Gadgetory

we're back reviewing a budget case today this is the Thermaltake verse at j24 it comes in at about $70 plus or minus a bit because you can get the a RGB version which we don't have for an extra couple bucks extra ten plus dollars but we have the non a RGB version so it's bit cheaper and that is generally a good thing on our bench because we're looking more at the value in this price range for how well does it cool how well does do acoustically versus nearby competitors and then of course to some extent how is the exterior and how is the build quality so today we're looking at thermal takes at J 24 and this is one of the cases that was tucked away hidden at a recent trade show so we'll see if it was hidden for good reason or not before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte ARS ad 27 QD gaming monitor the ad 27 QT is a 27-inch 1440p gaming display with 95% of dcpip 3 color saturation for high color accuracy accompanied by a 1 millisecond response time 10 bit IPS panel and display HDR visa certification additional features include fluid adjustment and slide RGB LEDs for personal Flair and firmware features like cooldown counters at reticles and adaptive noise reduction learn more at the link below so j24 a RGB not this one we have RGB there's this one last letter the a RGB version and also a whole bunch of other new commander series products we're at CES this year and a lot of them were tucked away in a back room which we were fortunate enough to find because the main product showcased was water-cooled memory which is just let's move on so the cases were hidden in the back and it was actually it caught us by surprise because the case is that Thermaltake had hidden in the back we're pretty damn good they're competitive and a lot of them did have mesh fronts this is one of the ones that has a bit of a denser panel on the front but it is still perforated for airflow more than a lot of cases on the market so this obviously caught our attention and we spoke to thorough I'll take about it and said you know you should you shouldn't feel ashamed about trying to do things with airflow and fans so anyway hopefully we've talked some sense into them and they'll show these things more MORE or proudly in the future but the j24 does have a couple of things that as you dig into it you go well maybe it's not quite as open air as we thought but we'll see how it does in the thermal section later in this video for example this one has effectively two filters there's the outer mesh which isn't much of a filter it is a you know two mesh and it's probably about 50% metal still and then the intersection got the honeycomb design just for structural support and then there's a really fine filter in there so when we saw this with the g20 one another thermal take case that we'll talk about today what we found was that the g20 one tripled up on filters and as a result really hindered its ability to cool well and then as he removes those filters one by one the thermal performance improved to a point where it became rather competitive so this because it's something that you can mostly achieve on your own by pulling a few tabs and pulling the filter out it's not such a bad thing you just need to be aware of the difference it makes thermally and maybe spend some more time cleaning your your case internally once you remove the filter so we're gonna take that out today and test and see how it does but beyond that it does have three fans in the front these are not particularly high static pressure which will come into play with the double filters here later but three fans nonetheless and they are RGB in this model there's an a RGB one as I said elsewhere if you want it there's one fan in the back it is about the cheapest fan that Thermaltake could possibly buy but it's still a fan so you end up with four kind of lowish and two maybe medium on the front and fans can't have a medium end but you get what I'm saying and that's not so bad for $70 it starts to compete with the likes of the RL 0-6 which has long been a chart topper on our bench from Silverstone and other cases in that price category the fact all mesh by C is another case that sells around this price point fewer fans included but still set up in a way that you can really get it going for airflow if you wanted to so it's it's $70 case it is RGB folks that comes with the fans that have RGB built in it's got a lot of things that are popular right now and a relatively low price now we just need to talk about if it's actually any good so where do you go through Patrick's build notes and then we'll go through the thermal section there are I will note as just just a prequel or precursor here Patrick is fairly critical in the build section and we are actually overall leaning slightly positive on this case but there's a lot of critical points to go through so let's let's go through those now the verse of Jay 2040 G RGB edition is a budget case from thermaltake our understanding is that the je 22 23 24 and 25 are basically the same chassis with the same number of fans and different front panels but trying to remember thermal takes case Q's is a great way to go crazy the sample they send us for review specifically is the RGB edition and not the newer a RGB edition which may or may not have been a mistake on thermal takes part but saving $10 over an extra vowel is a win in our book the case interior is just big enough to fit an ATX motherboard with little room to spare on any side but there are adequate cutouts along the front edge to route all the cables the case is about as small as it can be without entering Q 500l territory almost exactly the same dimension as the Mesha phi c but slightly longer cable management room is understandably restricted as a result of this there is space under the power supply shroud but users with one or more at 3.5 inch drives will struggle to find place for power cables the hard drive cage can be removed or shifted 2.5 centimeters back toward the rear of the case welcome change from budget cases that usually Ridge at the hard drive cage in place the top of the power supplied shroud is fully ventilated and includes two mounting points for two and a half inch drive sleds which can be placed behind the motherboard as well that's where we installed hours because the mounts on the power supply shroud don't line up with any cable cutouts to be usable at all the SATA cables wouldn't need to be plugged directly into the motherboard instead of being routed neatly under the shroud which is a minor deign against the case the only major fit and finish issue with the case was that it only had 7 motherboard standoffs installed and no espares included will give Thermaltake the benefit of the doubt and assume this was a QC oversight and problem but the manual confirms that there aren't any extra standoffs included in the parts kit in this case this happens but it really and it should have backups in case it does the scene two of nine standoffs with a full sized ATX board means that some of the board is going to flex unavoidably when components are installed we have a dozens of extra standoffs lying around so not really a big deal but it could be an inconvenience for first-time system builders especially those with a bit more OCD or need to do it the right way than those who can get by without a couple of extra screws the steel side panel is held on with metal tabs a mechanism as annoying as it is old it's the kind with it loops instead of the fragile little hooks at least so that's one good side of it the glass side panel however is much better it's got a couple of metal strips glued to the edges that hook over the chassis and are secured with thumb screws at the back this is probably cheaper than drilling holes in the glass panel for the thumb screws the process we showed in our tempered glass factory tour and although relying on glue is less secure technically it's easier to use for the user and it's unlikely to fail we haven't had one fail yet the front panel is covered with the same pill-shaped ventilation holes as on the core g21 but backs with a sheet of foam to filter out dust the effectiveness of the filter is slightly undercut by a cutout under the front panel which allows air directly into the fans but since the fans are mounted nearly flush with the front panel most of the air is still pulled through the front of the case the resemblance of the front panel to the g-20 one is ominous we criticized that case we're using multiple redundant filters that choked off the airflow the j-20 fours approach makes a lot more sense but it also blocks off a lot of the incoming air as we'll discuss the thermal section later the top of the front panel is decoratively narrowed in a way that seems like it would prevent mounting 140-mile new fans but the panel is still 140 millimeters wide at its narrowest point although the 140 millimeter fan mounts don't extend all the way to the top of the case the fan LEDs are controlled externally by a button on the front of the case labeled are originally for reset but now for RGB the power and RGB switches are under either side of a single plastic button which is sort of a bad choice and one that can't be saving Thermaltake much money or time it's not as bad as having the power and reset switches under the same button as was the original intent but it's still going to be annoying to hit the wrong switch in the dark the fans use the same five pin connector that we've seen and complained about in the past with Lian Li cases since they can't connect to anything except the hub that shifts the case thermal takes fan hub is extremely simple to the extent that it doesn't have any way to actually control the speed of the fans which therefore run at full rpm with no way to control their speed short of soldering together a four pin adapter the connections on the hub are tailored exactly to the fans that ship with the case and there are no spare plugs the j-20 for ships with four fans a massive improvement over the g20 ones a single fan despite our hang-ups about how they're connected and controlled the three intake fans are RGB not a RGB on this case that's a different skew but it does exist and they can accept lighting input directly from the fan hub or pass-through from a compatible motherboard the foam filter does have an interesting softening effect on the lighting compared to a more typical mesh front filter but the metal and plastic elements on the front panel also obscure the fans a good bit the front of the case theoretically supports up to three hundred and sixty millimeter radiators but only tubes up and there may be clearance issues with the hard drive cage unless it's moved back or taken out ignore any marketing photos with a radiator mounted at the top of the case Thermaltake doesn't even try to claim that the top mount supports radiators in their spec sheet since there's only about three centimeters of space between the motherboard and the case there's room for one 120 millimeter rear radiator and one 240 in the front without any crowding though we followed the standard test suite for the j24 was just a couple of exceptions we gave up almost immediately on trying to noise normalize this system since the rear fan is the only one that can be controlled and is the quietest of the four the front fans are not cross compatible with the Lian Li at five pin fan controller either despite using the exact same connector and if users can't practically lower the fan speed there's no point in us trying to force that scenario for testing we also added a test with a foam filter layer removed see how much it restricted the airflow and one final test with the rear exhaust fan controlled via the motherboard header instead of the fan controller we won't discuss that one too much because it's within a half at the for thermal results thermal testing will start with just the Versa j24 case results then will expand the charts the CPU torture average temperature is fifty seven point one degrees Celsius over ambient which lowered massively down to forty four point four degrees delta T over ambient with the front panel removed for a reduction of about 13 degrees Celsius the intake fans don't deal well at all with the task of drawing air through a foam filter and through the front panel but if they're unrestricted they do an excellent job of pushing enough air through the case to get it towards the top of the results leaving the front panel on and remove adjust the foam filter confirmed this with the CPU temperature of forty eight point eight degrees Celsius over ambient almost as good as with no panel at all users who aren't averse to cleaning their cases should definitely consider removing the dust filter in the front as these fans aren't particularly good with static pressure performance comparatively fifty-seven point one degrees stock isn't a completely terrible score to begin with it's close to the define as two levels of performance but it's definitely on the warm end of the scale and is especially warm for the fan count it's certainly not as good as we'd expect for a mesh fronted case with four stock fans for its placement the g twenty one with two one forty millimeter intake fans added in addition to the stock 120mm exhaust fan and placed fifty one point eight degrees delta t in this test and the j twenty four would be read along sided if it had either a less restrictive filter or fans with higher static pressure if you're willing to remove the front filter performance improves significantly and scales toward the very top end of the chart GPU thermals for the j 24 or next GP temperature was fifty six point two degrees on average in the torture test and it ii got much cooler with the front panel removed averaging forty eight point five degrees over ambient this also gives us an additional clock increase in boosting behavior which is maybe notable in some instances the ventilated power supply shroud matters more here than it typically does since the incoming air from the lowest intake fan is directed into the power supply shroud and has no place to exit other than upwards straight into the GPU cooler removing the front filter and keeping the front panel landed at the midpoint between the two results at 52 degrees average again removing the foam filter layer is a valid option for users who don't mind cleaning their GPU fans more than usual fifty six point two degrees over Amiens is comparatively worse than the cpu temperatures were on the level of the stock define r6 and definitely hotter than it could be suggest in terms of the stack versus other cases it's on the warm side once again the g20 one with two added fans also did nearly the same here he's all teen and fifty six point nine degrees over ambient but we'd like to see the j-20 for closer to something like the silverstone rlo six or something similar 52 degrees without the filter does put it on the level of the stock age five hundred p mesh which isn't bad but you do have to remove that filter the fire strike extreme test raise GPU temperature slightly above the torture test results to fifty eight point six degrees celsius over ambiens putting it among the results of cases where the GPU hits 82 to 83 degrees and down clocks to maintain its temperature it's not the worst GV temperature we've seen with this bench but it absolutely qualifies as hot because if we're hitting 82 to 83 degrees it's really sort of getting into unacceptable levels it would be better if the filter weren't so restrictive or if you just remove it but then you do lose some of the dust filtration this is a similar issue to what we talked about with the g20 one just not quite as bad we can't make our usual comments about adding a fans better cool the GPU either since Thermaltake already has as many fans as possible in the front of the case so you just be replacing fans at this point which is a valid option as seen in our earlier test results with just the CPU and just the GPU versus only the Versa j24 results adding or changing the fans the better ones doesn't prove performance significantly blender rendering on the CPU averaged thirty eight point seven degrees Celsius over ambient still in the middle of the chart and next to the defined s to vision and stock NZXT aged 500 if a case is going to be running three to four fans at full speed at all times no matter what it should at least be cooling exceptionally well it's not that the case performs poorly stock it's that it should be doing better and it can be rendered on the GPU average twenty seven point eight degrees Celsius over ambience equivalent to the land cold one which is a case that we haven't really mentioned in months the bottom of the case is about as good as it can be for GPU cooling with the constraints of the case and having a power slash shroud and a hard drive cage but it's let down by the front panel for noise up next we measured the J twenty four thirty nine point five DBA again there's no way to control three of the four fans in the case and the fourth one can't be controlled either unless it's plugs into the motherboard that means 39.5 DBA is going to be the limiting noise level for our test bench and this will change based on your system but when you can't control the fans there's definitely a floor to how low your noise it can go per Patrick's wording then and his written review that's linked in the description below I'll just quote him directly it might not sound like it but we actually like this case and the reason that Patrick like this is because it's it's 80 to 90 dollars supposed to be a bit cheaper sometimes but currently at current prices at the time of recording this review it is 90 on new egg which is overpriced it's 80 on most other outlets and we've heard 70 is a possibility as well so the a RGB version is on sale on new egg for about $10 over what they've got what this is supposed to be price that's that $90 on new egg typically a bit more 80 is a pretty good price we'd like to see it again as it falls closer to 1770 that's good but 80 it's not bad for a case with four fans it's just that the fans aren't particularly powerful they they look kind of good if you're into the RGB thing so there's some value there for a lot of people and they perform well enough but the case really starts to push high towards the top of the charts when you strip down the front a bit so if you take that filter out it is one of the better cases in its price category it's up there not distant from the RL 0/6 and some of our tests and that's a good thing so if if you're willing to sacrifice some of the dust filtration in favour of performance the case sets you up well for that it separately the case is really small so it's got that potentially going for it as well it's not too far from the Q 500 LSI's it's bit bigger and it's very very similar to the fractal master by C size and this is a good category to target because it's largely underserved other than the size of the enclosure there is there's one downside with that which is that there's not particularly good liquid cooling support but if you're leaning towards spending glass out of case you might be spending less on cooling and probably getting air more likely an example of where it's limited is the top so Thermaltake does not advertise top rated or support although in some of their marketing photos there's a radiator in there but it looks like it surrender so don't don't go into this planning to put it right on the top you can get one in the front so it's got some minimal level of liquid coin support you do a small like 120 in the back depending make sure you double check but depend of the radiator so it's not particularly good in that regard but it's small and that's the upside the the counter to it so here's where we land with this then the next step up in build quality would be something like the mesh of I see it's not far in price it's around the same price actually but you would want to buy an additional one to two fans to really get that performance out of Metro I see that it deserves to have so that is a bit of a hidden cost there this case if you buy extra fans we replaced four with three good fans and it perform better by a couple degrees actually and that's in the earlier results in the CPU and GPU only charts so you can improve it but once you start stacking up fan cost you get rid of the RGB stuff you're kind of getting a bit a bit bad on the value because there's more expensive cases that come out the same with the fan cost added that will match performance but it's something you could do so yeah the the main competitors here the case is actually overall not bad there's clearly some downsides it's cheaper case there's some static pressure issues with these fans versus the front panel the front panel is better than the g-20 one there don't think has improved on that point they've gone down from three filters by one reduction of one so that's that's an improvement in thermals - there were some QC issues we found that we discussed earlier but not major ones so the existence of seven standoffs instead of nine with no spares just kind of stupid hopefully it only happens on hours but we'll see let us know you have primary competitors if you wanted to look around for other things maybe you want to widen your options and consider stuff in addition to this one you look at the Fraxel master by c add in the cost of one to two fans and it's pretty good you can look at now pretty aging silver sonar l06 getting harder to find these days but still a very good case if you want to get a bit more spendy you can go up towards the h 509 P from Coolermaster just to be clear there's a lot aged 500 and that one is about a hundred bucks on average very competitive case the NZXT h 500 has a much different approach to all of these it's more closed off but depending on your configuration if it's like this one not terrible in performance because of the way the negative pressure setup is configured so that H 500 also not bad to look at and that should set you up for overall pretty good options the Corsair 400 see if it's still available is another good one in the ninety two hundred dollar range so that'll give you a full list to kind of start with and then you can expand from there thank you for watching subscribe for more co2 store documents nexus net to support us directly like by buying one of these shirts this is the anniversary edition logo with the tear down components in it we're one of our mod mats you know also go to patreon.com/scishow miss Nexus to get the newest behind the scenes video thank you for watching oh and we'll be in Taipei in about a week for copy tags so get subscribe to catch that coverage or stay tuned if you already are I'll see you all next time