Gadgetory

hey one this is Steve from gamers Nexus Don that and today we're looking at raid max's new iteration of their cobra budget gaming case we received the cobra case around the same time as CES was going on so to the same tune as our armored Evo and impending phantom 630 review it made sense review a purely budget targeted enclosure with gamers in mind as always let's talk hard specs before we get into any of my opinions and the objective thermal performance data the cobra is currently marketed at around $70 MSRP placing it firmly in the odd niche that lies between the ultra budget and true mid-range sections of PC cases and the the Cobra ships with two 120-millimeter fans one rear exhaust fan and one from intake fan with a green LED that is not toggleable and there's availability for either tomb or 120 millimeters to 140 millimeters or 1 180 millimeter top fan as well as one 120 millimeter bottom fan if your PSU is not large I did some testing on which which extra fan slot was optimal if you did decide to buy one more fan so check that out toward the back half of the video raid Max's Cobra offers a few dust filters on the bottom a couple of cable cutouts for cable management and a full 25 millimetres of depth between the mounting wall and the right side panel at the deepest part of the bezel there are cable tie anchors scattered along the green mounting wall as well making cables fairly easy to maintain so the Cobra as you may have noticed by now ships with a green front led and like I said a green mounting panel but you won't get the green glow in the side window that rain max shows off so prevalently in their marketing images to get that you'll need to add another source of green light probably a cold cathode or a different rear fan and speaking of the window the Cobra case has a small but interesting side view window that is using a sort of dragon scale pattern on the glass I guess you could call it and the window is shifted away from the ugly drive cage scaffolding enough where you won't even see it so that's kind of nice but it still tries to give a view of the CP and VGA you won't really see at least with our build you really just see the bottom left quadrant of the CPU cooler and the back ugly part of the VGA so no big gain there but it is kind of a nice thought with all of the basics out of the way though let's talk about build quality cable management and cooling performance the raid maxx Cobra case is fairly standard in build quality it's surprisingly sturdy for a case of its caliber of its of its low price and the materials are the typical steel plastic mix but the plastic isn't abundant enough to feel like it cheapens the case the green paint is resilient and doesn't feel like it'll be chipping easily so that's a plus and one of the fans and I couldn't figure out which one by ear but one of the fans makes an annoying resonant vibrational acoustic as a result of turbulence between the fans blades and the cases mesh this is a common problem with cases of this design and is resolved by certain aftermarket fans like silver stones new ap 123 that we use in this video the noise wasn't bad enough to dry drive me crazy and throw the case out the window to defenestrate the case if you will but it was it was enough to drive someone who is already sensitive to such noise a little bit insane so to the same tune of that the front fan is largely obstructed by the drive cage scaffolding and the plastic front panel and of course the metal mesh that sits between the two which is the source of this vibration all of these obstacles to airflow will be evident in our thermal benchmark in that I'll show in a moment but it definitely is not the ninety percent intake that you would like to see in performance cases this isn't a performance case though the cable management was actually very satisfied there's plenty of room on the dark side of the motherboard so to speak for cable routing even the fat 24-pin cable with others routed under and over it and the cutouts are mostly well placed the one the one exception being that the 24 pin cutout is I believe it should be shifted about a quarter inch downward for better concealment of the 24 pin cable but overall small complaint they're all pretty good for a case of its price one interesting item is the interior drive bays the 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch bays the cobra natively ships with 4 two-and-a-half inch bays that are made for SSDs obviously to put a laptop laptop drive in there but it's it's for SSD cages that's crazy for a case of this price in my opinion because at the end of the day considering that a buyer at this budget will likely not own for solid-state drives I just I don't know that those are ever going to be utilized by most users but I suppose it shows a shift in market trends regardless if you can't keep the components cooled everything's a bust so let's talk about cooling performance our case testing methodology is all included in the review linked in the description below but in short we put the CPU under for threaded large FFTs in prime95 for the CPU test which brings it to 100% load and we use fir mark for the GPU test which also puts that I want the GPU at 100% load and these are conducted independently of each other here you can see the CPU thermal performance despite its moderate quality and decent feature set the kobra really falters and it's cool in performance this is mostly due to the two fan design and heavily obstructed intake but if you were to purchase an additional fan and obviously this will change based upon your CPU coolers architecture we found that the top exhaust position was most efficient and cooled at least our cooler down on our CPU by an additional three degrees Celsius which is quite noticeable the that does push the price of the case up though because you have to account for another fan so do keep that in mind the bottom intake position called the GPU down similarly but didn't benefit the CPU a whole lot here's the GPU performance chart and once again the Cobra comes in dead last and the case isn't anything amazing in the cooling department that's for sure but whether or not this is relevant to you will depend largely on your cooler selection and overclocking intentions if you do plan to overclock and will be using a cheap mid-range or for bid the stock cooler I'd probably recommend that you consider another case if you're just running a true budget or mid-range system at stock settings well I think the Cobra is quite acceptable for that actually in terms of the overall value and my conclusions I really don't think the case is anything groundbreaking and that's evident to those of you who are experienced with such things but it did have excellent cable management features for a case of its price and had a few cooling expansion making it a potential winner for budget systems and some mid-range systems the main reason you'd be purchasing this over an r5 s11 410 or other similarly sub $100 case is that you'd be looking for the green aesthetic and the the just generally the jaggedness of the front panel if you don't need killer out-of-the-box performance and you do like the appearance of this case well by all means this seems like your case go for it if you could care less about the aesthetics then I'd probably point you elsewhere for performance I was quite happy with the overall quality of materials at the price though especially given the armored Evo's disappointment but with that check out the link to review below for more details and let me know if you have questions and I will see you all next time peace