Gadgetory

system integrators are a critical part of the hardware ecosystem whether or not you've ever bought from one because they comprise millions of dollars of sales and hardware every year and a lot of our audience myself included do prefer to buy parts and build pcs based on those parts but that's not to invalidate the relevance of system integrators like Origin PC main gear CyberPower and iBUYPOWER which is who we're looking at today we're looking at our powers revolt to gaming PC interesting primarily because of its small form factor and custom-designed case the revolt 2 uses a custom case that's actually designed by iWeb power this isn't some OEMs that'll show up on Newegg in 6 months that is not the case here it is available only through our power and they are the ones who actually engineered the revolt 2 did their own thermals and are now manufacturing it for this specific product that boosts the premium a bit but it does make for a far more unique setup and one that's very interesting to test thermally which will look at momentarily unfortunately the enclosure and it's RGB LED smart lighting are not available separately for DIY builders which I really wish that some of these s eyes would investigate that option but obviously they're trying to create some sort of value add to actually buy from them the thermal design challenges faced by the revolt 2 are shared by the entire ITX industry where cases make constant trade-offs between discretion silence and cooling efficiency we'll be talking about thermals than gaming FPS of benchmarks and then some value propositions versus the DIY route 3 volt 2 has two fan slots in its enclosure and they're both on the bottom there to 120 millimeter slots and those do both support radiators as well so our test system uses a CLC for the CPU that's a corsair age 55 and our build and then a CLC for the GPU as well it's running a 980 TI hybrid and that does make for an interesting cooling scenario now because it is limited to two 120 millimeter bottom fans you're basically forced to have those as intake fans whether they're push or pull it's definitely gonna be intake and the only way to get heat out of the system is to exhaust it through the blower fan in this case so the blower fan works different from a push fan a push fan pushes the air straight into the heatsink and then that dissipates and generally just ends up back in the case eventually gets forced out maybe through the CPU cooler with a blower fan the fan sucks in air from the front and the top of the car the faceplate and then forces it out the back and that is very useful in the scenario where we have a lot of heat generated within the case because there's only bottom intake now another place that the built-in fans are useful is the power supply so in this instance three volt to the power supply is facing the PCH and sort of near the memory facing the back of the video card and this power supply fan for once is used to pull air out of the system so it's pulling a hot air from the system pushing it out of the back of the power supply and exhausting it so it doesn't mean higher tolerances for the PSU is but they're generally pretty beefy components to begin with so they can handle a bit of extra heat and do a pretty good job at getting rid of what's sitting around the PCH area which you definitely don't want to overheat and one thing that I did like this IRA power actually requires a liquid cooler for this build and the website does not allow air cooler purchases so this is a good thing because even if you find a low profile cooler that fits which I'm sure there is one it would be suffocated for air within the cramped quarters of the revolt two and GPUs are not limited to liquid only but it does certainly help just for the same reason of trying to get that air out of the case as quickly as possible the case mounts it's SSDs in the front and center as a sort of showroom display so they're left fairly unventilated but SSDs run so cool anyway that thermals aren't really a concern in fact and we'll talk about this in a future video SSDs actually struggle when they're operating to cool and that's from an Intel conducted study the hard drive however is mounted just behind the front panel so it is within that cooling area and IRA Power has intentionally mounted the GPU cooler under the acrylic window so the GPUs faceplate is present and visible similar to what courser did with the inverted 600c mount that we reviewed recently the revolt 2 also inverts its motherboard by forcing right side access and positioning the PCIe slots toward the north of the enclosure and intentional design choice to avoid using PCIe ribbon cables to extend the interface so that means the GPU mounts straight into the board as normally this all creates a very tight compact enclosure that's got potential for cooling vortexes or entropy concerns is what we and in our benchmark we had a range of 12.1 for Celsius between all the ITX and closures so that's our range for the chart and it's definitely a large range for case thermals but we observed recently with the Manta testing that ITX concluded someone obviously do operate a bit warmer 3 volt 2 runs at 8 Celsius gained over the larger Manta 3 volts who pushes 50 point 3 5 Celsius on it's age 55 CLC which is a bit warm but well within the acceptable temperatures for the CPU you would definitely not want an air cooler on this thing and because I buy power disallows air cooler configurations that's really not a concern because it was not possible to add one in unless you do it yourself as for the GPU we observed the hybrid at thirty five point two Celsius loaded about 1213 Celsius higher than open-air benchmarking of the hybrid which she did previously and this is a testament to the hybrids cooling solution more than anything really which we do discuss in the Seahawk in hybrid reviews and we even did a lid open and lid closed test not shown here which saw the overall temperatures increased by about one to maybe two Celsius on average and the GPU and CPU we decided to change the configuration so I hope our ships at stock as a pull setup and we thought push would be better so we fought with the case changed it to push and that decreased thermals by a further 1.5 Celsius now normally this is where I would suggest that the manufacturer or system integrator ship their build with our tests and configuration but in this case the tubes were somewhat pinched because the nature of the power supply mount so in that instance we do agree that a pole configuration is the safest and for 1.5 cells is not a big deal let's move on the gaming benchmarks as you know with system integrators gaming benchmarks are really not that special because these guys aren't making the 980ti they're not making the 6700 tey which are both two components that are in here driving gaming performance but it is still important to look at for an overview of how this thing performs so that's what you're looking at right now the hybrid and 6700 K are able to carry more than 80 to 90 fps and several games at 1440p and would be able to push modest frame rates at 4k which you can see in one of our previous tests and my ATI hybrid the 1080p test puts us well above the 144 Hertz threshold for black ops and we observed it no notice will playback or frame time flaws during 1080p and 1440 be testing across all of our tests and games you can read more about these tests on the site which has a link in the description below we look at this stuff objectively so I'll leave the videos and photos to your viewing for deciding if you like how this looks but speaking to design not just as statics there are a lot of things that IRA Power does very well there's also a fair few things that they could improve upon the smallest and most petty complaint pertains to the enclosures buried thumb screws in the backside of the panels the side panel thumb screws are utterly useless seen as they're inaccessible unless using a screwdriver and this is because the screws are submerged within the panel extrusion the acrylic window is well done and uses a quality fairly scratch resistant material which again is a rarity in cases I like the presentation of SSD and GPU components now here's a point of interest you'll see some of these shots show our sticker on the side panel high-power is exploring the option of more user logo customization which they've done in the past and they want to do that for future system builds but they're not currently offering the service at this time for the revolt 2 there are three primary SKUs of the revolt 2 buyers can customize the spec to order and our build is running a non-standard spec shipped with a gtx 980ti hybrid GPU upgrade from reference along with a few other changes bumps our loaner units price up pretty substantially to 3101 dollars the revolt 2 extreme which is the highest official SKU without modification ships from $1,900 runs a 6700 K and unspecified 980 I along with 16 gigabytes of 20 800 megahertz memory then execute down is the revolt 2 pro at $1,400 which switches to a GTX 970 dropping another tier from that the revolt 2 plain build is $900 for a GTX 950 and i5 6500 the value proposition part for part at the high end is actually not bad if you were to build and buy with the exact same parts found for the revolt 2 high-end systems the cost is only about $134 more than doing it yourself and that comes with Windows and with a custom case so the overhead is really not that bad but as you all know the price could change it drastically bright dropping to a low respect PSU changing your other specs within the system to use cheaper parts but that's not really how it works with system integrators because this is some behind-the-scenes knowledge for you all these s eyes often get MDF sore marketing development funds and they get heavy discounts from certain partners when they're trying to move inventory so that's why their prices can sometimes directly match or on rare occasion may be undercut what is possible through DIY but it's also why there's a limited component selection all in all the revolt 2 is a pretty interesting box just externally it looks interesting it's got the acrylic window it's a bit different with the top facing and GPO faceplate and that's something that we're seen as a trend now with a 600 C for DIY routes and I hope it does continue because it's an interesting design that's a bit different from what you used to because the motherboards inverted to do that so aesthetically design wise mechanically it's all very interesting in terms of the performance the FPS performance was as expected it's running at 6700 K in this instance in my ATI hybrid so very strong FPS performance with no problems at all on 1440p you can even run 4k if you tweaked your settings a bit you'll see that on our site and older articles as well so that's fine thermals are not bad but they really could use some improvement and I don't know that I have a good way to do that without ruining the look of the case so overall because they're forcing CLC's or liquid coolers for the CPU cooler and recommending one in some cases for the GPU cooler that does help manage the thermals and mitigate the impact of sitting basically in a tiny box that's just heating up and generating heat that's having trouble to escape so the liquid coolers help with that quite tremendously but they're still in the 50 Celsius Delta range which is pretty warm for a liquid cooler to operate delta T over ambient high power loses some of its good value at the top and as you shift toward the lower end skews so the GTX 950 and i-5 combination is somewhat of a curious choice at $900 as it is possible to build an i-5 and 960 system for around 800 or so dollars I just did it the other day actually IRA powers weakest point isn't its low skew and the value increases tremendously as the total price increases so we would advise against buying that low-end skew unit at $900 the last item here to the communication of Io powers team so we saw that this unit was actually being shipped with you'll have to follow me closely here the power supply selection for a 970 and an i7 was quote 350 watts and then it said three upgrade to 700 800 watts something like that something fully reasonable and actually a bit more than needed but the 350 watt mark although they are not shipping that power supply with the unit they're listing it there to show as anyone selling a product will do listen.you there to show hey this is what we normally give you whether they do or not here's what you will get as a value add or perceived value add to the user I don't have a problem with that that's pretty normal the thing I pointed out to IRA power before filming this review was you know hey 350 watts is really not something I feel comfortable with for the particular configuration we're talking about we did all the tests it consumes 290 watts at load that is definitely pushing it you're at 83 84 % power consumption on the PSU depending on the quality of the PSU it might not be enough so why is that there I know you're shipping with a 7 or 800 watt power supply but maybe just remove that completely because it looks bad it does it's not enough power and anyone who knows that will spot it immediately and it would reflect poorly so I had looked at this and they pretty immediately went and updated the website and changed the minimum spec to something more reasonable I think it was 400 450 watts which is completely acceptable for the build we were specifically looking at at the time and then upgrade stayed the same to 7 or 800 watts whatever was so the reason I point that out is because the wattage was a concern again whether or not they shipped with it I didn't like the wattage I did not at all agree that that was enough wattage to drive a system reliably for a number of years and so I pointed it out and they corrected it and were pretty level-headed about taking the criticism and that is something for which I think some credit is deserved now that doesn't change what you all think of the system so whatever you think of this externally that is your choice gaming performance is fine a value proposition is ok at the high end it loses a lot of value at the low end then overall the thermals are acceptable okay but not amazing and certainly not competing with most ITX cases on the market about its unique case a shoebox toast retains that's what he got for that an interest of full disclosure I my power was at one of our sponsors at CES and that does not impact the content in any way whatsoever our testing was 100% independent I wrote that in the contract the testing and the results the analysis all of this review content entirely independent and controlled by us but I did want to lay it out there that full disclosure they were a sponsor because there's not a lot of transparency in the media industry these days so there's that if you like this type of content as always hit the patreon link in the description below or the postal video and link in the description below for the article I'll see you all next time