Gadgetory

today we're modding the ape 700 I machine learning device okay all right fixed it NZXT h 700 i is an example of the opposite end of the embargo discussion from last week people rush to review the product without really digging into it because there was no embargo so we spent the last few days really working on this one trying to get the smart device to work and this case is one where it's got a lot of really positive features high build quality excellent design and the spotlight is stolen by an attempt at machine learning buzzwords before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below the age 700 eye is a culmination of a lot of really good ideas and then one overreaching one and an example of some of the good ideas would be for example this back panel which has a button eject so that you can just push the button and it pops out and now obviously you know you have your hand there but it's actually really nice because it makes it the easiest panel I've worked with in terms of putting a back panel on a case that has already got cables in it and having it closed very easily so major plus they're cool mechanism on the release and overall just an extra step of engineering that we don't normally see and that's cool another cool factor is the actual ventilation which there's vents on every side front left front right bottom Center whole top left top right and plenty of meshing on the back so this ventilation pretty much aligns with what we said we wanted in the s340 elite when it was reviewed about a year ago when we reviewed it and my criticism for the SD 40 leads was quote here's how we didn't stantly improved the s3 40 elite shortened the glass panel so that it doesn't protrude beyond the power supply shroud then stick the front steel panel on to an underlying frame with mesh and cut a grille into the side of the new front panel this gives a one-inch depth from the front panel to the end terior and now we can actually use a middle fan intake without being utterly pointless and they've done that they improved all the things is that I wanted to see improved so well done txt none of these things were particularly unique ideas I certainly didn't come up with them I just requested them and I'm sure they heard similar requests from lots of other people so it's cool to see that they've done that this has full venting up and down the side we did test with the front panel removed and the case does pretty well overall as you'll see momentarily as for the other features they've got a bit crazy with cable management we currently have it all and done and these at velcro ties come pre-installed you route them under the cables tie them back over the other side and there's channels like up here there's three channels four cables channel four cables here there's a channel for your SSD cables so channeling four cables everywhere and then on the inside of the case they've got the infamous NZXT cable management bar that we saw first on the estimate 40 and as returned so this is the cable management part now this thing right here it's got a bit of an artsy flair to it comes down goes in I think comes back out down here you can actually remove it there's two screws one is here and then the other one is in here and unscrew both of those and you can push it forward or back a bit I would like to see this bar come down about an inch to better accommodate the 80 X 24 pin cable because right now we're kind of bending the cable in a way that doesn't look the greatest and in a case that has so much emphasis on cable management it's just a small feature that an extra half-inch would have gone a long way because not every motherboard has the ATX 24 pin in the same spot and I was clearly doesn't have it in the same spot as what it was designed for so that would be nice to see but still overall good features on cable management the front of the case in terms of cooling it's got three fans in the front there NZXT fans one in the back and the three in the front or 120s and those do pretty well because they have actual access to air everywhere except the front center and keep our temperatures reasonable it's in the top 25% of cases we've tested for CPU thermals which you'll see later now this is where I would normally focus a lot more on all the rest of the build features in here like sort of mounting bracket for radiators and fans on the top unfortunately that's gonna be cut short so we can focus on the smart device which is a new thing and exe has added so what does a smart device do in your computer case well it does machine learning what the hell does that mean basically you take it and first you retrieve it from the garbage and then once you've retrieved it from the garbage you can install it actually comes installed I guess but you've probably thrown it out at this point so I'm just assuming you've done that and you need to install it again so you install it in the case it's got a couple different channels for fans and basically what it comes down to is a an attempt at trying to listen to your system noise levels from inside the case while plotting temperature against fan RPMs and then it attempts to generate a fan rpm to temperature to noise response curve and Antioch C's marketing materials create this mind-blowing graphic for it by which I mean my mind cannot comprehend what the graph is trying to convey and it basically says it's a 3d curve for your fans so they've got 3d and they've got machine learning both of which are great buzzwords what happens in reality is you plug all the fans and you open NZXT cam which is it's a whole different story you hope the xdcam and once you've got that open go to the smart device page you must be connected to internet you have to log into an account and once you've done those things you log into the account you can start the calibration process that starts with well it's got three stages and I'm gonna explain this to you because the software does a terrible job of it so stage number one is preset in the preset stage it tests for system idle and it tests for system load the is where you play a game or run some application like fire strike and once a test those it basically is checking the temperature levels with the current preset configuration the next stage is when it does calibration so this is the one where basically you complete the previous stage by playing a game and a test your levels while playing a game it does not tell you that Stage one has completed it does not tell you to stop playing a game it doesn't tell you what to do next so you just keep playing your game because you who plays a game for twenty minutes so what happens next is it all freezes doesn't make any progress until you close your game which it hasn't told you to do once you close your game it will then place your CPU under approximately 80 percent load the NZXT cam software has its own load stress tester built into it and this is an attempt to stress the CPU with their built-in stressor modulate the fan rpm check the temperature levels and then readjust as necessary and develop a curve there are a lot of challenges with this one of them is the fact that temperature doesn't change instantly with the change of a fan speed especially if it's liquid coolant fortunately ours is not but if you have a liquid cooler the liquid takes longer to soak that change than anything else in the system so that's a challenge another one is that it just gets stuck and here's why it gets stuck from NZXT the software only measures idle levels when the cv is under 0 to 10 percent load here's a problem with that cam puts the CPU under six to eight percent load you all start running Windows so you've got six to eight percent load from the software that needs you to be under ten for idle monitoring then you have Windows that's probably using that least three to six percent on its own so you're already gonna have frozen update intervals on idle testing because of that the next thing for what they consider load levels it's got to be 35 to 65 percent load and stress levels it has to be 90 percent above so the software looks at your system temperature noise performance for stress 35 to 65 percent load and 4 or 90 above rather and for load levels moderate which are 35 to 65 what you'll notice is that between 65% and 90% nothing happens it does not work it sits there stuck at 52% or whatever it is for hours until you step in it interfere so the problem is NZXT is cam cpu stressor was generating on our 6700 K test CPU 80% load you'll notice if you are a mathematician that the number 80 is not between is not between 35 and 65 and is not above 90 it is in fact between 65 and 90 so the software doesn't progress it sits there so to overcome this we just loaded prime and burned it out a hundred percent and made the same finish this whole process of trying to machine learn the temperature the noise and the RPM response took over two attempts about three to four hours to complete because the cpu load restrictions are so constrained that it would get frozen and I would have to walk into the room and manually open or closed applications to get a trip to progress further it's supposed to take about an hour to do all of it and then it's supposed to read from the cloud to get user data for similar hardware components that you have and apply that curve automatically we have the case before most of the public does which means that there's not a lot of cloud data out there so it probably takes a bit longer than if you buy it in a week from now kam occasionally throws prompts that are completely uninformed for example this one that said that the CPU is at 85 degrees which is 100% perfectly acceptable as a temperature for this CPU I don't know if it says this for just every CPU as a blanket but for this one it's certainly incorrect you're fine at 85 C and cam just seems like it has overly sensitive semi arbitrary numbers that it sometimes warns you about and the sad thing with this one is that it's contributing to misinformation where people genuinely think that an 80 degree temperature for a CPU is a bad thing obviously depends on the processor but for something like these zseries LGA 1150 X CPUs is perfectly fine don't listen to cab and please don't repeat it because it's wrong so that's pretty much how the smart device works like I said it sort of woefully and tragically the tracks from all of the amazing things about the case you're buying a case if you go to new egg and you look up eight seven hundred I it will be listed under computer cases it will not be listed under machine learning and fat controllers so you're buying a case which means we should probably criticize the case well it's not a lot to criticize performance pretty well thermally acoustically is acoustically it's kind of so-so but thermally it's pretty good the design features a great kill management good is good the I don't everything I really have no major complaints about the case construction quality is sturdy the steel paneling is relatively thick compared to a lot of the market it's got cool features like the quick release so I like the case they've inset the glass it's not like protruding from the side of the case it has this bevel around there chamfered edges it's good but it's $200 and it's $200 because it has a smart device in it and it's got the RGB LEDs which if you like the hue it's included so great what I'd like to see is the case with no smart device I want an h2 700d to steal a quote from one of our patreon backers for dumb so eight seven hundred dumb would be great if they can sell it at anywhere from 120 to 150 dollars no smart device maybe even know RGB LEDs I mean you sell the hue anyway you sell it as an add-on and then be the most competitive case at the price on the market that would be pretty cool instead NZXT is trying so hard to get the smart device out there because they think it's really cool and kudos to them it is pretty unique and interesting and different so I totally understand why they want to sell it exclusively with it but it's nuking the potential of the case because it could be a lot cheaper appeal to a much wider base and would be absurdly competitive with the rest of the market just from the case alone it does fine on its own merit it doesn't need a computer inside of it to add cost and make you really frustrated with it because the case should not do more things than house a computer and cool it and now I refuse to agree that the smart machine learning fan controller is part of the cool it aspect that's sort of an accessory to cool in it you put the fans in there already let them do their job if users want to quiet the fans they can but they do just fine as is they don't really need quieting the GPU probably governs its own fan curve better than a smart device does anyway I don't trust an auxilliary device to control a GPU fan speed unless it's a garbage GPU in which case shame on me for buying it also kam isn't finished it has placeholder text everywhere ok so that's enough about the smart device thing short long story short we don't like it and cam needs work let's go over the good things quickly one more time before we get into the thermals because the smart device sadly the negatives are overwhelming the rest of the case and you're still buying a case at the end of the day so it's fair to go over those again from Patrick's written review notes Patrick says has always NZXT has taken particular care with cable management there are cable channels all over the back the tray which are sections of removable plastic track with integrated velcro ties they work well to hold the profusion of front IO and smart device cables that are included with the case and they continue to work well once the PSU cables are routed through them the one downside is that since the velcro loops are screwed into the case it's better to thread cable through them rather than plugging everything in and wrapping up the straps later there's also a small chunk of plastic innocently labeled designated cable router looks suspiciously like an NZXT puck but fortunately for us it's removable you can actually route stuff around it though if you wanted to the cable management bar is just as good as an idea as it was when we first saw it in the s 340 and H seven hundred eyes iteration is a little bit more artistic so not a bad thing there the bar sticks closely to the shroud and the interior of the case except where your angles outward to allow for room for the smart device and the s3 40s Bar outwards to allow room for the ATX power we're the age 700 I has about two centimeters of clearance so we had to route the power cable a bit more upwards than we'd like but not a major issue at all and still a nice-looking kala bar and that little puck on the backside the plastic cable routing one is one of the examples of the extreme attention to detail that ndx skis designers put into this case I really can't speak enough to the attention to detail its you see it everywhere the panels the way they mount is very secure but also as you saw easy to just pop out they've got the mushroom clips that are easy to work with not gonna fall off like other cases on the market then the front panel has these air channels that are chamfered into it so you take the front panel off and it sort of bows outwards towards the user but the actual front the exterior is flat so that's just sort of chamfering the inside and that's the fans breathe a bit better the attention to detail also shows on things like these dots they are functional and ventilation but they also persist across the case dots here dots here thoughts on the power supply shroud which don't really help thermals as we tested but it's nice to have for the hard drives if you had one in there it would benefit from that and that attention to detail and things like the cable management hole in the top so there's no rubber grommets which that's fine they're kind of dumb anyway and the top has a bar that's straight across so it'll accommodate every motherboard because case is now need to keep in mind that boards like Sky X and T r4 are going to have PCIe or a bps 12-volt headers all over the board and that means that you've got to have cable pass there's more places so they just cut a bar straight across all that is great but yeah let's get into the thermals as always you can find our full testing methodology linked in the article in the description below along with Patrick's written review starting our testing only with the H 700 ICB torture benchmarks the stock case operates at a 54 degree Celsius delta T over ambient temperature removing the front panel entirely only reduced temperatures by six point three degrees Celsius this shows that for Ellis to what the fans are capable of and DXE is relatively close to its maximum potential with its current panel and fan inclusion and design the only way to significantly improve would be mesh clearly but that still only give me room for up to six degrees Celsius improvement with the current fan configuration the side intakes are wide enough to breathe and the interior of the front panel is bezels in a way that gives them some additional room to circulate the air for perspective our mesh mod of the H 500 P allowed us to drop 6 to 8 degrees Celsius off the stock temperatures so nth C's case is right in line with that fixed variant comparatively tortured test the results position the stock h7 dry toward the top quarter of cases functionally equivalent to the thermal take abuse anyone see him 700 PE and core P 3 cases we're at about 54 degrees Celsius over ambient with the H 700 I about 6 to 7 degrees warmer let me silverstone our l06 chart champion and adding to AF 14 fans to the mesh of 5 puts it atop the charge just for reference again their additions not stock as shown in the previous charge NZXT has done well to get close to its maximum cooling potential when eliminating the front panel a far cry from the 10 to 12 degrees Celsius gap of the panelists versus stock paneled h 500 P aged 500 PE op rates a 56 point one degrees Celsius EP low temperature here over ambience but drops to become the coolest case on the bench when its front panel is removed down to 43 to 44 degrees Celsius that's the difference of good versus bad panel design NZXT is aged 700 i although not claiming to be a high airflow case like the aged 500 p those managed to leverage most of its front fan cooling potential with the boat out interior of the front panel on the wide intake machine for GPU thermals we start with torture thermals only with the H 700 I the case exhibited a 5 to 6 degree reduction from removing the front panel and taping over the power supply showers ventilation did not create any meaningful change of performance so doesn't do a lot for our card maybe for for example a PCIe device mounted in the very last PCIe slot like an SSD that would benefit from the holes in the power supply shroud temperatures are also comparatively good to average depending if 700 is positioned at about 52 point 5 degrees Celsius delta T for the GPU temperature positioning it between the Shogun and s 340 elite we already know that the venting of the PSU shroud isn't directly beneficial to our GPU thermals with this card but it could help with other devices and will certainly aid in harddrive cooling and overall air flow throughout the case no need to fully compartmentalize the PSU and its cables anyway 3d mark has the H 700 I toward the top of our newer benchmark as positions it in second for our new 3d mark test blender provides a real-world rendering test for blender rendering on the CPU our CPU temperatures land at thirty seven point six degrees Celsius for the H seven hundred i ranking it forth with the p3 and view sony one functionally equivalent in performance our l06 remains in the first as it has for the past several months now GPU rendering has the h 709 second behind only the redline zero six and shows everything operating it well within acceptable conditions finally total system noise is expectedly uninteresting with the h seven hundred i toward the worst end of the chart the case is really not that bad the worst of these cases is in the 40s and that's not exceptionally loud the case roughly matches the GN metro v version of the h 500 p marked at forty point two DBA for total system noise on the ntsc case this is the result of sticking four fans into the case and opening up air flow a bit and of course one thing not really discussed or shown here is that by opening up the air flow you can run slower fans which counters the noise concern so because the case didn't actually breathe we ran these at max RPMs for the the front and the rear fan we put the GPU at fifty-five because that's where the curve would put it a cpu is added like eleven hundred rpm you could lower those rpms with a similar configuration and be fine and that's because the case can breathe reasonably you drop a couple hundred rpm off the front and your noise levels are now down another one to three decibels depend what you did and what you use overall the case performs reasonably it's not the best case on the charts but it's not that bad it's sort of like the s 340 elite was where the 340 elite was not impressive we didn't like it a whole lot from an airflow standpoint they slapped a panel on it for glass this one puts the glass panel on which with a much more meaningful and obviously deliberate brushstroke and there's a ventilation for the middle fan to breathe so it'll do something and if you put a radiator in the front it's not going to be I mean obviously a radiator is kind of a great equalizer for everything but you still don't want them running and efficiently and this kind of resolves a lot of that so from that perspective noise thermals it's fine it's not exciting but it's fine and it's good enough for NZXT that we mark it as an improvement over the last design and that's a good thing as for the rest of it case designs great it is one of the most thought out cases on the market we've worked with lately it's woefully is it's tragic that the inclusion of these all these smart devices like feel like it should come with a smart doorbell and a smart refrigerator because they're just so unnecessary to have and it drives the price up to $200 if n dn/dt if you're listening please please seriously consider this consider removing at least one or both of the two smarter devices that the fan control thing and RGB LEDs consider removing them so now the case for a little bit above where the s340 is that's 240 elite maybe maybe like 120 250 dollars it would be so crazy competitive at that price point at that price point your competition is the Coolermaster H 500 P it's no brainer you you win like do it please the smart device you'll notice those are you watching we did not have thermal or noise results for it and the thermal noise chart that's because it sucks to work with it doesn't quite work kam is buggy enough that like you can get it to work probably theoretically but after fighting with it for like six hours on and off I basically bagged it because while sitting there and basically what you need to know to get it to work is sit there and watch the CPU utilization if it's doing an idle test and CPU utilization goes to 11% because cam eats so much on its own intermittently then you need to kill processes to allow it to complete that portion of the test then the load starts if the load starts and you're between 65 and 90 you need to fire up another application to get it to 90 or down to 65 so it can complete once you've completed it should work but I only have so much time to put into something before my expectation of it working exceeds the desire to force it to work and as a consumer if I were in that situation I'd say you know what screw this I'm either sending it back or I'm plugging my fans into the motherboard doing it manually and I'll be done in less than 30 minutes that's what it comes down to if the smart device takes longer to configure than doing it manually and it probably does a worse job because let's face it humans are going to be better at that type of thing just because they know what they want then it's not worth using so that's my opinion on that but the rest of the case is fantastic I wish it were not toner dollars we'll see if they listen and do a cheaper version but that's it for this time patreon.com slash gamers and access if you'd like to helps out directly NZXT you've done a great job here except that one thing so please don't take it the wrong way subscribe for more as always and you can go to story about gamers Nexus dotnet to buy a shirt that's not like this one sweet we don't have a puck gamers Nexus shirt on the store but maybe someday I'll see you all next time