this baseline bottom in rear out was 62.1 degrees Celsius over ambient and then we retested it later as 61.5 degrees in the second test so basically the same thing with in error flipping the case onto its face help the intake fan supply more air to the CPU lower in time 457 degrees delta T over ambient adding another fan into the bottom directly under the GPU lowered the temperature for the CPU by a couple degrees from baseline and this brought us down to 59 point four degrees Celsius and understandably small change because of the obstruction using a side intake rather than a bottom intake fell right between the two baseline tests at sixty one point seven degrees delta T over ambient so there's no significant difference comparatively for the CPU temperatures against other cases Stevan temperatures are decent but unimpressive baseline temperatures were most similar to the SG 13 with the front filter removed which is also fairly close to the form factor of the a one cubes style many ITX cases tend to have clearance for CBD tower coolers like the one sixty millimeter clearance in the a one so our low-profile cryo you see seven doesn't take full advantage of the space provided this is the nature of testing ITX might as well use a bigger cooler for this one but you got the idea and we're trying to standardize four components anyway at present our results put us at around the age 200 i with front intake and the FG thirteen without a filter GP a-- testing was more unpredictable face line was forty one point one degrees aziz over ambient and forty point two and retested just within our one c margin of errors so i didn't take supplied less air to the GPU and averaged forty three point nine degrees dt and the GPU we used from any ID axis testing is a short single fan design so with the bottom intake fan towards the front of the case and away from the GPU and our baseline tests we didn't expect the GPU to get much air flow logically the two bottom intake fan configuration should have done better since one of the fans pointed directly into the GPU cooler however that test averaged five degrees above baseline forty five point three CDT and the face down tests that allowed the bottom intake fan to pull more air in also averaged above baseline our working theory is that with two fans one obstructed intake and one unobstructed exhaust the case was under negative pressure and pulled air in a way that benefited the GPU more than other configurations moving on to comparative testing for the GPU despite the bottom and take fans being nearly flush with the desk underneath the a1 has the lowest average GPU DTA on our chart below even the RV's eo3 with the optimal fan placement this is of course thanks to the NZXT fans that we stuck into it they're really taking all the credit here so it's indicative to some point of good air flow and pressure patterns but also the fans do matter the age 200 comes with identical fans however and the a1 was still several degrees cooler than it most of this advantages because that the path of the components is so short you know the fans nearly flush against the table the airflow path is only inches to get to the components so static pressure is less relevant than in a case with impeding filters and eight inch travel distances to the components firestrike GPU temperatures average forty point seven degrees dt over ambiens equivalent to the torture test and that's again better than the h 200 which uses the same fan Stevi temperatures recorded in a1 are surprising but the remains consistently good in every test we ran CPU testing for blender now is next so CPU rendering average forty four point five degrees D T on the CPU between the h200 NZXT KS and cores are 280 X and again in the middle of the pack GPU rendering average 24 point nine degrees on the GPU being the previous best of thirty point seven for the h200 we only used the stock or baseline configuration when testing and blender and fire strike so the rv0 three is optimum fan configuration isn't on this chart check the previous review for that ultimately then for this case what we'd like to see is a bare-bones version of it there is no reason this case should force you to buy a honestly pretty low end power supply with it that's a comparison are the longest-living component for the most part in an entire computer it's the thing that's the easiest to reuse it's also sort of a specific thing if you have cable needs or any other things that you're considering in terms of airflow patterns and you want to pass a power supply because it's an ITX box whatever it doesn't matter the point is at $170 for this case a lot of it probably being the power supply because they're ordering low quantities so they can't beat Corsair EVGA for pricing it's it's hard to recommend it 170 bucks is way too much what this is we do like the case thermals are fine they actually do better than we expected the build quality is good the I mean if you like the IKEA minimalist look I guess that works too that's the thing you want you can get it in this case so there's really nothing incredibly wrong with it other than the price and that's a weird place to be because we can recommend the case the case is perfectly fine and we actually like it overall but a 170 bucks way too much so what we'd like to see in win if you're listening is remove the Qi charger remove the power supply remove the power spike cover thing and see what that lets you get down to in price maybe 110 bucks or something like that but that would probably be where we'd want to see it ultimately is that 70 to 110 dollar range with a difference just depending on other features like do you decide to include more fans by which I mean more than zero because that would be a good move as well all this money spent on the power supply Qi charger would be better spent on maybe one fan reduced the price the case and let the user figure out the rest that's kind of the whole point a PC building anyway so it's just it's weird to sell it in this setup because it's it's not that competitive you could piece out the parts for lower cost than anyone is selling them to you for and part of that is ultimately again going to be because in when is ordering a semi custom power supply in definitely low quantities and they're never gonna beat the price that you can get buying one from someone like UGA coarser solder stoner people who make power supplies on mass and get volume discounts as a result of it which are passed on to the consumer so that's the problem with the case the case itself is fine it's just the pricing is no good so anyway as always you can subscribe for more go to the article link to the description below to check out our written version of this if you prefer and go to patreon.com/scishow sexist helps out directly stored i gave his nexus net to pick up one of our mod mats or one of our GN shirts thank you for watching I'll see you all next time