Gadgetory

we've been interested in Thermaltake score g21 TGK since we saw at Computex at which point the fan configuration was unfine alized for the otherwise design complete case the g21 departs from an industry trend of closed off front panels to instead revert to mesh paneling something we haven't seen too much of in the last few years this permits better airflow under the right fan configuration today we're reviewing all the ups and downs of the Thermaltake core g21 TG with a heavy focus on fan replacement and optimization of positioning of fan and removing dust filters to improve performance before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by our 10 year anniversary edition shirt which has an explosion design layout on the front the shirt comes in both teal and gray with tri-blend and cotton materials and celebrates the 10th year since we started designing gamers Nexus dotnet ultimately leading to its launch about nine and a half years ago you go to gamers next to us about squarespace.com to pick up one of the shirts this is the thermal take cord g21 we showed it at Computex and talked about how it was not yet finalized at the time but now it is clearly we haven't and reviewing it today now the thing of this case is it's trying to take a lower price point approach to the tempered-glass trend we're kind of entering into the tail end of that trend as the industry starts looking for new things to chase after but tempered glass is still a thing that's going on right now and will probably stick around for a while because the quality is high is just a matter of price and now that tempered glass has become so widespread the price can come down a bit so we have these $70 cases like this one where it's got two tempered glass side panels up until just recently this was really pretty much unheard of for any case of tempered glass side panels so that's the new theme this year is bringing price down of that the right side over here camera right is darkened so it sort of obscures the cables but not completely left side is clear and you can see through it as usual but other than the glass it's really a focus on power supply shroud some cable management features and most of the things we've seen finally become adopted in the industry as the new direction for case design with one exception and that is the front of the case where Thermaltake has gone back to the mesh focus design rather than the solid fronts that we see on something like an s3 40 for example so from our perspective that's a good thing we've always preferred mesh because our focus tends to be more performance driven rather than looks driven and you can certainly have performance and science in some extent though never as well as if you just focused on one of course the difference here is that thermaltake is shipping this with one fan so they've got one fan in the back it is a pretty cheap fan unfortunately and it's setup in an exhaust configuration this is a bit odd we'll talk about why in a little bit the front comes with no fans pre-installed but you could install two 140s or three 120 s or of course radiators of equivalent sizes up front it's just that they don't do that for you stock front also has a couple of dust filters so there's the mesh front panel behind which and mounted too which is a dust filter that's a bit wider grain holes are they less fine and then behind that is a magnetic dust filter that attaches to the front of the chassis and then you have your fans and the intake to the case let's go through the layout before we do the performance the fold glass panels sharp angles and sort of full shroud but the g20 one the same visual category as the NZXT s340 elite although the mesh front panel and prominent thermal take badge detract from the sleekness somewhat narrow black borders on the tempered-glass side panel leave every part of the interior visible and both the border and screw holes are conveniently symmetrical so that the panel can't accidentally be installed upside down oddly the backside panel is also translucent although tinted the darker shade this means that cables and drives tucked behind the motherboard are visible from the outside especially if they are white so despite Thermaltake charming description of this decision on the Newegg page quote to town - tinted glass for the look up front while keeping the business in the back this puts much more pressure on the user to bundle the cables neatly as for the build process as described by Patrick Layton and our written article review link for the description below there we'll take the service of praise for putting catches below there side panels we're working with the s3 40 elites or the BitFenix Shogun you required constant vigilance to avoid dropping heavy panels while removing them as they can easily slip off their mounts and main on the table not enough to be dangerous but enough to scare away chief and the analyst snowflake so thermal takes decision to put catches with a market improvements we hope to see more of it that'll take panels are secured by catches until they're hinged to about 45 degrees they can also provide leverage for pressing down the glass on bolting cables although glass and leverages aren't necessarily concepts that should be put together but that's okay the cord g21 has plenty of room for cable management and aligns with the Fraxel define c4 its abundant cable in space and easy routing of front panel headers the g21 adds two separate sheets of metal for the forward section of the case near the FPC and the rear section near the motherboard back side a gap between the two permits easy cable channeling and the cables brace against normal tie points the front panel is one thing other than glass that really makes the g21 stand out it's all mesh as the silverstone are l06 proved this can allow for serious airflow unfortunately Thermaltake doesn't take advantage of their biggest differentiator and a market dominated by cases with closed front panels only one fan is included with the g21 it looks and feels cheap and if a reasonably priced tempered glass case that cuts its MSRP by excluding fan sounds familiar it might be because of our n1 303 review where our review sample is shipped with zero fans fans are one of the best places to cut costs and enclosures and is where thermaltake decided to do it with this one make sense they allocated their cost to tempered glass instead rather than forcing the consumer to pay for cheap fans that they'll have to replace then we'll take things that the customer can rather save their money and buy the fans they want that's the approach anyway on the other hand shipping a case with no fans or with garbage bans that means that some customers will feel cheated and at least one will accidentally cook their PC when they don't realize that included zero phantom that they should have bought some that's why i thermaltake included one but it should probably be in the front instead this is a tremendous oversight and missed opportunity by Thermaltake they have a really good case the foundation is it combines all the elements that we look for in modern case design for a mid Tower of this approach it's got a power supply shroud with some cutout for larger radiators or potential open loop combinations it has great cable management options it has good isolation of the front and the back parts of the case so you can really separate those components out and keep them in their own compartments without having a compartmentalized case and it's got a tempered glass on both sides necessarily got a price point everything looks pretty good and it has a mesh front so it can actually breathe unfortunately thermaltake decided to include a single fan it's in the rear as exhaust which is probably the least necessary position depending on what type of system you're working with and it's not a very good fan so they've had a big oversight here it's of course an attempt to drive costs down elsewhere because they have higher costs and things like the glass and invested there but in the very least we would have liked to seat they don't take get a better fan and probably place it in the front instead though we have some testing where we actually did that ourselves move stuff around remove different combinations of the two and a half front mesh intakes to see how much performance improves by getting rid of one of the magnetic dust filters for example and overall there's a lot of potential here in this mesh front paneling that's just being wasted and sure the user can buy fans but that's not normally the way that things worked when you're looking at cases on the market you see $70 case and you start looking at other $70 cases and those are what you compare if some of them have better cooling configuration stock they might get selected over this one even though it's quite a good case other than the cooling as we'll get into in a moment so it's something that they could improve on and the thing is yes you can buy more fans and fix it as we'll talk about but it does require some additional changes as well momentarily see that the thing is once you go from 70 to adding to fans now you're at 70 plus the cost of two fans you're an 85 or $90 case a lot of really good cases at 85 or 90 dollars and the competition gets a whole lot fiercer once you get to that price point you start seeing things like the Corsair 400 C which is sort of a different class 70 versus ninety to a hundred dollars big change but if it's seventy plus two fans now the 400 C is a competing option so something to think about for both Thermaltake and its potential customers but let's get into the test look at how the different fan orientations impacted things we first wanted to establish an understanding for how the Thermaltake Porgy 21 TG performs stand alone after initial torture tests we ran additional configurations that involve new fans removal of dust filters and reconfiguration of the front of the case entirely we'll get the comparative benchmark results next but let's start here during the hour torture workload that burns the CPU and GPU simultaneously the stock configuration of the case with a single rear fan and both front dust filters produced a load temperature of 65.9 cells is delta T over ambient idle rested at 7.5 C delta T with an ambience of about 23 to 24 C just as a note that puts you under ACP temperature of about 90 C on our test bench definitely a bit warm and getting too uncomfortable levels especially since an extra increase in ambient to 30 C puts you at throttle point in an effort to understand why temperatures were so high on a case that has good ventilation we next added to AF 140 fans from Corsair to the front alongside the rear exhaust fan staying in there the result wasn't much better almost surprisingly we only improved our CPU load number two by three Celsius with idle improves by about two Celsius this puzzled us so we set forth on a mission to perform far more tests than we'll ever get ROI for on this review maybe in the front panel was next which improved temperatures by three Celsius to 65 in the stock single fan configuration and barely changed anything in the dual intake configuration with Corsair we next remove the magnetic dust filter behind the front panel and then put that front panel back on without the dust filter behind it and finally we discovered the root cause of the issue removing the magnetic dust filter improved our CPU thermals from sixty two thousand nine cells each delta T with the dual intake configuration 250 1.8 Celsius delta T as a massive jump 11 Celsius and is one where we were able to validate it repeatedly across multiple test passes just because it really didn't look believable until we dug into it further for the stock configuration with only one exhaust fan we saw a change from 65.9 to 62.5 certainly an improvement but given that there are no intake fans to choke with that dust filter the change is less significant removing both the filter and the front panel gives us our bear front configuration which still sees a boost but not enough of one worth removing these somewhat required front panel removing the optional dust fill there's absolutely worthwhile though as you can see in these results TV thermals were improved similarly we were throttling hard and most of these test configurations as the throttle point is eighty four C and we were at fifty nine Celsius delta T that's the choke point given that ambient is taken out into delta T it wasn't until we remove the magnetic dust filters and added some fans that the GPU is able to cool itself down in this torture workload once we got rid of the front filter it performs a spec and stayed the low throttle territory so these are some really strange decisions on general takes part because they have a mesh front intake which is not quite but kind of a dust filter behind the mesh front panel there's a dust filter attached to the plastic panel you could pop that out if you wanted to and clean it and then behind that there's a magnetic dust filter why do we need two maybe two and a half filters depending on how you define that front it's unnecessary and it's restrictive to airflow where obstructing the intake from what is arguably one of the best most differentiating features of this case so that's kind of sad to see when we ask that we'll take about this and validated our testing results again multiple times and really we're confident in them the company noted that they'd rather include extra dust filters that are removable as it is harder for the end-user to source an appropriately sized dust filter for the case than to remove one that's reasonable it certainly would be harder for you to find the magnetic dust filter perfectly to spec then for example to just pull that one out but if you're removing the filter anyway why include it so here's where we are with this we're about to go through the comparative testing in a moment the case does quite well if you account for that change in the front that we were talking about and the case overall is good it's just its biggest problem is thermals we've seen this before the difference with this one is that you can solve it so if you're interested in this case don't sign it off complete or write it off completely because of the thermal issue keep in mind that you can pull the front panel off remove the dust filter and solve the problem for the most part now should you have to do that apps not and if that means that you buy a different case so be it hopefully thermaltake learns from that and keeps that in mind for the future the fan is also something that could have helped a lot here if then we'll take one with a better fan maybe spent an extra dollar on the manufacturing side and then moved it to the front of the case and split the airflow between the GP and the CB channels traditionally that would be an improvement as well but a single 120 millimeter fan that's not particularly powerful in an exhaust configuration of the top rear is not going to help your GPU which is where we're actually throttling and dropping clocks and it's probably not going to do a lot for the CPU either our comparative testing starts with torture workloads and then moves on to blender and 3dmark for realistic workloads well the torture load on the CPU and the GPU the thermaltake cord g21 TG stock case performs about where the be quiet pure base 600 did but a be quiet case is the most noise suppressed case we've tested so that's not really a linear comparison we're between the Shogun and speck oh for ultimately adding two fans and removing the dust filter really shows the potential bringing us up to 51 hlz LT or on par with a $180 corsair 570 ex case that includes three front fans not bad for the $70 unit though cost goes up about fifteen dollars once we account for the fans added we're also near the 270 ra price competitive case that forgoes the tempered glass and thermal takes open air core p3 also is nearby the G 21 it really has serious potential to be competitive on the cooling front it's just stifled by its stock configuration looking at the GPU comparative temperatures next the thermaltake core g 21 ends up slightly less bad than the corsair spec of 4 and about on par with fractals define CK's another warm case on the bench when stock configuration removing the dust filter and adding fans doesn't help as much here bringing us down to 50 6.9 so these TT but it's a start these thermals could be brought down further by manually configuring a GV fan curve that's more aggressive and slightly louder than these standard 55 percent speeds on our test GPU and most GPUs follow that trend speaking of that here's what noise levels look like we're at about 30 5.5 DBA in the stock configuration which shall be it warm isn't too bad on the noise scale this puts the case near the Corsair T 70 are in fact to find c with max rpms and an open-top back to thermals on frequency for just a few more charts CD blender workloads give us a realistic scenario with no load on the GPU here we're running a CPU DT of 39.3 Celsius which sits the case near the kale is 0 7 and well ahead of the corsair spec up for $50 case a blender GPU were loaded pins the GPU @ 32.5 sells itself of T which isn't throttling at least but it's also not great at sitting between the kale 0-7 inspector 4 and lots of room to improve your thermal take who really have an advantage design with regard to the mesh front finally looking at 3d mark we're not hitting CPU issues at all with a 35 set 7 delta-t output though it's warmer than the kala 7 by a good bit but Genie temperatures are throttling once again we can show a frequency plot now to illustrate the clock decay over time as the case permits temperature to warm up to 82 C on the GPU resulting in noticeable clock drops that would in fact impact your FPS so that's the problem with this case we have a few dust filters we have this one here this is a this is the one causing the problems just to be clear it's a magnetic thoughts filter it's got a really fine grain to it so to speak and although we've seen stuff like this in the past on other cases certainly it's not as critical of a position the front intake and it's also typically not accompanied by another dust filter you can see this one is removable as well and it's also fairly fine grain so what happens is we're just really obstructing the airflow and choking the fans in a way that's unnecessary the dust prevented from getting in the case really is not going to be significantly different and even if it's slightly different you kind of get into territory where it's like do you want a sacrifice actual frame rate for dust when you have a good filter already one of them you just clean that because this is not just a temperature thing it's frame rate you lose frames by overheating the GP like that and all this stuff is solvable by the user so you can buy this case you can do a few things it's good case if you want to fix it what you do is first you open the front like I just it's trivial you pull from the bottom remove this if you want you could repurpose it and put it on top of another case you can put it on top of this one cut it map they didn't include a dust filter for the top for some reason but two and a half for the front and once you've made that change the next thing that would probably be beneficial short of adding a fan in one of these two slots is that you could configure the video card fan to a custom fan speed curve generally speaking a lot of the video cards we test cap out at about 55% because they do start favoring noise over thermals you might want to push that a bit to 65 or 70 percent when it starts heating up and that will prevent you from dropping frames or clocks which results in dropping frames and then further you could increase the fan speed of your CPU cooler note that where we're seeing high CPU temperatures you might not it depends on the cooler you select and how tall er until noise you are this is one of the least scientific types of testing we do strictly because there are seven different components and effectively infinite combinations we can't pass for them all in our test configuration we've laid out the problems those we expect will extend and be representative of most configurations in a case of this cost so keep all that in mind now not to overplay the thermal issues that Thermaltake has here the case itself again is good the cable management is good they do a great job of isolating the front compartment FPC and the rear compartment cabling and then the support for radiators for extra fans the half power supply shroud that gives you some open-loop support if you wanted all that stuff is really well thought out and designed and actually speaking of the tooling alone this is one of thermal takes best cases they've designed recently that's actually practical so it's a shame to see the cooling issue but at least you can fix it if you want to and hopefully Thermaltake can - so that's it for this one as always you can check links in the description below for the full article subscribe for more coverage as always go to gamers nexus net or patreon.com slash gamers and access all that directly and again our shirt this one right here you can grab at in excess squarespace.com thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you