Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus net and today we're looking at roseville armor evolution mid tower gaming case this case comes in a long line of mid-range roseville cases reaching down to the are 5 and up to the thor version 2 and it's planted firmly in the center of both of those options with the armor evolution marketed at around 100 2 115 dollars and the thor v2 being slightly more r5 being slightly less it's about what the average builder would be seeking out as for whether the case will hold up to the extremely competitive marketplace well that's what we're going to talk about in this review first off let's talk hard specs before we get into opinions the case is sort of oddly shaped it's elongated more than the average mid tower and is about the same length as the massive phantom 820 but it is overall lighter thinner and shorter than the phantom 820 it's just the length that matches the same with the half x this means that the case theoretically is fantastic for larger video cards and cleaner cable management and speaking to cable management the case has plenty of routing pass throughs including a functional EPS 12 volt cut out toward the top of the case imagine that it actually fits the armored evo if I may call it that even has a small cable small amount of cable management room excuse me on the right side of the motherboard so there's that the case also shifts with an overwhelming six total case fans five of which are 120 millimeters one being to 30 and two of the 120s have red LEDs if that matters for you to you there is also a toggle to disable the LEDs if you'd like to though it comes at the cost of added cables to conceal by default there are two 120 millimeter intake fans in this in the front one rear 120 exhaust fan one side in take 230 fan and an additional to 120 millimeter fans that are just lied in the case when it arrives you can mount these two extra fans in one or two excuse me of five of the open locations there's one bottom mount two top mounts and two internal hard drive cage mounts i hypothesize that the bottom intake and top intake locations would be the optimal configuration but we'll discuss thermals in a moment the armour evolution focuses on ease of installation features sort of with it offering everything in to list form and plenty of cable management solutions as well as a tiny bit of cable hiding space on the rear side of the case the performance touting 6 fans could sound like it's a deal of the century at $115 but there is a point at which marketing specs play more of a role than actual quality so let's talk about that the armour evolution sounds excellent from the specs and from the look of it but from the moment I opened the first side panel to the moment I sealed the components inside I found myself cursing all manner of gods and goddesses dome you Athena who I must you interfere with my side panels first of all because the side panels use the inferior cliff in design rather than the hinge option that is emerging and because the quality of said panels is suspect to begin with I often struggle just to remove the damn veins without risking a bend in the clips they barely lined up with the case and the elongated nature of the case meant that the panel sort of naturally bulged outward centrally which would be resolved if Rose wellhead decided to use a third side screw in the same fashion of the phantom 820 Orlando air but alas they did not so it it kind of pops out centrally and doesn't perfectly line up and there's their tiny cracks on the top and the middle and it's just really annoying so once the panel is finally open and you've thoroughly exhausted your list of mythological beings despite you then run into a new issue the two fans must be mounted somewhere and of the five available locations I suspected that because many of our users would immediately opt for dual top exhaust configuration I I decided to do that so here's what happened god damn now eventually managed to get the grommets to stay but given that one of the fans felt inward just by moving the system from the table to the floor I highly doubt that this case can withhold the weight of a proper 240 millimeter radiator as advertised rubber grommets also tend to droop with age if you've ever noticed those interior cable cut out grommets so more than a year or two of this case coupled with typical dust invasion and I suspect you'll be replacing them or you may be facing other problems I wasn't just being spectacularly incompetent when installing these either at least not any more than normally so aside from the thought of an h100 radiator following inward and crushing everything this doesn't seem so bad except for the fact that the fan could fall screw side down and potentially jump an icy and cause a direct short you know aside from that it seems perfectly fine so at least we've got cable management features sort of here's the problem with those when routing cables through the case it rapidly becomes evident that typical practices of running the 24 pin cable above or below in some cases the 6-pin PCIe and front panel connectors will make for a very tight squeeze with this case but this is minimized in the face of another issue the HyperX SSD we install for testing look to be just a little bit too far to the right toward the right panel excuse me for my comfort but I figured it would be ok because who would possibly design a case that Clips the SATA connector with the panel well there's a bit of information I need to tell you before we get into this the SATA connector standard is incredibly weak it's only rated for something around 70 connection cycles or at least the first one wise I don't know what the the modern one may be better probably is first of all anyone who remembers the first iteration of SATA drives will remember it was followed instantly by regression testing mostly due to the plastic pin out guide on the drive side snapping you see where this is going with a normal SATA cable connected not a 90-degree one the bended ones I close the panel and saw that the side panel was applying pressure to the K people but before I could respond the cable snapped downward and ripped the guide off of the SSD effectively killing it I'd like to quickly then Kingston for sending us a replacement on a moment's notice but I don't think most builders will be so lucky is this entirely rosel fault no a lot of it can be blamed on the connector and the K will be in week and whatever but at the same time I'd strongly encourage you to use a 90-degree SATA cable otherwise you risk your fancy reinforce cable being pinched by the door and potentially being ripped downward causing the demise of the drive still I can't help but find myself a little bit pissed off at the case and I another few millimeters toward the left panel and it would have not been an issue so Rose well if you're listening please bezel that right side panel or remove the cages toward the left by just a few millimeters it'll be so much safer for users there are a lot of different SATA cables out there but it's just in this case save us to use a 90-degree Bend option as annoying as that may be so looking past all this we still need to benchmark the performance of the case when testing for optimal fan configuration here is what i found in chart form you'll see that the dual top exhaust configuration works best with our particular air cooler setup though may change for yours and my initial hypothesis was that the bottom intake and top intake fans would be optimal that was incorrect it turned out the top two intake or exhaust excuse me fans were the best setting although bottom and take top and take with a near second I believe the difference in GPU temperatures was so small that it's within margin of error so I'm not listening those using no extra fans actually was more successful than dual internal intake on the on the hard drive cages so if your option is dual internal intake or no fans well it sounds like you've got two free fans for another project if you're wondering why this is the case our air flow testing revealed increased turbulence near the GPU with the two extra internal fans mostly because the GPU was unable to keep up with the massive amount of air being spat at it which while normally is not an issue because of the accelerated air intake less of the cool air made it upward toward the CPU cooler with much of the air sitting around or below the GPU in between the power supply so there was it was effectively somewhat cutting off air to the CPU although it was in substantial here's our comparison benchmark for the CPU and GPU of other cases in this cpu cooling bench you can see that the armor evolution clearly outperforms every other case on our bench and it's actually quite phenomenal performance given our the relatively disheartening build quality of the case the case would be excellent for intermediate overclockers and I still stand by my original suggestion for this case in our overclocking build but if you can look past the build quality issues and really at the end of the day you're hopefully only building the system once so if you can tolerate the swearing for a bit you'll see excellent performance and return that is just indisputable here's the GPU chart you can see the half X if you're familiar with our tests has historically had the best GPU cooling performance period nothing came close and in large part this was due to the massive side intake and front intake that are directed toward larger cards that said the armour evolution outperforms every case but the half acts and performs almost identically to the half X for GPU temperatures so once again if you want something cool and cheap in in all aspects of the word this is honestly a very good option of course it's going to be a bit louder than the phantom 820 or other cases with massive cooling fans but you get high performance or silence you can't have both for a low price so what's the conclusion well as I say in the full review links below the case suffers from systematic design flaws but they are all survivable the only major exception being the SATA connector issue that could potentially murder your SSD so for now now that I've warmed you of it it's really quite easy to avoid by using an angled header rather than a straight on SATA connector look past the poor build quality and you've gotten excellently performing case actually the best we've tested so far but you have to look past those issues if you're going to be upgrading or tweaking regularly I'd strongly urge you to stay away from this case now I always mention other cases I would personally buy at this price range so here's what I've got to say about that look into the p280 by antec NZXT s410 and Corsairs c70 all of which are relatively nearby in price and significantly better in terms of build quality performance wise none of them will beat the armour evolution I mean that's just how it is the armor evolution just has really good performance for some reason partially because of all the meshes everywhere but they're going to be a degree or two warmer big deal that difference is really quite irrelevant in the face of most build maybe for an extreme overclocker you care but that's about it extreme overclockers should be looking at open benches anyway but I digress even Roswell's Thor version 2 and r 5 are better in my opinion on the armor evolution so I still feel comfortable recommending this case in some instances like for our intermediate overclocking build we recently put up but at the same time I'm torn about the evos future Andros well honestly I think you can do better that's all for this review guys check out the link below for the full review and I will see you all next time peace