Gadgetory

all right what do we got over here the three one is often but is it Fred worthy let's find out you can only rely on the pros to do the job with every keystroke satisfying like the millions before it quality filled every key regardless of your speed to the master master keys bro take it with you make it good alright the three one is exciting for many reasons aside from being an extra excellent addition to a very limited category of micro-atx this one's got four PCI slots and it's about time we filled the middle gap so let's see how the $69 301 stacks up as a contender for the best micro ATX enclosure let's start with the design first its boxy it's modern it's got metal and glass very limited plastic and the only plastic we find are on case feet but the bottom dust filter basically sits on top of the case feed so perhaps that was the cheaper version for tooling then going full metal the dust filter is kind of course which most likely is to minimize air flow restriction because there's very little room underneath it the overall design formula follows in the footsteps of the N one three or three ATX tower and there is a bit of resemblance to the s340 elite so if that's your flavor of a case companion then England have done a good job the tempered glass panel is to us with an excellent mechanism that has a bit of stiffness to it which I think is by design and it's just so much easier to remount and now the thumb screw method seems so 2016 ill the handle protrudes a little bit but without taking away from the character and the glass is tinted and it doesn't seem to have any color caps which I prefer over a warmer or colder glass and there's also this dotted shading on the perimeter that helps to conceal the frame underneath I really like this touch and we haven't seen this design on the glass yet I have the black and red model wife in blue is also available so you see the front i/o is illuminated with dual USB 3 power reset and audio jacks along with that in win text in vertical orientation so it doesn't really look like a logo instead you can view it as just basic squiggly lines and since both the front and top are completely covered in metal the main Air Flow Intake is on the side which is a bit odd but I love this ventilation honeycomb design you could light it up from the inside for this really cool illumination pattern the side panel is held in with two captive thumb screws and while the design of this ventilation is cool the spacing here is very limited plus there is no dust filter and you guys how feel about that on top of that decide airflow entrance is very much blocked on the inside as well you can see this area shares the space with cables it's an odd airflow design and with dual 120mm fans at the front perhaps the three one is suited for a radiator with good static pressure fans and so this case has no fans included and you can look at it from two perspectives one is because it's in this budget category it's a shame because at least one exhaust fan in the back here would have been great but - I feel like this case is really targeted towards people that might do custom water cooling and you know this micro-atx direction is picking up pace or you are going to populate your own quality fans and here anyway and so no fans included both negative and the positive and so the main chamber it seems to have all the primary elements like a large CPU backplate an open frame with a plastic cable cover beside the motherboard the power supply chamber is at the top that is fully closed off aside from having the fan openings and the small cutouts for the cables so the power supply is an active component for interior cooling the bottom supports dual 120mm fans but unfortunately no cutouts are available right underneath the motherboard which is the consequence of having the power supply chamber at the top while wanting to minimize the height and it's just interesting to see how different the 301 feels from today's expected frame layout now I normally don't mention accessories but it is important to mention how they are included so here they're well organized and they're separating the nice baggies but they're not reusable so one can open one bag that's it how do you store the rest of the little screws and stuff and this is something as fantex have been doing for like three years now ever since their first case the enter primo these little pouches with separate compartments so you can sort your screws and everything and I use these and these are life savers when you want to just find the exact screw and this is so useful down the road when you do multiple builds something companies should definitely start including for storage there's a drive cage in front the power supply it is removable and accommodates a single three and a half inch drive or an SSD plus two more SSDs at the bottom and only the ITX motherboard standards are pre-installed but a tool is included to fill rest now when it comes to the power supply mount here are a very large 1200 watt overkill power supply from be quiet technically this frame would allow it to sit there in lengthwise it will not interfere with the drive gauge but because of this mounting point where the thumb screw for the side panel fit you cannot simply insert the power supply this way you have to angle it in order to mount in size so I'm not sure that the limitation or not to sort of limit of very large power supply compatibility but only a hundred sixty millimeter power supplies are supported all right so as I start to do cable management one very disappointing thing came about and that is the entrance from the top chamber of the cables into the main chamber so we have this plastic cover kind of similar to what we saw on the NZXT s340 but here the entrance from the back into here is very small so you have to pass all your cables through here because that is the only opening from the top channel unless you want to of course route it from from here where it's you know it's kind of open and the cables are not really hidden but look at this this is the sada area there's nothing there to accommodate your SATA cable pass-through ah that's how you do it maybe they should have included that in the manual alright so by design you can remove any of these five pieces and this is plastic so that it helps to channel the airflow into your you know the where the fans are supposed to be but I didn't realize that you're supposed to actually break you know these little pieces so that you can pass your cable through like the SATA cable into the motherboard area it would be nice to include this information so that users are aware and taking all that into account here's the full build it's a little bit messy because the main opening is not that large and many of these cables have to cross the motherboard to their final destination particularly for the USB and the i/o cables so keep that in mind if you're installing the fans at the bottom - I installed the radiator and then the fans as the tubing at the top with otherwise interfere with that area so your radiator fans has to be configured in pool setup it would have been very good to see the power supply shroud to be a little bit more open for cable routing or these larger cable cutouts as this was not an easy space to work in coming around to the back it's actually quite simple to just clump your cables in this area and use some of these small cutouts on the motherboard tray for cable side points and you have to remember though that this is your main intake area so to keep it as clean as possible is the goal for best airflow and because the power supply is at the top be prepared to deal with the thick cable coming from there so just maybe come up with some solution to hide it for a cleaner look and finally I wanted to see how effective that side ventilation is and so let's begin with the benchmarks GPU stressing we're using the furry donut is 64 for the CPU here are our temperatures so we were hovering around 70 degrees Celsius on the CPU at load 82 degrees Celsius on the GPU I have the 4690k overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz and the GPU is the r9 380 X now the thing is the fans here are maxing out so that's full speed because temperatures like really went up high so this is your best-case scenario now I want to put the fans into their more normal profile like the silent curve and like my custom profile curve so that there's they still do a very good job but they're not super loud because right now the machine is not exactly silent AC moments later here are the temperature so the CPU hovering around 75 to 76 the GPU drop degree I'm not sure why that is maybe it's because of the circulation of air is better when there is less air flow coming from the front you know it's not as turbulent or something but the system is much quieter so that's good but still what do you guys think of these 10 it's a little hot I would say five to ten degrees maybe more even you know the Delta between such a restrictive intake and well what can I say I love the look the materials on the build the price point at 69 bucks is just where it should be to remain relevant and not overstep any toes and perhaps incentivize the switch to a micro ATX build but it's not really optimized for air flow that is its biggest weakness that will run your components warmer than usual and you just have to accept that but I love this unconventional approach to frame design and we are giving it a higher canucks damn good award now because the techs but on how you feel when the system is ready and the only question remains is it fredward so thanks for watching we treated her our kinetics what do you think of the three one let me know in the comment down below make sure to subscribe and watch although other contests and we'll see you in the next video