Gadgetory

thermaltake scorpy 3ks is probably the most unique chassis to come out of the company in the last few years and is one that ironically others in the industry could stand to learn from the p3 is a case with flexible uses including open air test bench applications wall mounted installation or standard upright mid tower build formats today we're reviewing the core p3 for build quality assembly thermals and noise as it compares to other cases on the market before getting set this content is brought to you by v1 tech comm who make the custom back plates shown in our b-roll on the screen of the MSI gaming X they've also got plenty about the backplate so you can go to their website and use code gamers Nexus 5 for $5 off click the link of the description below for more information so this is the thermal take core p3 it follows up the core p5 which was a bigger version of this case and following this one was the core p1 that we saw at CES including the core p1 T g2 letters there and the T G means tempered glass so there is a tempered glass add-on you can buy for this but it technically shows with acrylic panels and the tempered glass out on is about $37 though the models after this one including the core p1 T G chip with tempered glass as a default configuration other than that this is one of those cases that's part of a new up-and-coming trend of semi modular design cooler masters a part of this design where they have their master box and master maker cases and other products in that line where there's at least some level of appearance of modularity whether or not they ever expect you to use it and part of that would be the 3d printing trend for example when cooler master offers 3d printing capabilities and printouts for a $50 case because anyone buying a $50 case will have a $2,000 printer but this one is a bit different it does have the semi modular approach but stick to a more practical version of that for some basic examples that there's the PCIe riser cable here you can configure the video card to either be mounted vertically so that the face is outward if you want to remove the glass you could do that but you face it outward and can position it in any one of the normal PCIe expansion slots or you flip it and do it horizontally and more of a standard configuration without the riser cable other than this there are options for radiator mounting over here plenty of drive cage support all with the SSD logos facing outward which is just part of the aesthetics thing and the case has all kinds of open-loop support we test with an air-cooled system for standardization across all of the cases that we review for noise and thermal testing but this is really best implemented as an open-loop case and other than that it's got applications as test benches that will go over here because you could flip it and run it as a standard test bench open-air on a flat surface or run it like this the only problem is it's a bit big if you go with the horizontal orientation the quarter p3 comes with a lot of loose parts and it's not immediately obvious what to do with all of them or what order they need to be assembled in and for that reason the manual is actually useful here though it would be nice if a included more Lego style instructions this complexity is a direct result of the p3 adaptability the configuration that we assembled and tested was a normal upright mid tower but with the graphics card it mounted sideways using the riser cable for display purposes alternatively PCI cards can be inserted directly into the motherboard as usual with a different arrangement of the expansion slots drives can be mounted either inside the case to hide them from view or in the area it meant for the radiator if it's not completely filled and that offers that you the ability to show off the drive power spot can be mounted normally or sideways with an IT exit board and there's an optional bracket for a liquid cooling reservoir which offers an impressive amount of changes right out of the box but we still have the test noise and thermals of course room for maneuvering is never an issue in a case with no sides but this also means that it's very difficult to flip the case over or mess with cables until assembly is complete putting the feet on after installing the motherboard and standing the case on its side is probably the easiest method there are also no real cable tie points provided although there isn't any lack of space to hide the cables in the 5 centimeter wide enclosure it would just be nice to be able to more easily tie them down to hold them where you want them cooling capacity is limited to the radiator mount this really is a case designed from the bottom up with the intention of liquid cooling and although air cooled systems will function perfectly fine at waists on the potential the case by leaving the one side either empty or filled with 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives there's a magnetic air filter clipped to the case which may or may not be useless depending on the direction of the airflow particularly in an air-cooled configuration and to really make use of this as a good open air test bench one of the features we would like to see is optional mounting for fans right up here in the front of the case so that they can blow inward and get some airflow in there we use fans like that in our open air benches for example if you want the ability to easily swap in and out devices but also the ability to do some directional airflow for when you're testing things like back plates or passive products or things like that so some kind of functional mounting bracket up here for 120 millimeter or 140 millimeter space and would be fantastic for the next iteration so you can get some more airflow over the products for people who want to use this in an open-air bench setup because open air test benches are really expensive if you aren't aware the benches we buy for testing for our day-to-day component benchmarking and analysis cost about two hundred and fifty dollars each they're really good but they're expensive this competes with those in a lot of ways it lacks some of the features like the fan mounting but it's 93 dollars so that makes a good competitor for folks who are interested in an open-air bench setup if you're an enthusiast or an overclocker or an up-and-coming reviewer or something like that and you don't want to invest 250 bucks in something the biggest concern with the case after that is stability since half the case is comprised of non structural beams and an acrylic or tempered glass sheet with the rest dedicated to the enclosure Thermaltake has largely solved for this by just adding more metal to the chassis making 2 millimeter thick walls when accounting for the paint 3 millimeters thick steel brackets for wall mounting and wide legs to prevent tipping the only supporting structure that fails to perform Foley is the PSU bracket which holds the Corsair RM 650 up entirely at buy one side and didn't quite make contact with the middle this is more likely because very in power supply dimensions than thermal takes manufacturing though it would be nice if they could do some kind of implementation that would better fit everything moving on into the objective testing you can check our link in the description below for full testing methodology click on that you can read more about how we do the test and also find Patrick Lathan's opinion on this case he works with the case the most and wrote the article that's one below so you get two dueling opinions there if you're interested in that kind of content running the Thermaltake Corp III through the CPU bench we see that the open air configuration performs reasonably well overall the only reason an open-air set up wouldn't chart top as we see here is because of reduced directional airflow into the components and reduced ability to push warm air away in the case of T three the acrylic window blocks some of the heat from escaping in a fashion that might occur with a truly open air bench but not in a way which significantly hinders air flow or performance with our standardized case testing bench the Corp III under a torture workload operates at around 53 Celsius delta T over ambient with an idle around three Celsius delta T we lose some of the directional airflow and heat exhaustion abilities of something like the Silverstone R l06 which is a chart topper for us right now but still perform well in a semi open air configuration of the p3 the p3 places just outside test variants margins of the courser t7 ER at 10 50 rpm which tested about one degree warmer and within variants of the 270 R at 1300 rpm for the p3 the fractal define see also does reasonably well here maintaining some level of silence by nature of being an enclosure but also being somewhat close in temperature readings speaking directly to the p3 though there's nothing really to complain about provided adequate active cooling solutions or the CPU and GPU temperatures will remain in check moving to the GPU temperatures during the same torture workload as the previous test the thermal take core p3 runs a 52.5 Celsius delta T over a man GPU value when the fan is configured to 55% with the idle temperatures hovering around 4.7 Celsius LT prior to test start this position is the thermal take Corp III open-air configuration about equivalent with the 270 our stock configuration at 10:50 RPM similar to the previous test and with invariance range of the BitFenix Shogun at 1260 rpm it's not the coolest box on the chart it's also not really a full box be fair but for a semi open air configuration with a side panel and no directed airflow from case fans it's doing pretty damn well the GPU is that no risk of throttling in this configuration and a 55 percent fan speed is representative of the max that most fan curves are willing to go before sacrificing frequency instead of noise moving to our 3d mark firestrike extreme workload on loop we can now look at a realistic thermal scenario with gay my workloads on both the CPU and GPU simultaneously this is less intensive than our thermal torture test but still fairly intensive on some components while offering a real-world look at how gaming would perform this is a brand-new test and doesn't have any comparative data yet so thermal think is the first to go through the 3d mark test run our next case reviews will add to this and help provide perspective on where they install the next test was introduced with our silverstone our l06 test and we'll slowly build the add more component we're using GM's custom blender animation to render on the CPU here leveraging only the CPU as a worker the GPU is running at its minimum fan duty cycle as it is not being loaded at all and we have fixed the GPU fan speed to this cycle so it doesn't fluctuate and impact results with the CPU worker running we're seeing the Thermaltake core p3 semi open configuration operate a CPU load temperature of around 30 7.3 Salty's delta T over ambient with a GPU idling at 7 Celsius the silverstone RL 'zir 6 is the only other case on this charge and it was the coolest case we've recently tested so it's naturally a high performer the directed airflow keeps the CPUs around 34.4 SL t TT load with idle around 3.6 celsius both cases are performing well in the sense of overall temperature being well within any reasonable operating range but we need to continue iterating on case reviews add more data to this charge and to quoting gns Patrick lengthen for noise testing because he really sums it up the best we see that noise levels were low because of the lack of fans but also didn't benefit from any insulation there's a very easy way to judge how loud a radiator with fans will be when installed in this case plug it in and listen to it because that's exactly how loud it will be we want more of his take on this case be sure to check his written article below but you can see the noise levels here and it's performed where you'd expect an open-air bench with no sound or noise damping to perform and in that regard noise levels are going to be entirely dependent on what's in the case now they always are to some extent but normally you have things like case pans and features of the case I would impact your noise here you don't so the testing for noise levels really doesn't show you a whole lot other than what our case or our test system noise level is when it's in an open air configuration so you'll have to buy based on your components in terms of noise but otherwise looking at the case overall eliminating half the on the case and going with just this the structure and an acrylic window brings cost down it means that they can get a 93 dollar price point 90 ish and that's not bad the price of the p3 is competitive in this regard it is priced right around where the Corsair 400 see is the s3 40 elite the fractal define sea and all manner of other cases that we've reviewed recently including the be quiet pure bass 600 none of these cases are quite like this one though so it's really a weird market where if this is what you want it's probably exactly what you want and that's all there is to it there's not a whole lot of alternatives out there other than open-air bench if you want that or maybe some other small wall mountable PC but it would like to be smaller than this one if it's not what you want there's a whole bunch of options again 400 cs3 40 elite both good cases pureed 600 a good case are l06 not bad so plenty of options out there this is an enthusiast case it has specific use cases you probably don't want it configured like this on a table if you have pets for example but it would be just fine wall-mounted so a pretty unique in that regard and helps out thermal takes image certainly after the last year or so other notes here it's a targeted market you lose noise insulation and things like that noise damping more appropriately because it is an open air setup and you lose directed cooling but if you buy decent components it will be fine we would like to see Thermaltake expand on this though and maybe consider the fact that this as an open-air bench is very appealing because there aren't a lot of good options out there for under $200 so that's somewhere they could expand more an 18 by 18 inch square though is a bit rough to fit horizontally but it's a start so that's all for this one as always you get a patreon.com slash scammers Nexus tops out directly the articles below if you want the full written review thank you for watching subscribe for more I'll see you all next time and more of a standard configuration without the riser cable other than this there are options for radiator mounting over here