Gadgetory

this is the deep cool matric 70 a larger iteration in the matrix family with its own unique quirks and features so today I'm going to review it building it benchmarking it and then I'm gonna give it a Greg score and four more of my thoughts on the matrix Evan you can visit autotrader.com slash / what ok so this is definitely a strange case but it somehow manages to impress me at the same time especially given its price you've got three panels of tempered glass one acting as the left panel Chive removed because the glare is like pretty extreme another as the front panel here and then the third is not the right panel it's actually the basement roof that's right this piece right here is a tinted slab of tempered glass and boy does it look good but is it functional and are you paying more for this layout we'll talk about all of that and more in this video so to answer the first question no this class basement is not functional really doesn't do anything other than reflect light I mean it would look really good if it scattered more light than it actually does like the graphics card light it'd look really nice if you could see that kind of under glow on the top of the basement but you don't really get much of that and honestly if I had the option of spending 10 or 20 more dollars to have a glass basement I would definitely turn that down luckily this case is MSRP is $70 the matrix 55 retails for around $55 and the matrix 40 comes in it yeah 40 so you see the trend fun fact this case here was actually I believe the matrix 75 at Computex last year so vehicles effectively lowered the price since then and the launch is actually gonna be I think next week or the week after that now a trade off to such an affordable chassis given its dimensions and features is fan inclusion you'll find only a single 120 mil cheap voltage controlled molex adapted fan to mess around with and it honestly belongs in the trash a good thing is you only have one of these to deal with I mean come on a fan with molex in 2019 yeah so throw it away and that'll free up a bit of your budget right having to pay only 70 bucks versus maybe 80 or 90 for some okayish fans you can buy maybe nokju is be quiets corsair fans we threw to 140 mm silent wings three fans in here as well as a single 120 of the rare for the sake of consistency in our temperature tests which we will get to shortly so first let's talk about hardware support this case technically can support up to e ATX thanks to its flat motherboard tray and additional standoffs toward the front this is a nice touch and you'll still find satisfactory cable management Headroom behind this tray the case does lack rubber grommets pretty much everywhere which is a shame I'd have taken that over the glass basement I just think that the rubber grommets are for more functional than the glass basement is but what can you do I mean I can complain about it this is what we have to deal with so I know that competition in the PC space is is fierce especially in the case market I just like the fact that some $70 cases have rubber grommets and if they don't have rubber grommets maybe they have something else like a cable bar like what NZXT does in this case you get none of that it's just bare open holes for routing cables and it just looks a little ugly to be frank deep cool did however take care of some other issues I had going into this this review for one the entire top of the case is devoted to fans and radiators that is beautifully give it up to three 120mm or 140mm fans up here along with something as large as a 360 ml a IO the mounting points are positioned far enough to the left that you shouldn't have any issues clearing vrm heat sinks and cables that's nice you can also mount the same config up front though you'll find that there flow is much better served above thanks to the single dust filter that's this right here the front of the case has a big old piece of glass blocking any horizontal flow pattern right so you're not gonna have air just get pushed right in it's gotta come in from these side vents and these side vents are not wise it's not coming out there we go the side vents are not very porous let's say the grills themselves do you have integrated dust filters but deep coals included a second cheap screen behind them I kind of recommend just throwing this away I'm not sure how they expect you to use this when you have intake vents installed I can't install it on the other side so kind of weird there are a couple of holes for routing cables through this space including SATA cables for two SSDs you could mount up front but I'd like to see dedicated cutouts specifically for fan cables otherwise it can get a bit awkward trying to hide them this is kind of exposed to a tempered glass panel on the left side speaking of cable routing space elsewhere things are where you'd expect them to be a glass basement provides a large cutout for HD audio USB to front i/o the works and large cutouts for the 24 pin USB 3 and SATA cables align the right side of a standard ATX motherboard by the way the front of this basement includes one of the only signs of branding you can see the name deep cool here surrounded by semi-transparent plastic lining which means you can technically illuminate it if you place an RGB strip back here it doesn't come standard by default just a cost-saving measure for deep cool but I should note the fan text is a similar thing in there P 350 X which mind you is very similar in price to this so I would have liked to have seen equal include the RGB strip or some sort of LED or something down here otherwise this is just like what why make this semi-transparent if you're not actually gonna put anything back there I mean the option is nice but if no one wants to buy it after the fact it's just gonna look a little weird I'd rather this have been like a mirror finish or just like a slightly off black color two less things I'd like to point out on the side for one there are two SSD mounts to the right of the motherboard standoffs I'd mentioned earlier obviously you can't use these if you're sporting a ATX boards but there's a nice inclusion just to consider I don't want to gloss over that I only wish that these cutouts were a bit larger or even merged as I couldn't fit my SATA power cable through the bottom cutout and only an angled say the data cable would fit through here so I ended up rounding SATA power through the to the top cut out excuse me instead of the bottom one just a bit frustrating and the other thing on this side no dedicated cut out for PCIe power meaning you'll likely have to run these cables through the large opening toward the rear of the basement which is why these cables kind of stretch awkwardly way over here I mean looks decent with like a set of custom sleeve cables like these but if you're just sporting your power supply's cables it's not gonna look that great and it's gonna have to stretch all the way basically across your graphics card shroud doesn't look too great now onto the right side you'll find two extra SSD trays behind the motherboard a great use of space in my opinion you'll also find a removable hard drive cage good for two drives PSU space is adequate anything under 200 millimeters should fit without a hitch you do have to load things in from the right however so mind your PSU cables when inserting the unit just a bit frustrating again our straight power 11 fit almost perfectly so you could use that as a reference if you still find this installation tricky you can lay the matrix seventy down on its side and slide the hard drive cage about an inch closer to the front the only downside here is that you'll be partially exposing the cage from behind the basement so it'll look a little weird kind of sticking out it'll also reduce the amount of space available for a 360 ml fan rad combo if you decide to place that up front for whatever reason rule of thumb and just stick with a smaller power supply and you'll be good to go total clearance back here comes in at around one inch or two and a half centimeters or so this is satisfactory but an extra centimeter would have been nice you'll see however that right panel installation makes things super simple rowlock up even if you have a rat's nest back here which is a good thing now I save the exterior for later because a lot of what we're gonna talk about with respect to temperatures has to do with this design and it's a questionable one but it's not it's not terrible first of all you'll find that it follows a conventional mid-tower format right seven PCIe slots at the rear a large dust filter underneath a large list filter up top standard front i/o including two USB 3.0 ports a headphone jack microphone jack and a dedicated recess switch with a built-in LED indicator for hard drives or solid state drives whatever I like how clean it looks up here and I like that everything is relatively open for top fan support and exhaust and what I don't like is this front glass panel the mechanism for removing it is pretty cool you get a dedicated button right here you push it and push that in and it just unlatches the top of the this piece of glass from the chassis and then to remove it completely you have to kind of pull up that's how its resting on the bottom these two little brackets and then there you go the entire front panel is removed now remember that other dust filter that secondary one that was sitting I know where these front fans are I remove that again because there's an included mesh kind of in these grills and I think that's gonna do a good enough job keeping dust out in fact I think that the mesh in here is the exact same mesh that they had also laying against the fan tray so it's kind of redundant for no reason by the way all three panels are kind of secured in a similar way so you just slide them into their respective positions low and I'll kind of just hang there and then you can secure it up top in the case of the left right panel so you have just two thumb screws to keep things in place it's nice it eliminates the need to secure all four and at the same time you can kind of push especially with that right panel you can just push it into place which kind of pushes all the cables against that motherboard tray much easier than sliding the right panel on from the rear that was something I also liked about the H 500 from NZXT so a brief synopsis then great airflow qualities up top and in my opinion terrible design up front I just don't like the trend with like having a solid panel especially if you're not gonna do anything about it most I like this is just the to me this is not enough and I'd like to see more if companies are gonna be bold enough to completely block this off so anyway to the temps now I switched to I 264 for case temperature testing meaning I had to rerun this exact config in the other two cases we previously reviewed this quarter which really sucked but you can see here that the matrix 70 falls somewhere in between our dark base 700 hotbox and the air AP 600 s from pantex you can find links to both of those reviews in the video description by the way long story short this case chokes for air intake but has absolutely no problem exhausting it so in this config we're probably running with slightly negative internal pressure I will say that deep cool saving grace in this case was the top ventilation so if they had completely sealed off this top section we'd be looking at temperatures closer to be quiets dark bass 700 whose CPU temps grazed 84 degrees Celsius we only saw a two degree Delta for the matrix 70 and literally no change in the graphics card and to tip the scales and be quiet saver at least a dark Bay 700 was a quiet hot box with its sound damping material this is not a silent case obviously this is pretty much exposed to the atmosphere so they're not you know they're not advertising this is a quiet case I have no problem with that just know that going into the minute of the purchase if you decide to buy this but I still want to end on a high note I know it seems like this case is just missing a few important details but give who actually managed to put together I think it's a well-rounded case for under 100 USD and there's something to be said about that like sure it doesn't come with all the fancy bells and whistles of the P 600 S or the O 11 dynamic from Lee but it does nearly all the jobs a case should do at an affordable price point in my opinion no I don't think the NZXT H 500 or the fantex P 30x fall short of this I think this case is slightly worse than those two and those are both kind of in the same price category that's just me but you guys might hey you might hate those cases you might really like this one so again it's gonna be more or less an opinion at that point functionally I think those two cases are better than this one but this is unique right you get the glass basement I mean like I said deep pools trying to differentiate their brand from others by doing some cool / weird things however II want to look at this again it's not really functional it's just an aesthetic thing if you want to brag about having a glass basement by all means oh and one more thing a testament to the cable management with this case in the right panel this was my first attempt to install the right panel and it went very smoothly so I'm very impressed again the matric 70 of the log going for it the case launches in early April you'll still be able to find it on sites like Newegg and Amazon shortly I'll be sure to link those as soon as they pop up for now I've linked the product page along with other cases similar price points including those from NZXT and fantex if you are interested you guys like the video thumbs up you know what to do thumb it down if you feel the complete opposite or you hit everything by like click the red subscribe button if you haven't already become a member if you're feeling especially lucky and we'll catch you in the next one this is science video thanks for watching and thanks for you