Gadgetory

hey everyone i am steve from gamers nexus donna and today we're talking about the Zalman r1 case this case is Zalman's first pushback with a cluster of other cases so this is the Zalman r1 and it is truly the height of case engineering and confidence I firmly believe that this case has pushed the industry to new levels when it comes to design and in all the wrong ways starting with the specs for the case and then we'll start talking about design flaws and hopefully other manufacturers can learn from this the case has three fans it's very simple there's two exhaust one in the back one of the top which is problematic and then one in the front as intake and these are all 120 millimeter fans the one of the front has an LED the back to do not and that's really all there is to it in terms of cooling there's very limited liquid cooler support of course as this is a after rebates $35 case before rebates between 50 and 70 depending on which retailer you look at it's about 50 right now on Newegg rebates brands down to 35 just for quick reference other cases in that range would include the Corsair spec a1 that's about $40 the NZXT source 210 about $40 and that if you add 10 bucks you got like the 200 R and a whole range of very good cases Silverstone's PS 11 B is I believe $40 or $45 also so very fierce competition in that price range and the Zelman r1 is attempting to enter it starting with cooling on the case we did some thermal benchmarks you can see the charts now and it's not the best case for cooling this was tested against other 70ish dollar cases including the NZXT s340 and anti XP 70 which is an identical chassis it is the same as this chassis there are om the exterior is a bit different though and that doesn't impact cooling so this thermal benchmark shows you that the r1 is not great at cooling but more importantly it's not great because of a lot of things like this top flap and when you pull it up first of all it's not a great release mechanism but when you do pull it up you see that the plastic over the top mounted fan is covering the most critical parts of intake for really any fan they're all pretty much the same it's covering those air pathways for intake exhaust so when you're trying to exchange the exhaust out the top of the case it's running into plastic and then you have issues creating vortexes or looping the hot air in the case and more obviously than this if you leave the flap on which is the only way the case has any semblance of looking somewhat okay I guess it would be the best way to describe it if you leave it on it is completely blocking the exhaust the fan has no where to push the air when this thing's on that's not entirely new to cases something like the Thor or the throne do this by design but they have a grill in the back of the case so that the exhaust still has somewhere to go it doesn't just get circulated back into the CPU fan which is sitting and of course directly underneath this if the rear exhaust isn't bad enough the front intake fan is completely choked for air by this front panel and this is a design feature in a lot of cases I have a feeling it is less so for these al-manar one there's a little bit of room for the fan to breathe through this cheese creator matched on the side and this is also the only place you can see the blue LED from a fan that is completely obscured by the front panel so they've elected to put an LED in a blocked fan very interesting choice very good allocation of resources and once you open the front panel there's a few more problems first of all there is a dust filter here that's an okay idea but it's not gonna filter any dust because of no air and with that dust can get through a solid piece of plastic the solid piece of plastic solid is a loose term here because it's actually I don't know what the exact spec is we're probably about a millimeter thick and the only reason this foam that you see on the front panel exists is not for sound damping it's to make the front panel stronger it is extremely flimsy by default and this is just a the nature of very cheap plastic very cheap manufacturing it's a cheap product but the spec Awan the source 210 all these other cases are substantially better and that's really saying something for other competing $40 cases so we can flex this really easily which isn't great and if you peel the film off which we'll show here I'm guessing that there's an extremely limited amount of plastic for the panel and that it's really got no bulk to it moving to quality control and aesthetics issues the top panel was installed off camber and is not flush with the chassis itself as you can see by looking at the two screws as your landmark here in this shot you can see it's not straight so that's a major quality control issue and a severe design oversight speaking of design oversights the side panel and the top panel are not adjacently they're not aligned properly when you look at the top panel it sort of juts over the back that's not a feature that's again a design oversight and if you look at any of the good cases on the market including these sorts of to ten including the 200 are including the spec of one these are $40 cases $50 cases in some instances and they're not great as no case at that price will be but they at least get that right they get the paneling and the alignment correct for the most part and the quality control will allow that to persist in all the cases that are manufactured more or less the front panel again same issue and even there are other small issues like the feet which have no rubber padding the Antec p70 if you recall is the exact same chassis as this Samms some things will look at momentarily on the inside but the exact same chassis the footing on the p70 is different because they elected to install different footing it's rubberized so it actually stays still on your surface if you have it on a solid table and you can see as we're moving around of this shot here the the case is very prone to sliding and it's a bit it makes me a bit uneasy as a user as a system builder other issues with the paneling and quality control would include a cross threaded screw on the bottom here this is not installed flush and you can see that just maybe barely in the camera shot the metal paneling on the chassis at the top is dinged it's not severe but at this angle really at most angles you can see the light reflecting off of the dents in the paneling that is on the outside of the chassis so another issue for quality control and installing the side panel alone is difficult enough because you have issues getting it flushed to the front flush to the top and then screwed in through the holes one of which is cross threaded so we've just got issues all around finally on exterior design flaws of the plexiglass or cheap plastic paneling here I guess it's really just a cheap clear plastic if we push on the corner just a little bit it will slide inward on the rail that's holding it in place and I really shouldn't have to explain why this is a design flaw I'm sure you can quite reasonably on your own draw those conclusions but it definitely is not how it should have shipped the upsides of this glass window despite its flexing nature is that you can see the floppy drive bay from certain angles so we've just got issues all around with the paneling and the outside of the case and we're not even to the inside of the case yet it's one of the more technical items worth complaining about would be the fan controller when we use the fan controller it has a max a low and I think that's really it for the settings aren't being off but when you use the max setting it doesn't get a stable 12 volt to the fan and if we plug a multimeter in there you'll see it sort of fluctuates just below the 12 volt range this fluctuation can cause fluctuations in rpm which impacts thermal testing impacts thermal results in the real world and this is an issue it's not something I expect anyone to really bypass in a cheap product like this but at that point why are you including a fan controller it's really the the only thing that I get out of it because you're better off plugging into the motherboard at that point or using some aftermarket controller that's much better moving to the inside of the case we see the same chassis that is used in an Tex P 70 and I first want to introduce you to the floppy drive bay this is something we haven't seen in a while it is on these Alan r1 so that is a major plus for legacy systems I suppose and the floppy drive rails come bent in the system that was a feature added to it that we encountered and the bending is not too bad because you can actually bend it back just like sprue and modeling or miniatures or figurine cutouts so you can bend it back don't bend it too far because it will snap but that is the floppy drive bay don't want to spend too much time there because many other things to worry about like the random drilled holes in the motherboard tray that will do absolutely nothing for anything including cooling and behind the motherboard tray a very limited space for cable management you'll be doing most of your cable management in the case proper and moving on to issues that are perhaps even more noticeable to the end-user I had difficulty by which I mean it was impossible to thread screws through the expansion slots for the video card we ended up just tethering the the video card to the case itself by using a zip tie the opposing side of the case from the unthread of all video card expansion slots we have the SSD bay this is a special bay that was installed on the top of the 3.5 inch base so this is actually foresight I'm glad that it's here for a full list of grievances on these al-manar one check the article link in the description below Patrick Nathan our reviewer has already talked about all of them he did a case roundup looking at this one the Antec p7e and the s3 40 the reason for those three cases is because at the time of starting the roundup they were all about $70 60 to 70 now this one's got the mir rebate for down to $35 and even at this price point I have a very difficult time arguing in favor of the r1 it is at the point where it's it's so poorly designed and so bad that I would really strongly encourage everybody to spend an extra five dollars and get almost any other case and you don't even have to spend an extra five dollars the source 210 bounces between 35 and 40 pretty regularly the Corsair 100 R is about $50 to be fair but it is the same chassis as the spec series cases which did better in Asia than in the US and the spec series cases are perfectly fine for a budget build about $40 as well and the Silverstone PS 11 B which is the same as the 100 R is 35 $40 so there's a lot of options out there to replace this and they're all better designs they have more functional uses that make better sense and most importantly the quality control in our experience with them is just a lot better and we've got videos of those on the channel from CES so that is the Zalman R 1 this is elements return to market I wish stronger but it is not it's simply not a case I can recommend right now all the others are better options if you like this content please like comment subscribe as always check out our new patreon page you can hit that link after this video and that's a new campaign we're starting up to help move forward with better lighting better camera equipment all that so again link in the description below for the full review and I will see you all next time you