Gadgetory

welcome to my coolermaster elite 110 video this is a tiny tiny little pc case that holds a tiny tiny little Bell piece I mean I guess you could put anything in it but it is specifically designed to hold a PC hotspot shield service makes your internet browsing safer more secure and fully private click now to learn more let's start with the packaging fairly straightforward fairly thin fairly lightweight hard foam but because it is such a small case and you can't really build a computer that's heavy enough for it to be a problem I'm okay with that this time around we'll go with an external tour for the start here at the front you find mesh on the side you find mesh on the top you find mesh on the other side you find mesh and at the back you find well mesh on the power supply I guess and then more ventilation when you're trying to cram an entire PC with discrete graphics end up to a 4770k cpu into something the small you'll need all the ventilation you can get in the elite 110 delivers here in terms of front i/o it's pretty standard fare we've got 2 USB 3.0 ports headphone and microphone jacks a hard drive activity led a reset switch and then the front coolermaster logo is actually a power switch there is no five and a quarter inch babe most people aren't using those these days so I'm not too worried about it and there wouldn't really be room for it anyway which you'll see once we open it up at the back you can see that even though the elite 110 is a small package that doesn't prevent it from having a pretty decent sized bulge on it sorry it's so the power supply does stick out the back a little bit what this does is it gives you about an extra 20 millimetres of clearance internally so that you can fit a fairly normal sized power supply on the inside again even though the case is so small the top casing comes off with four thumb screws that I'm just going to go ahead and remove here and pull this baby off so you can see it fits on a little something like that and then once we get on the inside we can see it supports 280 mm your fans here on the side however that's only if you don't need a dual slot graphics card which we opted to install this is Linus tech tips guys not Linus and namby-pamby tips we're hardcore we won't settle for on border single slot graphics cards if we don't absolutely have to now with that set on coolermaster site they don't really show it being used the way that we're using it and the case seems optimized for onboard graphics or a smaller graphics card with more storage as opposed to being designed for people who are trying to put a full-on gaming rig inside but I guess the only way to find out if this works is to check our temperatures at the end and see how it went in the front it supports either a 140 millimeter or 120 millimeter fan that takes advantage of that mesh and you have the option to install a 120 millimeter radiator the manual and product page don't specify the thickness that's supported but I went with a side in 120 XL so given that that went in there just fine with actual actually a fair bit more clearance to go I would say pretty much anything should fit okay in terms of CPU cooler support it can handle a 76 millimeter or 3 inch CPU cooler not much space between the socket and the power supply up here so using a stock cooler as an option but not many aftermarket CPU air coolers will fit in there which to me made that liquid cooler in the front a no-brainer for our core i7 processor I was easily able to cram the tubing in here between the power supply and the motherboard even though there wouldn't have been much space for airflow otherwise you can it can handle up to a 180 millimeter power supply that's in terms of length other than that it's a standard ps2 form factor but shorter is much better I used a 160 millimeter power supply and this is a modular one which gives me a little bit more flexibility in terms of using less cables and not having to cable manage as much and this was about right for me I think trying to do a 180 millimeter power supply in there would be quite a bit more challenging in terms of cable management now it's a mini ITX case which means that even though there are two expansion slots back here there's only one internally so this is just for if you have something like a dual slot card Coolermaster does support dual slot graphics cards then as you know but not as long as you might normally see in a case that's a little bit bigger so it supports up to a 210 millimeter graphics card but there are a couple of things that you'll have to consider if you want to get a 21 centimeter card in there number one is that you're going to want a card that has a top mounted PCI Express connector or you're going to have to factor that in when you're taking your measurements because it has a rear one you're going to need a little bit of extra space for that cable at the back of the card number two is you're going to want to make sure you have a strategy for what to do with all the cables and wires that you're going to have to hide in the front from the front panel connectors like the front USB 3 so what I did was I kind of crammed them into this corner but I found that that ate up a little bit of the space that I would have had for a graphics card that took up the entire length inside and a big part of the reason for that is because I'm using a radiator if it wasn't for the radiator I could put a fan grill on that front fin and then not have to worry as much about the the space available on the front so I squeezed the graphics card in at the end I didn't have too much trouble with it I mean at all it all worked just fine just make sure as you're building you're managing your cables correctly to ensure that you're able to get everything in there either way whatever you're doing I recommend leaving the front bezel actually detached you can just pull it off at the front right here until the very end because that'll give you a little bit more room to work with and install all those cards as you're building the system now in terms of hard drive support I wanted a challenge when it came to hard drive installation so I well okay I guess I actually just kind of did it wrong and to go back and do it over I might turn the drives around so you can see I have the mounted connectors towards the back and they're supposed to be mounted connectors towards right so I would I would turn the drives around and put the cables on the other side and I would definitely install drives in the top slots before populating the side especially if I have mid-range graphics card in here it's a 260 X in there the way that I do because that's putting a lot of that graphics card heat next to my drives which is going to be bad for them in the longer term in the end it worked and the fact that this case supports up to two three and a half inch drives and two two and a half inch drives or three three and a half inch drives or four two and a half inch drives is pretty darn impressive given the size and when we see our temperature tests you're going to see that even with the hard drives in sort of their worst case scenario locations it actually performs all right after finishing my build I did have one piece of criticism I wish the manual was a little bit better I've already brought this up with Coolermaster but step by step build instructions and some useful guidance in terms of part selection would go a long way towards making the build process more enjoyable the manual is well written and professionally made but I would just like to see it go a little bit deeper but to be frank if that's what I have to complain about rather than things like you know what was the overall build quality like then I guess they're doing pretty well there were no rough edges no things that could have caught me know things that that really bothered me or I looked and I went really what were they thinking when they did that but I've come to expect this from Coolermaster so it's hard to remember to mention that kind of stuff and in fact it's not even in my script so there you go I just remembered now so with all that out of the way let's talk results playing Far Cry 3 with the GPU usage pinned at a hundred percent yielded 90-degree temps on the r7 260x that I have tucked away in that little corner in there that might sound high but remember guys these modern GPUs are actually designed to ramp their fan speeds to target a specific temperature and that card was reaching about 72% fan speed to maintain that 90 degrees yeah it's a little bit on the loud ish side but it's not unreasonable by any means and when you consider the stupid way my drives were installed such a my graphics card really doesn't have much access to fresh air it's obvious it could do a little bit better with more forethought CPU temperatures of course we're much better at an impressive 55 degrees max but that makes sense because it's liquid cooled and access to fresh outside air for the radiator does wonders here it's drawing that fresh air right in from the outside so overall the system is extremely small extremely compact runs quiet at idle but of course gets a little bit louder under gaming and I'd say the elite 110 if you're trying to build a tiny little system with good ventilation gets a definite thumbs up from me guys thank you for watching this video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know do you prefer small cases like this or would you rather we do more coverage of things like behalf stacker for example like large more maybe more versatile but certainly less us space conscious solutions I guess there's a couple more things to mention guys we do have a link to support us in the video description you can do anything from direct monthly contributions which helped us out an immense amount all the way to changing over your Amazon toolbar to one of our affiliate links so that every time you buy 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