Gadgetory

fractal design cases have inspired modders all over the world who have built some amazing systems like this Darkseid themed case by George priscilla's showcasing the spacious internals in the define s or metallic acid a mini ITX system by Justin Olsen featuring a white black and red color scheme and a super clean layout in they define nano s there are a ton more awesome builds like these on fractal designs modding series page so check it out via the sponsor link in this video's description and get inspired for your next project what's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware today's video is a case video this is the enter max equal ins silent case the model is EC a three five one zero so I'm going to set up the system in here give you guys some feedback on what I think of it now the price right now for this case if you look at Amazon and Newegg it's about a hundred and ten dollars so it was a hundred and six dollars on new ache for some reason and enter max has tried to cram some high-end features in here including a backlit LED panel a four millimeter panoramic tempered glass providing panoramic views triple radiator support a power supply shroud of course which has become standard in modern cases and some silence features some silent features I guess I should say including sound dampening but let's begin by of course taking it out of the box let's get in here for a quick closer look and oh my gosh the reflections many many reflections from this case now it's made of a steel frame with the pretty typical ATX layout you have a single tempered glass panel on this side which is a fairly dark smoked tempered glass piece it's held on by four a little metal thumb screws they do have Phillips heads in them and these two screws are used not just there but there also holding on the opposite side panel as well this side panel will just kind of pop out from the side I'll show you that in just a minute on the front you actually have an extruded acrylic piece so even though it is not tempered glass as you can probably see right here very reflective on both but actually has a pretty nice matching look you have an inner max logo on the here on the side that will light up I believe in red once we system turned on and here friend IO we got a big old power button reset button this is a three position fan controller that will be indicated by the lights right there and then a strange addition of plugs on all these ports here but these are protective plugs I don't know if you want to keep them in all the time to keep dust out maybe possibly but a couple USB 3.0 ports mic and headphone jack yes these are Jack's not buttons they also have little plugs in them and then a couple USB 2.0 ports there as well no type-c and no 3.1 gen2 unfortunately but at least a full layout and I do like having four ports up here rather than just a couple USB 3 tempered glass side piece again is held on by four thumb screws and it is just a single piece of tempered glass with four holes in it this has been pretty standard for 2017 but we've just been shown like the define are six recently that has at least sort of an enhanced tempered glass piece so I'm starting to feel like this is getting a little bit less desirable but again a fairly dark tint on that as well that will actually let you see the inside of the case enter Mac's logo down here at the bottom and then we've got standard ATX layout pre-installed motherboard standoffs which is nice not a lot of rubber grommets in here for cable management there's a couple up here for peace for you Oh supplemental power and possible fans and that kind of thing then over here on the right side there's a bracket you can use this to mount hard drive so you can use this to actually mount fans they have set it up so you could set up a radiator here although I feel like that would be kind of weird because there's no pastor on the back here for the air to flow out of and that said though let's get this side panel off as well and here you can see with those two screws off it'll just kind of fold out just a little bit reminds me a little bit of cooler masters recent master box series of cases the side panel itself does have a sound dampening material on the other side fairly reasonably sturdy steel and then this catch lifts down at the bottom which is what allows you to position it on the side of the case and what's it kind of hanging there like so leave this off for now at the back of the case here we can see our exhaust fan 120 or 140 millimeter mount there and not yet for the rear panel IO you have a total of seven expansion slots no vertical GPU mount there and this is one of the types of cases that is flush in the back with the GPU mounting solution so there's this sort of pop-out piece back here and that is where you actually screw in your graphics cards or other expansion cards that you might put in there at the bottom is our power supply shroud and our max logo on the side of that and I thought it's interesting that they again to say to put a couple grommets there at the back for routing up probably HD audio and USB connections but no grommet here and this little pass-through which would be the most visible one and that's where cables would come up probably for your graphics cards so I would like to see a grommet right there to be perfectly honest there's another look at that rear bracket on the back again mounts for 3.5 inch hard drives mounts for 120 millimeter fans so you can actually put a couple of those right there and that would actually help to block some of the visibility of the cables going back behind this piece because that is one of the complaints from a couple of the reviews that I sort of did some research on before doing this video as you can really get a good look at all the cables back through those brackets and right here we can see the pre-installed cables with USB HD audio USB 3 USB 2 front panel connectors are all black cabling so that is a nice idea the bits of rainbow blah on the USB to an HD audio which is a little disappointing but those are pretty common to see in computer cases and then beyond that down here you got a total of six three pin fan headers and that is to connect up up to six fans to your three position fan controller Brett the fans that are included our inter max well there's a 140 at the back and then two 120 is included in the front and they do have dual use cables so you can connect them to a three pin motherboard connector or you can just plug them in straight to molex I don't recommend just plugging in the molex so because that will join the fans at full speed beyond that fair amounts of cable tie down points back here know clearly defines sort of vertical running position for your main 24 pin cables so that's another thing I would like to see and you can kind of tuck them in here but again they'll be fairly visible from the front of the case I've got a couple SSD trace here held on by more of these same thumb screws that the side panels are held on with would've liked to have seen these be captive thumb screws they are not but the SSD trace our all-metal point can be removed like so and you can position a couple of them back there for some additional storage here at the bottom there are two more little drive trays which have some plastic mounts in them the accessories are included in this one again these will support a 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives here's a look at the accessories that come in the box you get a product manual one long velcro strap and one short velcro strap very specifically three zip ties they do give you a speaker which is these are nice to have if you don't have one I guess some longer screws here for mounting radiators and that kind of thing you get a couple enter max magnets these are refrigerator magnets there you go just leave them on there I would be right under underneath the 8-bit levar burton and then of course extra screws for everything else and they do include a metal nut here for tightening your motherboard standoffs also a nice thing to have so I'd say a good selection of accessories from an ER max alright the power supply mounts right down here at the bottom and over down here take a look at those feet this is some interesting feat design yeah they're made of plastic but there's some ribbon underneath them and the power supply does have a hole dust filter here which is not the easiest to get out okay dust filter not a decent dust filter but not very easy to actually remove it just it locks in there and then cuz the feet go all the way across the bottom it's it's like you really need two hands or yeah but I'd rather have the dust filter than that attempting to remove our front panel here to take a look at some outing points for the radiators now their precip tied in here you're definitely not gonna leave them that way you're gonna want to release all these and everything also the front panel is permanently connected to the front i/o which means if you want to pull it all the way off you're gonna need to plug all that tada there is our front panel it's all the connections up in there and we can also see a little bit more sound dampening on here but again another one of the cases for 2017 that has completely solid front piece right there so all of your airflow in the front is going to be coming in through these vents on the side and the small gap at the bottom which is also there so you can grab the front panel to pull it off if you want to so I'm probably not gonna be the best airflow especially depending on where you mount these fans it comes with two pre-mounted hundred and twenty millimeter fans there at the front you can do up to three and you can do a 360 millimeter radiator up here one thing I might consider doing just out of the box if you're not going to install radiator up there is move these fans from the outside here to the inside mount them right there if you're not gonna have anything else that might conflict with them mounted over here on the crossbeam piece that would give a little bit more space underneath this panel just for airflow so that those fans could possibly be a little bit more effective and I thought there's another dust filter up here that's part I haven't really talked about yet is up here on top and here you have a removable panel so I got some more sound dampening on that so if you're less concerned about airflow pop that on top magnets hold it in place reason well and remove it if you would like to let more air at the top or get a couple more months up here so you can do up to three sixty millimeter radiator up here or to 140 fans or eight order an 80 millimeter radiator of course that's all going to be very dependent on the motherboard you have installed here how large the heat sinks and whatnot are on there and how thick your radiator is as far as support there goes but good to have support on both the front and the top for a couple configurations like that it's really missing anything I'd say it's maybe a secure location or a pre installed location for a pump because there's a bit of space here up at the front of the system but no no pre-drilled mounts are anything like that all that said let's go ahead and get a system installed so after some further explanation I just wanted to demonstrate sort of the quirkiness and maybe some missed potential here for this crossbeam support section that they have at the back now first off I thought these were 3.5 inch mounts on that they actually are not they're 2.5 inch mounts so they're the bottom mounts for the SSD and you could put one right there and then you can put another one down here now bear in mind this would put the business end where you put the plugs on on the left side here which would probably not be ideal you'd have to wrap them around to go back behind there to get behind in the cable management area you could flip it of course and go this way over here but if you have fans in the front and as you can see I've switched these hundred twenty millimeter fans over to the inside of the case so that they have a little bit more breathing room inside the front panel it's just it's just doesn't seem quite ideal also you could easily have fit three or maybe even four 2.5 inch drive mounts along here I feel like if this was designed a little bit differently finally again there's hundred and twenty millimeter fan mounts that are kind of slot space so you can shift them up and down a little bit there and I think that's meant so you can take some flashy fans and put them there that maybe light up or something like that but again just a very impractical position for it because behind that you just have a solid flat wall of the other side panel of the case so you're not going to be pulling air from or pushing air to anywhere especially if you were considering mounting a radiator or something like that at least not without modding the rear side panel to provide some additional ventilation so it seems like there could have been a lot more done this piece right here to provide additional mounting points for SSDs or just ignore the fan mounts right there that really is not necessary I can't get the system installed in here in case you're wondering this is the same system that I installed recently in the Defiant r6 and I'll put links to the various components in the description down below it is an Intel based system and I'm just going to power this on right now and that will give us our first look for example at the accent lighting in red the enter max logo on the side here as well as there's some back lighting on the ports up there for USB and mic and headphone jack I will say it's actually blending in quite nicely right now simply because the gigabytes Z 370 motherboard that we're using also has some red accents on it I will point out though that this is just a single color for the accent lights on the case itself so for anyone who's interested in RGB theme or something like that you are stuck with red there so you're gonna need to pick colors that match with that or complimentary to it now as far as silence goes I will say this gets an initial thumbs-up from me simply because the included fans of the three of them to 120s in the front and the 140 in the back I've routed and connected all up to the 3 position fan controller and right now that is in full speed mode or the fastest fan mode for those so even with that it's very quiet and I can even turn it down further to make this a really silent running system I will say again that I was glad that I moved these two front fans from the initial position they were in inside the case just to provide a little bit more airflow intake to them through this front panel here and even with them position there it does look like you might still have enough room for the fans and a radiator if you are using a slim version now the biggest shortcoming practically speaking of this case I think is just something that I've kind of come to take for granted with cases and that is dust filtration and there is no dust filter on the front intake of this case I think that's a pretty significant miss and also something that enter max probably could have accounted for just by simply including a magnetic mesh dust filter that can go over the 240 or even all the way down to the 360 millimeter fan configuration that is potentially available up there with the fans moved back here that's definitely something that you could easily pop on there and those are sold separately so if you are interested in this case that's something I would definitely recommend getting as an add-on item just put the fans like I've done here pop a mesh mesh dust filter on there at the front and you will be in a much better situation in three months or six months when it comes to the dust buildup in your system so to sum up the cons for the inter max excellence case I think would be definitely this rear panel back here just little bits lacking when it comes to what you can mount there and also a little bit to open and when it comes to actually providing some protection for the cables that you might have routed back there second would be the front intake up here first off it's blocked off by the solid front panel I would like to see a little bit more airflow there and then of course the lack of a dust filter is one that really stands out to me third is just gonna be the price at one hundred and ten dollars I feel like the feature set that you get with this case is good but there's definitely competitive options in the SE eighty dollar range when you look at stuff like fractals mess with mesh if I see for example or some of the higher ends NZXT s340 cases not a bad case by any stretch but I would like to see the price coming down a little bit overall the build quality is really solid really silent operation out of the box thanks to some extra foam padding as well as some pretty decent fans that they've included in there that pair up nicely with the fan controller and then overall I think it's a pretty good-looking case I like that the acrylic on the front matches with a tempered glass side panel and as you can see with the system I've set up here pretty quickly you can get yourself a nice looking build without too much effort so I'd like to say thank you to enter max you're sending the excellence case over for me to take a look at if you guys enjoyed this video definitely hit the thumbs up button let me know in the comments if this is a case that you would consider or if there's other cases that stand out to you that you feel would be a better option thanks again for watching guys and we'll see you next time