Gadgetory

everyone i am steve from gamers nexus net and today we're talking about an enter max case this is the edimax lipa lennox case or the lennox 801 pc case lipa is a brand of enermax and the case we're looking at here today is annie ATX full tower so it's fairly large certainly not as big as the rosel b-2 spirit that we will be looking at shortly but it is a larger case and that classifies it as a full tower the case MSRP is 160 dollars it's currently selling for 170 on amazon but in theory that should drop to 160 through other retailers as i know my continues to see the case and for basic specs the unit ships with three fans to 200 millimeter fans one on the top one in the front both of those are blue LED fans and then 11 hundred forty millimeter fan in the rear and all three fans can connect to a fan controller which is a three-step fan controller so it's got a low medium and high setting we tested all three of these and we also tested additional fan support so you can install bottom fans in the case including 2 120 millimeter bottom fans so we tested if we had one fan to this case how much of an impact does a 120-millimeter in the bottom actually grant to performance and that's something we look at later the case has a lot of extras and some of those include a USB charger port at the top that's actually a 2.4 amp port which is pretty high and this is meant to be used for charging mobile devices cell phones things like that so for frame of reference I have a moto x cell phone my charger for my Moto X is about 1.2 amps this puts out 2.4 amps so it will charge much faster but the charge will have less staying power and it's really not that great for the lithium-ion battery but if you wanted a very quick charge because you're about to run out the door or something then this does have a port that does that a lot of modern motherboards support this functionality as well other features include a hot swap 2.5 inch SSD bay here in the front which is actually pretty cool because if you're spending one hundred sixty dollars on the case you may actually be in a position where you have a hot swap 2.5 inch drive SSD or not in that case you just plug it in the front it's pre-wired to Sita and then all you have to do is basically go through windows and access the drive there's no damage that inherently occurs from unplugging or plugging in a drive when the motherboard in the case and the drive itself I'll support that functionality so you've got that there and then on the back of the case there is a handle that's coated in rubber pretty nice so that means that you can actually lift the fairly heavy case and system up from the back using a steel support beam rather than pulling on this plastic paddling that a lot of cases will force you to do speaking of the paneling it's coated in a soft grip rubber pants so the top and the front are coated in this paint it's actually a very expensive paint and that's part of what contributes to a high cost of the case the side panels are standard steel coated with a matte black paint and there's a slight difference in the color between the metal and the plastic which I really wish didn't exist because the difference is it's really not a big deal but i would rather a more uniform look unfortunately that is basically an unavoidable issue when you're dealing with different materials for the paddling and the side paneling so that's what you've got there the soft grip rubber actually does have a very nice feel to it and the aesthetic is pretty good i originally thought that this case would appear more plasticky because of the molding of the front of the top panels they are definitely of the gamer aesthetic but with the soft grip rubber it does come out looking a little bit more professional and sleeker than the average low-end plasticky case the specs are relatively standard otherwise the front door does this action right here which all that does is hide your optical drives if you don't want to show them or if you're not using them and there are three five and a quarter inch base here definitely something we've moved away from but it is a feature that some users still demand enter max gets a lot of things right with the leap at lenox case and some of those things include a told space to allow head-on access to expansion slots so you don't have to put the screwdriver in at an angle when installing video cards and other expansion devices which reduces risk of cross threading the rear grip with the rubber coating is definitely a big plus and a small feature that they added for which I am grateful the split top panel is actually pretty cool as well so the top panel mounts on Rails and it's split it to a to third section in a one third section the two third section of the back you just unscrew two thumb screws and then slide it off the rails pull it off and you have instant access to the radiator install and top fans if those are of interest for replacement so that is definitely something I was a fan of and I wish more cases would put their top paneling on rails in a similar capacity because it makes it easier to work with finally enter max puts the SSD trays on the rear of the motherboard so you've got some of those back there just like NZXT does on its cases and a lot of other manufacturers ease of installations fairly standard no major complaints there it's pretty easy to install case it's mostly to lyst there is one instance where i thought the cable management could be improved by enermax and that would be to add a second cut out near the cpu so the cpu power pinouts on motherboards are normally located either in the top left of the board meaning top left of the the cpu or in the center above the cpu or a little more to the right if you have a certain larger board like EA to export so the asus rampage as an example is one of the boards we have that has its power pin outs for the cpu located due north of the cpu on this case the way to get to that would be basically to go through one of the other side flanking cutouts so you're going to have to sort of awkwardly install the power supply cable this is really not a huge deal it does not functionally impact the case all it does is impacted mostly aesthetically because you've got to grab the cable through more open space now so it's exposed and it doesn't look as good but that is a small feature that NZ ft and Corsair have caught on to and I think enermax would benefit from as well and then another small downside is that because of the high pressure output in the rear exhaust fan we end up with a sort of high-volume exchange of air on a lower end fan with a mesh in front of it and what that does because the fan is not optimized with a frictionless coating or with a better slipstream as some of the higher-end fans do have like Silverstone's fans and be quiet fans for instance the rear fan ends up making a lot of noise and it's not really an irritating noise as much as it's a deep hum it's a low frequency output it's fairly loud and that's from forcing all that air through a port that has a mesh and you get sort of turbulence in there that creates the noise so this is something that could be easily improved by changing the fan in the case and it's something that enermax should perhaps look into in the future but not a major issue if you lower the RPM of that fan let's move on to the thermal benchmarks over time and the equilibrium benchmarks and then conclude the case review here the lipa lennox cools marginally better than the Noctis 454 cpu and GPU temperatures outputting 48.4 to celsius of heat on the cpu at equilibrium and 20.6 celsius on the GPU at equilibrium looking at the temperature over time charts our automated tests align the benchmark perfectly and show the lenox is slightly warmer than the fan tax many XL we later found that it's also warmer than the b-2 spirit we're testing a number of other cases in the background and we tested the fan controller on all three settings for the Lennox low medium high finding that the thermals aren't effectively identical on all these this is likely due to a bottleneck created by the thick plastic bars on the front and top of the case which restrict air intake to the point that it throttles the fan potential more than the controller does so to this end you're really better off just kind of leaving the fan controller one setting and ignoring it when we added a 120-millimeter 1200 RPM bottom fan we saw a 14 Celsius improvement and CPU thermals which is a gigantic change and that is potentially an oversight by utter max it's definitely something we think should be included stock and if it isn't then you should be buying one pretty early in the process because it's a big cooling difference overall the case impressed me with its feel of the coating and look really was expecting something much more plastic e and a lower quality aesthetic but that is not what we got here thankfully it's actually a pretty nice appearance overall and the thermals are average they're par for the course nothing special there but the extras on the case are well thought out and show a an attention to detail for smaller items that I think enermax deserve some notice for the front SSD port the supercharger in the top and then my favorite is just the small handle and the rails for the top panel of the case those are all small things that definitely don't make the case functionally better from a cooling perspective but Portability and other things it adds a bit of character the biggest downfall of the leap at lenox case is its price point at one hundred sixty dollars MSRP and 170 retail through amazon and newegg right now the case is actually in direct competition with some heavyweights in the industry including Corsair 760 T which is actually one of my favorite cases right now and that has a heavier use of rigid strong metals it has a very large tempered glass side panel there's slightly different markets for each of these cases but coarser definitely is a bigger name and they're going to have some power in that department other cases around the same price point would include the NZXT noxus 450 that's a hundred forty dollars it is a smaller case but it does compete in the gamer aesthetic category in terms of appearances for cases and then there's also rose wells be to spear which is gigantic it's bigger than this and it's sort of a mini server setup if you have a lot of hard drive so there are a lot of different options at this price point some of them are more direct competition than others but at the end of the day comes down to preference for aesthetics because structurally and in terms of functionality this case is at least on par with the others if not slightly ahead in some areas the plastic coating is a plus that some other companies haven't figured out yet or just don't want to pay for so there's pros and cons to all of them I would feel fine endorsing this case I wish the price point where 100 forty dollars instead because at 160 I'm probably a buyer of the 760 tea instead or even some of Silverstone's cases are cheaper and like the Raven 05 is a very good option that has more focus on cooling functionality than this case does so it's not a bad case it just has a lot of fierce competition and the main reason just like this case or really any other one in a direct competition is because you like the look of it and the look and feel of the plastic so that is the lipa Lennox case it is the 801 p ck is check the article for full details on the review and of course if you like this content please check out our patreon page it helps us out a lot and we're trying to move some of our support base over to that going forward so that is all for this video I will see you all next time