Gadgetory

we last saw the level 20 VT a couple of months ago at Computex alongside the level 20 GT and XT the VT is a micro ATX case and the smallest of the three inside and out the VT is similar to thermal takes mini ITX v1 that we reviewed and even more so similar to the micro ATX v 21 the major difference is the use of tempered glass which could be a sign of Silverstone syndrome or following up a well ventilated case with a sealed box however as we pointed out at Computex the level 20 cases are being sold alongside the older mesh front 2 V 1 and V 21 rather than replacing them in addition Thermaltake has earned the benefit of the doubt with cases like the view 71 and 37 which appear sealed but actually still managed to keep temperatures reasonable today we're reviewing the thermal take level 20 V T before that this video is brought to you by Lian Li is 11 dynamic a case largely designed by overclocker Deir Bauer for high performance water cooling though our performance testing also Illustrated strong air cooling performance the 11 dynamic is affordable high build quality and offers a unique form factor case with dual PSU support by one now at the link in the description below their own takes level 20 series is supposed to be a hailer products we originally talked about it maybe two years ago at Computex or CES and the tooling alone for the case was a half a million dollars plus and they're probably approaching closer to 750,000 or higher at this point with the level 20 revision so really expensive to make the case and the original was meant to be a follow-up to that BMW design chassis from ages ago and just the level 10 that is and supposed to look like something special for thermal takes 20th anniversary hence at level 20 I think though it released on the 19th to anniversary but close enough they were excited about yes he stood a bit early so level 20 VT is the smallest of the level 20 series this is a $100 chassis it's micro ATX quick sidenote we're testing with mini ITX because we don't presently have micro ATX bench we're just we're getting there but we're doing mini ITX for now just cuz it fits and we can still do our tasking with it so go over that more later though but the case itself it's tempered glass mostly everywhere still follows the highly modular design of the v1 the v21 there's an older thermal take small boxes that were very popular for mini ITX micro ATX systems for SF fht pcs stuff like that so this is following suit except it's a tempered glass and as noted in the intro it's not like they're cancelling the sales of the original so if you do prefer the mesh cheaper steel paneled versions you can still get that it's just that this one goes a bit harder with the glass and thus is a bit more expensive by the way quick side note these are back in stock but so this case the most obvious thing that probably all of you are going to comment on is the minimal amount of airflow and spacing for air flow it's interesting though with thermal takes cases in the past the v71 view 37 they kind of followed the same pattern where they had a lot of tempered glass but there was more sort air spacing in between the glass panels on those and they actually breathe pretty well surprisingly well actually so we can kind of give this the benefit of the doubt until we get into the thermal section later but for the the most part here you have very limited gapped space in here there's no ventilation at the top that's okay we'd like to see this gap raised a bit so that there's more air if you decide to put some fans on the top for a radiator or something pushing out or well really either direction but if you're pushing air out it's just hitting the glass gonna warm up the glass which is fine but dispersing it out of the case is wasting a lot of your pressure so that is a bit of a concern but we'll test in the thermal section to see if it matters or not because as noted some of thermal takes other cases that were similarly concerning actually performed very well but the cool thing of this one is that the panels are more or less completely modular we actually have a shot of the front panel rotated sideways as well so you can pretty much change them and put the panels wherever you want it's the same thermal takes down for a while they definitely get credit for it because it's cool not a lot of people manufacturers that is allow modularity of cases to that degree and so if it's something you want more customizable it's a point of note that not many cases give you especially in this form factor so this panel pulls off the other panels same thing they all slide off you can swap them around if you want it means a bit less with this case then with the v1v 21 because you can swap mesh and acrylic panels on those and change where your air flow intakes are out or exhausts are the front of the case is where there's a 200 millimeter fan that is entirely blocked by glass but there's some side intake and we run into an aged 500 Peterson area here where if you gave it enough breathing room it might be okay but this isn't a ton of breathing room it's less than an inch for air to actually get in there so you're losing 30% of your pressure every time you're making a 90-degree turn with that fan which is already kind of low pressure well look at the thermals in a moment but just wanted to point it out because it's something that everyone's gonna comment on straight away and there's good reason to what we would like to see is the top elevated a little bit and the front either pushed out or truncated so that there's a bit more exposure to air it does not have to be matched we're not asking for every single case to be high airflow mesh it's just you know enough that it can get air in while still maintaining some of the look and it's possible to do that even just something like ventilating this it could probably still look pretty good if you ventilated the sides here and got some extra airflow through that vector so anyway that's the basics on airflow comes with 1/200 you've got an option for a 140 in the back and options for mounting there rails on the top that are actually very easy to remove and move around they're pretty sweet so if you wanted to change it your radiator setup or really anything that fan top fan setup in the case it's pretty easily done and it just has rails that they all slot into just like that so modularity wise thermal takes done a great job on the case making sure it's easy to work with easy to move stuff around easy to access it's extremely easy to build in for micro ATX case that's a bit larger that's not all that impressive but ease of installation is an important thing when you're doing with smaller boxes even though it's not small properly so they've done well on the front of build quality and ease of installation whether or not you like the looks is subjective that's up to you we'll leave it up to you so what we're gonna do now is go through the rest of Patrick's build notes as always talk about his experience with the case and then we'll go through the thermal testing section and see if it does well enough considering the alternatives in the Mini ITX testing that we've done so far the panes of glass are mounted to metal frames that attach the chassis so there are no holes or screws through the glass there's also nothing to prevent the side panels from flopping off once they've been unscrewed but that's much more forgivable with these small and relatively light glass panels made in a small form-factor case the top pane in particular is lifted away from the body of the chassis to allow some airflow similar to the view 71 just less of it and the side and bottom panels are swappable like they were in the view want the case can be placed on any of its sides by moving the bottom panel quote unquote bottom that is an aside and top panels can be swapped around as well this feature is important because only one glass panel the stock top panel has an air gap for fans and radiators but this panel can be moved to any side of the case if you wanted to move things around the i/o is attached with a single screw and also very easily installed on the top left or right of the case which means that the front panel can be rotated as well so the sticker will rotate with that front io is adequate but only includes two USB 2.0 ports and for those who want it there's no USB type-c there are four metal rails that clip into the sides or top of the case a pair of them can be used to attach a radiator or some fans which then clip onto the chassis the concept of a semi to list radiator mount the rail still has to be screwed into the radiator is a great concept but the rails themselves are a little thin and rattling hopefully Thermaltake continues to develop this feature because it's one that we think works well thermaltake clearly intends the VT the sport liquid cooling and it even has an old-school grommet on the back of the case or externally mounted open loops stock cooling is a single two hundred millimeter fan in the front of the case behind a glass panel and we talked about that already we mentioned in our - ATX micro ATX review that since the case was barely small form-factor it wasn't 100% fair to compare it to the extremely compact Mini ITX cases on our chart like the two ATX the VTS volume isn't overwhelmingly smaller than a normal town so this gets into the same thing we've talked about with all these smaller case reviews now we're working with a small case there's a lot of parameters people define them differently our test bench is up for really small cases like the Raven series where you need a downdraft cooler to make sure there's clearance this case clearly can fit an open-loop if you wanted to do it really if it all kinds of radiators you can fit a taller tower cooler so our test bench is not the best representation of what you could do in the case but it allows us to do some standardized testing in the future we're looking at adding maybe a micro ATX test bench or in the very least adding another mini ITX bench that's got a taller like 150 tower cooler or something on it since so many cases accommodate that whether or not you consider it small form factors it's not like there's a hard definition for it but this would exit our definition of a small form factor it's pretty large in terms of volume it's a big case and that means that the parts we use for testing aren't perfect but they're fine for just a standardized comparison while we work towards filling out our mini ITX micro ATX testing some more so for the rest then drive space is extremely generous given the form factor really not a surprise for the space there is space for three 3.5 inch drives that makes it a possible candidate for storing lots of media there are 2.5 inch drive sleds beside that and these are attached to a track along the side of the case that can be moved around on it for optimal cable routing for thermals and noise the bt again one big 200 millimeter fan in the front and can't really move it elsewhere there's no space for it so we didn't have a bunch of alternative configurations to test like we do on some other cases we wanted to try swapping the side panels around so we move them around on the case we rotated some stuff a bit played with the modularity for thermal testing so we have some of those numbers for you it's referred as rotating when we show them in the charts that's the word you'll be looking for because the chassis was rotated 90 degrees inside the side panels everything else inside the chassis was rotated along with it of course and the front panel was rotated as well since relocating the i/o is sort of a hassle once you have all the components already installed for CPU torture focusing first on just the VT torture test in brought average CPU DT to sixty six point eight degrees Celsius over ambien on the first pass and about 67 on the second close enough rotating the case slightly raised temperature to 69 degrees due to some minor airflow changes although the case fan was in the same position relative to the CPU the top panel which has the widest air gap went from being above the CPU intake fan to beside it with the rotation this changes where the air escapes the case and can cause a draft that pulls some cooler intake out prior to hitting the CPU fan relative to the V ones at CPU temperature average of 69 degrees moving on to the comparative numbers the stock VT was slightly cooler this is partly because the case is larger and there's more space for air movement around the CPU cooler but also because the stock v1 has no ventilation on the top panel in fact the closest CPU average to the VT was the v1 with the mesh panel place at the top of the case that's on the warm end of s FF cases we've tested and is consistent with other cases that don't have a case fan aimed directly at the CPU like to talk to and the SG 13 the GPU torture test results were extremely consistent between runs averaging 57 point one degrees Celsius DT the first time around in 57.2 the second rotating the case lowered it 256 degrees Celsius delta T over ambient it makes sense that rotation would help GPU temperatures since the GPU intake fan was pointed towards the ventilated bottom panel rather than the flat glass panel but a one point one to one point two degrees Celsius improvement is only barely outside of margin of error the VT is GPU temperature average comparatively is warmer than the V ones a verge of 50s five point six degrees Celsius DT but the v1 and stock configuration has vent holes directly facing the GPU fan the VT is the high but not excessive range for GPU temperatures close to the stock RB z03 without its fan placement fixed the case is large and airy enough that our components weren't roasting in it like the Taku but the single intake fan struggles to push enough air on its own the VT was closer to the v1 and 3d mark than in the standard torture test the VT averaged 54 point nine degrees celsius GPU delta T over ambient and the v1 averaged 54 point one GPU clock speed averaged roughly the same in both tests although we've noted barely any very in GPU clock speed in this test other than with our in when a one baseline which was 25 megahertz above the usual 1775 megahertz average again this GPU average is well below the Taku but warmer than the SG 13 and 280x moving on to blender rendering on the CPU CPU average temperature is 50 point one degrees which falls in a gap between the Taku and SG 13 the warmest and now third warmest averages respectively the blender test is less stressful than the torture test but this confirms that even under normal workloads he can build up in the VT rendering on the GPU GPU average DT was 34 point eight degrees similar to the v1 and the 280x especially the V want the stock configuration of the level twenty V's he runs a bit warmer than so all the other cases we've tested on the charts and that's because it's a fairly large case it includes only one fan and that fan is pretty restricted so it's okay in basically every other category except for cool and you can make the cooling sort of okay because it does have a lot of loops for open-loop closed-loop support you have plenty of liquid cooling options it's just you're paying for those and it is a showroom case so if you're not looking for a showroom case then probably skip on this one at a hundred bucks for what you're getting in terms is just the amount of tempered glass and the fact that it is meant to be flashy it's not a bad price it's just that there's really nothing there to be excited about in terms of hard functionality like again airflow the fan is just one two hundred millimeter fan nothing special about it doesn't come with a rear fan at all it's up to you to do whatever you want to make the cooling work with your build so you're left on your own there which sometimes is better depending on what you want to buy so this could use an additional fan we think on the rear position potentially on the other hand there again is decent radiator support if you want to fix it that route beyond gaming the vitia has good potential in living room environments if you want something that's a bit larger because it does have a lot of drive support so go in for local drives for all of your movie music whatever TV show storage this might be a good solution just because it can fit a lot of them whereas you might need to go with a network attached Drive otherwise for smaller boxes the glass does actually a pretty good job of noise damping we talk about noise in the video version of this review but it's a bit quieter than some of the other cases that's because you have so much thick glass which helps with the longer wavelength noises because it's I mean on all sides so you've got some assistance there since there's no mesh for any of the noise to get through but that also means air doesn't really get through so bit of a toss up on this one where it's not the best case we've reviewed for thermals it's pretty unique looking their own takes done a great job on modularity they've done a good job on build quality it's just they could improve on the thermals in some significant ways like just lifting the top a little bit more it makes the case of larger yes but the case is already big but by all accounts this is not really a small form-factor case so what's another quarter inch or half inch lift on the glass just to make sure that if you do put some higher pressure fans up there you're not dealing with a ton of noise from the air getting just kind of squeezed out all the sides rather than having a direct path flow or even just a bit more elevation on it same for the front panel we'd like to see this either truncated or boost it away or something or ventilated cuts put in the side just so that there's some more help for that 200 to get some air in because the two hundreds are already natively lower pressure than a smaller 120 or something like that so if their own will take has some things they could definitely improve upon and there are clear paths for them to improve upon it so that's great it'd be nice if we can see that in the first revision but everything else is pretty good and solid it's just that airflow needs some help so they've got a decent starting product here if you can work with the cooling or don't care then everything else seems fine if it's a problem there are plenty of other good options out there and we'll have some of those that linked in the article in the description below if you're curious thank you for watching as always go to store like aaron's axis dotnet to pick up one of our GN beer glasses we just restocked the cobalt with gold rimmed glasses on the store they're selling pretty fast though but we we have enough for now or we go to patreon.com/scishow murmurs noises tell us how to directly subscribe for more I'll see you all next time