Gadgetory

everyone I'm joined by Rob teller today we're talking about problems in the case industry lack of innovation in the case industry Rob worked as a former what p.m. at NZXT case case p.m. so has experience designing things like the H 440 yesterday nope h 440 s340 and then going further back phantom 530 source 530 h 630 cases which 810 phantom 820 I was in the mix for a while yeah so he's he's got about seven years of experience in the game with cases I've been working with them for a long time I'm not fully satisfied with where cases are in the industry in general right now so it's thought we just lay some problems out or talk about where the current direction is before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a 360 millimetre radiator plus 3 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if then we'll take it rain fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stack pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below quick note anything Rob says is his own opinion so we'll just put that after yeah not representing a company today so where do we want to start I think we were talking about general lack of innovation which is probably a symptom of a few things yeah like one being how how far can you really push a case and I feel like a lot of case manufacturers are kind of in there like tween years they like some of them gave it like a real hard shot hard effort to try to get case innovation and may not have happened and then they're like oh well we'll still the same amount of cases if we just kind of turn one out anyway right let's saw the same amount either way and it's not our leading product for a lot of people yeah a lot of these companies have become much more multifaceted you know when I joined the industry I was told to look at an tech and coolermaster and tech and coolermaster were the two biggest case names in the whole industry and you know you look at how far we've come I don't like when was last time you recommended and Tech case for purchase like seriously recommended probably I know personally I never have but well I I did probably the antique nine hundred back when it was like the case yeah when it was brand new alright and that I built in that key that was probably my one of my my second or third personal system so that's mid 2000s or something yeah so yeah I don't know they've they've got the p8 now which we're reviewing but it's got some issues with it as well just like all the other cases do you you can see antics trying to break out but really all they're doing is catching up they're adding a power supply shroud they're getting rid of optical drive bays they're using a little bit less plastic they're going to a more squared-off dine like it's not there's still a lot of the same tooling though you get you can pull bits and pieces out of the cases where you're like oh that was in the whatever came out six years ago okay yeah and if you're gonna start to do that really all you're doing is playing a numbers game you're like alright helmet can I get all these features in a shared chassis and sell it for $39 right no that that's when it gets interesting but if you're still trying to sell it for like over $100 it's kind of it's kind of like an insult I feel like the end user because now that someone who's not in the know someone who may not fully understand what they're trying to purchase might just be like Integra's good yeah an antique was I mean they were genuinely industry-leading yeah okay there's a reason that they're referenced and I they were one of the first companies they might have been the first company to do a non brown box box for the case like as in art on the box yeah that's how old antic is and that's how leading-edge they were at the time due my um my my first memories of antic were always going to Fry's or micro Center they had the endcaps they'd have a whole pallet stack yeah of cases and you'd see it you're like that's the case you buy like you could get a weirder oxide style led like super funky admittedly NZXT back in the day but right you knew if you bought an antique you'd be fine and it's not really the case anymore are they kind of resting on their laurels yeah they've they've definitely certainly in terms of perception have kind of fallen from visibility so now you've got companies like Coursera has definitely stepped in in a big way sure they have a huge following a lot of fans they've got some solid designs they have some flaws like all the other companies but I feel like we're an tech has faded a little bit and fallen back in the industry there's now coursers come forward NZXT had a big creative growth definitely so I don't start with Corsair next so what do we think there first of all Corsair was memory yep right then they got into things like power supplies where they really did quite well liquid coolers liquid coolers cases so they're one of the multi-faceted companies we're talking you know the courser story is one of my favorite just speak like of course there was for a long time always just a competitor of mine in the industry but of course their story is always really cool because they managed to come out with the 800 d the 800 e was their first foray into cases at the time you know really cases weren't that expensive for like no one was really spending that much money was a big halo yeah it was a huge thing it had multiple partitions on the inside it was kind of set up for liquid cooling what liquid cooling was back in the day and it really it felt expensive like they did a great job not feeling like a turnkey but case but bigger I think made an incredible good job in making it feel like if you built a computer in this it'd be worth more than the sum of its component all right yeah and that that was really incredible that they went did that and then subsequently went on made like the 600 T which is what like a cult favorite of mine I can just they did they started to do things that no one was really thinking about at that time yeah they started they they pushed hinged doors a lot too yeah that was a new with the mechanism on that 800 d I remember being very serious yeah it was robust and the 760 T was it I think also had the more affordable version of the hinge door yep with a full like full panel acrylic window and that was pretty new as well people have certainly done these things in some form or another but we're talking about bringing it to like mass market even the busiest I I seem to be fall in love with all the the coarser cases that never really took off in a mainstream the stuff like the 380 T you know like it it it wasn't perfect and it wasn't the best optimal you know use of use of spending for a case but it was really cool like you looked at it you're like I don't know any other case that looks like this I don't know anything I could buy that could be comparable to it and that's why I really like what coarser was doing with cases right yes then modern Corsair we've got things like 400 to 600 see what else they have right now that's since it on honestly since they changed the numbering scheme up on these model numbers it's really hard for me to follow Corsair in terms of placing a name onto a project well so generally speaking what are things that with like with Coursera talk about an tech some of the things that uh you know they kind of fell on like cable management for example and I've never caught up there what about Corsair where can they improve because I I think Porsche is one of the few companies where in our testing they routinely do pretty well in thermals there near can't say that for alot of yeah of course there's definitely the more responsible as leader these days you're gonna get a good product no matter what now I would say that Corsair is almost the new antic that you can't buy a bad Corsair case you know certainly I'll leave to you to do the reviewing but it's really hard to be upset with the product that you get out of course there there could have been improvements they could have done things better I'll always think that of course but they do a pretty good job the problem with that is you end up with a middle of the line product in a lot of ways you don't get a lot of new innovation out of it Corsair tends to use a design firm for a lot earth at their solutions they're not in-house design right of course they're managed by a Corsair but middle of the line is really what what I seem to get a lot out of it you get the current trends that are coming up stuff like decent and inoffensive yeah yeah they try to be a little funky with stuff like what was the newer boxy case that came out the huge one yeah that had almost like the little alien sculpted was it wasn't at a tee yes there's 500 tee time I like a Computex that just past it's been out for like a year or so but you know you get you get a little bit of funkiness enough that you know it'll sell you know that no one's gonna be upset with it right and then a pretty good case but I haven't I really would love to see coarser do something really fresh really new but this isn't always in their wheelhouse you know yeah well they've gotten with coarser seems like they certainly follow trends pretty effectively not not in an offensive or insulting no but they definitely catch up on trends quickly which some other companies don't catch up as fast on the trends that's you know bad for them but trend-setting companies say we should probably give in win some credit in win has i i'm curious how that's actually translated cleaning to sales for them but i they came in really hard with the glass like in one came to market with glass and it was it the towel the towel was like the first yeah they're only showed at Computex with all that glass and they were one of the they were the first that sticks in my mind with doing tempered glass yeah seriously as they did and other companies caught up pretty quickly I mean last year's copy that's not not 2017 but 20:16 had tempered glass on probably 30% of the cases oh and a lot of the the China sourced direct him to customer case manufacturers now - they figured all we could change the stud on the side panel and put a temper yeah John Jones for example is a great example they make the Rose well : n which is the same as the entities crystal yeah and a lot of the case is just like with peripherals there's a lot of rebrand going on and companies can differentiate it a little bit but depending on which company you're looking at which product it is like if it's pretty cheap and it looks like it has good features it's probably because it's sourced from somewhere else sure and you know especially like a company with Rose well they're banking on good reviews know if you get in at a low price and people buy it and they're not unhappy with the amount of money they've just spent for that product it's gonna have great reviews it's gonna have great return business lots of people are gonna end up consuming that yeah but at the end of the day you know this is we're really this is like case snobbery yeah talking about me picking here on a lot of these things you know it's it becomes about how much further the industry could have pushed it and what else could you've gotten more for your money and you know I think airflow is probably one of the biggest problems right now definitely there's a lot of things being overlooked to get this style yes this costs come in under budget well not even just that I mean it's it's not expensive to cut holes in a case true so but to make it look good you know you end up with only a couple scenarios on how to get enough holes and make it look good and that's usually you know either you put vents on the side or you put Vince on the top and then you leave a blank front yeah because mesh is expensive and well also there's just a style thing yeah everyone thinks ever since feels like ever since the s340 everyone's trying to do flat like single color no mesh front panel I'll walk it I'll walk it back even further than that and I'll give credit to fractal because I remember working on NZXT when you know the define r2 was out and then the r3 came out and it was like if it was black and nondescript people were losing their right I like do you understand how hard it could be to work at NZXT earlier and then when fractal becomes a popular thing and everybody's like I don't want that transformer I don't want that girl there I don't want that style and ID I can you just make it simple and a black box yeah and I have it not break and be kind of quiet and the fractal was killing it back then absolutely killing it like I think fractal contributes as much to Corsair as being the killer of Coolermaster right in tech back in the day yeah that was a huge bullet and these giant companies was this simple design and when NZXT came out this 340 in the h 440 like it was so hard to try to walk that line of having a design a unique design that wasn't just the fractal right look yeah well especially because ultimately you're trying to differentiate yourself from the OEMs like Dell yeah someone like that and their boxes are pretty plain yeah playing black but up a good fight we're playing better yeah and so if that's what you're competing with the kind of lose sight of the ID product but I mean on the intake side of things like pulling recent examples the Antec p8 the EVGA dg7 that we just looked at and then the video I was talking about it DG seven p8 the oh the even the Corsair review 21 or thirty-one whatever it is it's not Corsair thermaltake view 21 or 31 those cases all have the one thing in common which is like flat front panel and then it's like they forgot the other part which is you have to have mesh so to the point where in some of our reviews we'll see the GPU starts dropping clocks unless you set a custom fan curve and I don't know how much of that is like trying to follow the fractal and NZXT example without realizing you need a cooling element it's like they look at the broader strokes it's like alright simple design power supply shroud no plastic right less plastic and then try to update it like oh well this case was from three years ago well now we have tempered glass we could take that plus tempered glass done since instant success and really that's kind of it's frustrating to me and to most end users probably not not as much you know I remember reading the comments to most people were just frustrated didn't have like rubber grommets and now yeah these were things that that always seemed kind of silly to me but I I love the NZXT was able to make such a far leap forward with the H 440 in the s 340 and it's like we're still kind of stuck in a that era right now that refresh cycles have slowed down yeah we're for everybody oh yeah men's exp has been I mean the last case was the Manta yeah right let me try T about even an ATX case and you know everybody has kind of slowed down and and what they can put in there and so you end up with these like refresh with flat tempered glass yeah any fresh and powers flash and power supply strap I'm even Silverstone Silverstone has really done a good job at staying the line of like our company is about function to the point where we'll meet up with them at an event this was probably last year's CES and the the PM's were asking me if you are asking me do you think we should add RGB to this and I was like I don't know man they're like what do you think about RGB and tempered glass and they ultimately caved and started adding that stuff it's I mean and I'm like be fair silver stones been doing Ravens for a while - it's not yeah well they're not in on chasing that gamer yeah they definitely chase it but they they do try it well like the Raven o - you know it was functional for sure but it also looks like gamer yeah so 50% plastic oh yeah you know it I think I think people's companies definitely struggle without having I think we've seen that that top tier pricing fall off yeah like you can't sell $200 case anymore like that's phantom 820 a phantom 820 could never exist like it's which I tena was expensive to attend was like 180 170 but things like like cosmos is coming back yeah she does have 100 P it's gonna be what like three hundred dollars three hundred bucks so yeah and it's you could or it like the feet are really cool and the buckle the side panels are cool but the interior looks like a rope an erector set like it's oh and it is one it's super functional completely modular you know not everyone needs that kind of like the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 you can do a lot of the same stuff you can invert the motherboard tray or rotate it and that gets you up to a 200 or 250 dollar case which it's got a lot of cool features like it's a well-designed case but also you pay a lot for that functionality yeah when you win when you can do purpose-built correctly you end up with a much better product that's more for a specific type of customer well yeah and even like that's getting into territory where see 700 P and dark base pro 900 both have really cool features in that you can you know modularize them I'll say but the the difference is like where the s3 40 tries to differentiate by doing clean design and a power supply shroud these are differentiating by adding features that cost like an extra hundred dollars to buy companies are struggling with being creative under a budget yes that's for sure you know s 340 and H 440 we keep coming back to and the majority of the money spent on on those products to their costs was the tooling yeah if you look at them the tooling first off it's not shared with any other case and there's things they try to reduce the amount of rivet holes unnecessary holes just anything that might make the product look more utilitarian and they try to made it make it look more like a consumer finished product inside outlet everything about it looks tip-top inside sexy outside sexy what do we think of the what are the aspects of cases that it seems like companies are spending an unnecessary amount of money I'm like where's where are the aspects that are you look at it and you go that was a poor allocation of Matic like in every scenario this was like at NZXT it was really great because they were always open to trying and doing things so phantom 820 is a great example right of spending a lot of money on features that sound cool that that was acting that was a case I really liked originally but now I wouldn't give it a good review exactly and so it's something like II as a person working to develop it you were like alright we've got this great chassis same chassis as switch 8:10 let's put the Phantom style new phantom style on it yeah let's put interior RGB LED and that was new yeah you had the lighting controller but the thing is runner millimeter fans in the front yep yep and at the end of the day though what it was was a lot of plastic it was an LED controller that wasn't completely ready for primetime it was way ahead of it there's a few version one right yeah technically yeah you know the hue ended up coming out after and being better than the electronics Kashyap I remember that but this is kind of like the fallacy of buying a flagship case just like if you were to buy a ten-year-old hundred thousand dollar car it feels old now back then it was like just trying to innovate and what I like now what it would why why I like these cheaper cases that that seemed so nice is it it's like all right what could you do in steel what could you do with the least amount of material what could you do to attract the most amount of customer right I think that's such a great puzzle to try to make a great end-user product like I really like making products and under hundred dollars to make something so cool yeah that's the challenge yeah yeah and if you see a lot of it's been stripped out it comes down to core competency right now it cases you're not getting fan control built into cases you're not getting led in the cases fan control was really popular yeah that was you know was in unnecessary as a p.m. there were things that was like oh this is over a hundred dollars you have to have rubber grommets oh you have to have fan control do you have temperature readouts do a temperature probes you have multiple channels you have many watts was it was like a rabbit hole of spending money on things that you're never gonna do as well as the discrete product like that's what cases were for so long motherboard or Ivan a quarter-inch yeah add-ins yeah and so you know you thought you were adding value by doing things that a case wasn't supposed to do and now cases have become so much more pure you don't even have an optical drive to enable these rings and they're still not popular to be built into a case I I like that we're getting back to like a core functionality of the case but I would you know it's been a few years I'd like to see something really kind of yeah I don't the H 500 P is really popular right now with viewers and people online yeah so that one is interesting because it's mixing old and new elements the old being 200 millimeter fans those were so popular with the half act and like Phantom Menace NZXT panel yeah and they just vanished so it was such a yeah 10 now they're coming back people are trying to bring them back I don't know if they'll come back but I think the question is before you you think about is it good that they're coming back the question is why did they go away oh there's a lot I actually someone asked us on reddit a couple months ago I mean first off there were two specs just just like if anybody has ever bought a 140 millimeter radiator there's like a whole space like there are these issues that should have just never existed just because there were multiple manufacturers and so like NZXT had one size and I think they were aligned with another company with like 193 spec and then there were 180 and then there were also 200 and they were all falling under two they're also 220 fans yeah yeah and so that the thinking was like okay well to make a fan the same width as most cases most cases are about 200 millimeters that's great like this is gonna be your peak fan size you're gonna go from an 8 to a 120 to 140 theoretically quieter yeah eventually you would ascend to a 200 millimeter fan but the problem was first off that meant that you had to take up Z height so like you wouldn't be able to clear the motherboard and have a 200 millimeter fan unless you're very tall or very wide right then you had bearing issues these blades were very heavy and so you needed a heavier duty bearing to run them but that cost money and consumers generally don't want to spend more money on top of the already least amount for the fan blade so you know to buy a good 200 millimeter fan could be $25 $30 and then on top of that radiator support wasn't very good they there's no radiators yeah you know like if you look even at one 40s it was difficult to get good fans for 140 millimeter radiators for a while to do it look 200 was like very difficult so yeah I mean optimally you'd have a radiator the same width as the fan but also they're not they're not really static pressure ah yeah yeah that's a big the death so you weren't beat it fit on there but I wouldn't see the same performance so I think cooler masters may be chasing something that's not really there anymore with those 200 millimeter fans but that'll be an interesting one because I think the case will it looks okay I think it'll sell because there's a lot of interest in it it does a good job showing off the RGB LEDs yeah I think a lot of it is like is centralizing your LEDs and kind of just two spots in the front so it doesn't you don't see all the individual diodes like you would with three friends yeah they've got the big clear like acrylic window or whatever it is I think there's tempered glass on one side so I've got a lot of the design elements that people want or at least have the industry's trending in what's the price on it I think it's specially 150 so that's where it's like that's the question though is it's like when consumer stopped buying SUVs like it might it might just be too expensive I don't know anybody who's buying cases over thirty dollars now that's the thing right like there's a lot of just like the interesting thing is we can look at things like coverage viewership yeah and I can look at the coverage of a great example as our Vega coverage and we got more views on the review than products that have shifts to date yeah right and so and there's probably more interest in the product expressed online than ever will people ever people buy it there's more interest in the H 500 P I think then will be expressed in dollars spent buying it and so it's really hard to gauge right now how well it'll perform when when when you're a case p.m. this is like the biggest difficulty to because you want to be a part of the community so you're towing like overclockers thought net or a power up your OSI UK read some reddit sub reddits build a PC and you hear all these things and if you hear them twice in a day you're like this is the thing I need to put into my case and then 810 months later you put it out and people are like oh I'm gonna buy this case because of these things and then it's just the comments section yeah they don't actually buy it that's that's probably or only the conscious bias yeah which is still not a lot of people it's such a subjective product people are very vocal about it you may have won over those comments section people but they're not always right but that's on a magnitude also of hundreds not of thousands one hundred hundreds doesn't pay for cost and at the end of the day I don't I don't know if your viewers have a good a good sense but you need to be selling like three to seven thousand of these a month to make it worth your while like you can sell less if it's a rebranded products like those Jones both matter a little product yeah we care yeah you build everything into the cost but if you're coming to the market and you spent months years of Rd a lot of effort into your design and features and your marketing you need to be shipping at least 3,000 easy to try to recoup your money and you start to think you need to ship 3000 a month for several years that's a really wide audience and it takes a really special product to get that kind of attention yeah and that's why you got so much to land reuse - it's definitely why companies are more afraid of spending money on tooling for four cases right so what's our recap here what are the things that I would like to see airflow improved on the front panels I would really like for companies like when we when we post reviews we've started including frequency trend lines now yeah because just saying it's hotter doesn't work with these people like you got to show that it's losing something in addition to being hotter so GPU temperature yeah we can ramp the fan to 70% and it's fine maybe we need a like do you want a 60 DB a fan in your case maybe you need to do like a summarize performance metric for cases that a number for the the decibel level a number for the thermal level right like a a subjective like a I don't know yeah port card yeah yeah you know something so that you could categorize these cases I think the case industry is gonna be booming soon though just be quiet you we've got all these new processors coming out coffee like yeah coffee Red River coffee Lake is supposed to be very very good if if it is that good I think we'll see a lot of Sandy Bridge people upgrading and you'll get this tidal wave of people ready to spend money on the industry and I hope companies are ready with some new offerings to get them excited yeah yeah what's if you pick one thing out of the stack for improvement well what would you want people to work on I think it's designing for the core competency it's making look for for that specific company it's a case the cases job in my mind actually isn't housing the components it's making the building process better ease of installation of installation and then the final product aesthetics that the the computer looks good right we always figured out how to make the next case when we do the show builds with the current case so like CES Computex builds when you get hands are all bloody and cut off and you're trying to snip off zip ties that shouldn't be mounted to certain parts of the case and then you're like all out of zip type point here oh we should pre install the standoffs oh we should make this out of metal and I'll plastic that velcro oh they exactly exactly and you know a fan hub is just as good as a fan controller let that kind of stuff I want to see a return to core competency all right thank you rob for joining no problem Steve I'll see you all next time you