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This Mesh Panel Kills Airflow | Enermax Saberay Review

2019-06-14
you know we've never really worked with enter max before and they actually sent a bunch of stuff for a giveaway them and gigabyte will be kind of coordinating with our channel to give away one big PC and I always seeing that coming in the next video so stay tuned for that but for now I wanted to do an impromptu review of the same array because this case is very peculiar it's a very large mid-tower by definition 7 PCI slots at the rear but you'll see why there are some problems some of which you can mitigate I'll show you how in this video but the whole thing is just it's different and depending on who you are that might be a good or a bad thing Thermal Grizzly's carbonate pads offer peace of mind ease of installation and industry standard performance in a market crowded with mediocre thermal compounds our own testing confirms that they conduct heat appropriately and provide a safe and consistent membrane between the Dyer IHS and cooler best of all you can grab them in several sizes and reuse them as many times as you'd like carbonate pads are a peace of mind in my book and they're very consistent and that's why I use them for CPU testing check them out via the link below so I had to zoom all the way out of my wide lens to get this entire case in frame and that's just a testament to how large it actually is so there's about an inch and a half and two inches of space below the actual case itself these feet are massive but it keeps it rather sturdy a lot of the build construction here especially on the exterior is plastic which is a bit disappointing but because of the feet are so wide they've actually done a good job at least keeping it stable while it's on a desk and then on top you've got another inch and 1/2 of 2 inches of just extra space if you wanted to push-pull config you are Flo here in a second but this is just a case that can kind of fit anything you could possibly want within reason right so up to a 360 ml up front I believe you can support up to it looks like a 360 ml up top but I'll have to look up whether or not that is actually the case because there's also an optical drive bay little area up front which is convenient for some of you who want the CD drive the DVD drive whatever that's an option you don't have to use it though and the good thing is it doesn't look terrible when you don't include an optical drive if some cases have that extra space and it just looks really weird and unused but NMX has done a decent job filling out the extra space Animax does offer this case in white and black variance which is convenient obviously for this kind of configured have been better but that's not that's not their fault this is just what I use for every case review for obvious reasons you have two large LED strips up top and up front they're actually interconnected it can be controlled by a one button up top and they off connect to a fan hub also acts as an RGB LED hub at the rear the only bad thing about this integrated hub is the fact that you only get three pin fan support which is a bit disappointing so you're only not voltage control here the good thing is the fans are they include you get four from pilot away three of which are RGB LED integrated up front are also three pin fans so you're going to only have voltage control which means you can't get them super quiet but to my surprise they actually kind of could for from being voltage fans the the natural rpm state of these fans is pretty low so if you're running on one like the first setting which you can even configure up top there's a little fan controller up there they're actually super quiet so I'm not really going to complain for once about the fact that there's only voltage control on this hub speaking of those fans so three up front are 120mm fans the RGB is kind of wrap around the entire fan frame which is a unique look and then at the rear you get a single 140 mm fan it's not the quietest but it does have like rubber vibration mounts and things that you would expect to find in $150 case which is what this is roughly gonna run you and erected a great job including rubber grommets here you get to up top for those two large cutouts above the motherboard you also get two of the basement which is not something we're used to seeing usually those at the bottom don't have rubber grommets these do it looks really clean cleans up the cables you also get a PCIe cutout as well it's not as wide as I would like so again to eight pins is gonna kind of crunch those at the base but it's a nice inclusion nonetheless now as for the area next to the motherboard tray itself this is where the the design cube it's a little questionable because first off you get no rubber grommets at all for like the 24 pin or a USB 3.0 or you type C whatever you don't get that at all there's just a little kind of space there for you to wrap cables it's an indented area so you have space to actually mount to fans although the exhaust array on the right panel is not very forgiving the cutouts themselves are very restricted so I don't have a feeling these would be very functional also if you choose not to populate that area with fans which is what I've done here it just looks a little bare and you can see through it you can see the cables that you're routing behind it it's a convenient place to route cables but I tried my best to keep those out of the way for this build because it just looks really dumb in my opinion to have all those cables kind of exposed like the whole point is to hide those behind them on the board tray so it's kind of a catch-22 you want to put most of your cables behind that section of the tray because there's more space there behind the motherboard tray directly there's only about 3/4 of an inch worth of clearance that's not enough for a lot of the thicker cables especially if you're running like cable extensions or even with the fan hub there it just makes things rather cluttered now so you're gonna want to put those cables again near this little double fan mount indention next to the motherboard tray and it's just there's no cover there I would like Animax to include some sort of like modular cover to block that off so that you can freely run cables there and that would be perfect similar to what fractal design does or what fantex does we don't have that though so it was a it was difficult needless to say to keep those cables out of sight and I still couldn't I couldn't make it perfect clearly you also have a large cutout in the basement for a fairly thick rat I would say definitely around forty five millimeter thick rod should fit as long as you keep the stock fans in front of that frame PSU support down below in terms of length is adequate you actually have room to stuff extra cables even with a slightly extended ATX power supply you've also got a hard drive cage down below with two tooless hard drive brackets that is convenient and then two dedicated SSD brackets behind the motherboard tray now pet peeve of mine with white jassi's is tinted tempered glass not a big fan of that especially with these kinds of cases because you want to be able to see the fact that the internals are white and you can't do that with tinted glass especially if using like other white components all you're going to see are the LEDs when your build is on so in this case enter max actually did a good job at least in my opinion you might not with me here but I really like that this is like very slightly tinted tempered glass so you can see everything inside even when the build is off individual components it's very easy to do and it looks really good speaking of tempered glass the Left panel is the only place you'll find it and there are four thumb screws that hold it in place and with questionable Phillips screw inclusion I'm not sure why they did this I my concern wouldn't be that these would come loose tear and shipping it would be you know someone like slamming a Phillips screwdriver into it or kicking it when in they're shipping it right UPS FEDEX we all know that stuff like that happens so I'm not sure why they did this but it's they're very easy to remove without a tool so maybe some of these come over to work but yeah that and the fact that they are also like bare steel or whatever this metal or alloy is these could have been black and I think it would have looked a lot better so that's the another design key that I think they really could have touched on it is nicer that you have a black trim going around the outside of the tempered glass it's it's all stuck to the chassis itself and this makes for a little smoother tempered glass application and it's not gonna be rubbing against this steel or plastic frame as for the right panel again we've had these small slits here for questionable amounts of airflow I'm not even gonna test this because it just doesn't look very practical but there are only two thumb screws needed to hold this in place and they're both up top the bottom of the panel just kind of slides into the frame so a little easier installation on this side but nothing really worth getting too excited about now speaking of air flow that's what I want to focus the remainder of this video on because this was interesting and I had to run four separate tests because Animax includes an optional mesh front panel and there's apparently also an optional mesh top panel the mesh was already included on top of this one but the stock config is to have it's like an acrylic front panel and acrylic top panel and that completely closes off both sides so obviously wouldn't be ideal to have both of those installed you could put the acrylic up top if you have enough fans up top but then also putting it up front will completely choke these fans you'll see temperature results here in a second it totally makes sense what you're seeing because there's there's no air at all for these fans up front to pull this is what that panel looks like again I'm assuming it's acrylic because it's flexible it's not a glass that's probably most of you are concerned about and nonetheless it's going to completely block air flow especially when mounted up front now I do have the mesh installed up front and up top for obvious reasons we want to maximize airflow get it as close to ideal as possible in these scenarios and stock the mesh config also didn't do that well actually only lowered our CPU temps by one degree swapping from this to the mesh and I know what you're thinking there's no way that's possible Greg this is way more porous this is this is literally like completely blocked off at least there's some space up the front right well the way you're seeing it now I've modified it it's very easy to do I'm going to show you what I did and that will drastically reduce your temperatures so there are three separate layers that make up this mesh front panel first off you've got that white kind of honeycomb frame underneath that's needed for structural rigidity not gonna mess up really much of anything in terms of airflow the uppermost layer is a hole-punch metal grille and the middle layer is another hole punched metal grille I think they wanted this one to act as the dust filter the problem with that thinking is that okay so they got the holes about this size right well the holes on the the uppermost metal grille are about the same size so that's already doing whatever job this was going to do in terms of blocking duska preventing dust from getting into your case they put two here for redundancy but what that does is max oblique choke your airflow so what I did was I removed this central panel the uppermost metal grille kind of wraps around the white honeycomb frame you can remove that by bending these tabs around the perimeter and then you can remove very easily this metal dust filter here in the middle actually I made sure this is metal it probably isn't it's you know the typical ones that you find in most cases problem is when you have this also stacked against another one that's just like this you're literally cutting airflow again in half and that's not ideal and that is why our temperatures looked bad so you can see with the front panel on completely covered with that acrylic the CPU reached 90 degrees Celsius and the GPU reached 71 that's actually the hottest I think we've had our GPU get for any of our case tests I might be wrong with it I'm pretty sure that's the hardest I've ever seen it and that means that our graphics card is really getting no airflow and also at the rear of this case the PCI slot covers are a little more restricted we don't have that typical hole punch kind of mesh at the rear we have these little vertical slits in each of the slots and I just think that this is reducing the amount of area that the graphics card can pull in from the rear and then with the acrylic panel swapped for the mesh panel as it comes stock in the box remember with technically to dust filters in there the CPU was still at 90 degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of i-64 engineer and the GPU dropped by one degree Celsius that tells me that our entire system is still being choked for air so at this point I got curious I remove the front panel entirely this test would act as our control that lowered CPU temps to 79 degrees Celsius our GPU level off at 64 degrees Celsius this is in line with other cases that I've reviewed with this exact config that tells us that again acting is our control there's nothing inherently wrong with the way I am testing the case and then the last thing I did was remove this middle dust filter now yes you're going to have a bit more dust creep its way into your case over time but which are you more concerned about a little bit of dust or your system running ten degrees hotter and that's almost exactly what a CPU temps were lowered by in the case of the modded front panel CPU times have dropped to 83 degrees Celsius that's a 7 degree difference just by removing this right here and the GPU dropped to 67 degrees Celsius it's another 3 or 4 degrees Celsius drop again just by removing this right here so it's pretty incredible to see how something like this just by removing this can drastically reduce those temperatures for the CPU and the graphics core if you have this stuck against another one like this it becomes almost as restrictive as an acrylic or tempered glass front panel that is a shame frankly it's something that I think edimax just overlooked or didn't think about and so I strongly urge them in future revisions of this case and others to forego the second dust filter especially you're going to use a filter up front that already looks like this to begin with it's this is going to do the job in and of itself right you're going to have a little bit more dust come in because your choking it but you're choking airflow as well at the expense of also choking dust and to me that's just not a compromise or if considering so in general my assumptions about this case we're true when I first pulled out that front panel it's like there's no way that this thing is going to be anywhere near as porous as they probably think it is I didn't expect it to be literally as choking as this is that was a surprise but I had my doubts when I first pulled out the mesh front panels like there's no way another cool thing about this I didn't talk about you can remove this very simply by clicking here in here and then it just slides out so there's two little tabs that kind of punch into the chassis up top and then there's two little feet that slide into the chassis at the base and that was how easy it was to remove again when you put two of these in there it's just you can you can barely even see through it and and that's a testament to how restrictive it is in terms of airflow just based on the amount of light that it allows through it when you remove one of these it becomes suddenly much more transparent it's still restrictive but it's a lot less restrictive than it was before let me see if I can do this without there we go well it's literally that easy like it's a really nice feature of this case it also works up top the same way so very easy to remove that's a plus and it just makes modifying the front panel the top panel that much easier so this takes like 20 seconds do it if you buy this case it will make a world of difference and you might have to clean your PC one extra time every six months because you'll have maybe a little more dust in your case as a result but it's a worthy trade-off in my book in terms of my thoughts about the value of this chassis I think it's okay it's not great it's not it's certainly not the best case I've ever reviewed but it's it's far from the worst case I've ever reviewed either there are some design cues that I would like to see address especially with that just huge gap next to the motherboard tray it just looks a little weird to me the price is a bit high now but you are getting things that some people will pay extra for like the huge RGB D RGB inclusion up top and up front the control panel a huge fan hub a huge RGB controller at the rear and plenty of hardware support so if twosome they might see this justified I'm not going to dock it for the price but I'm not going to praise it either at 150 or so USD so I'll let you conclude however you feel necessary to conclude in the comment section below I'm gonna give this just an average score do I feel comfortable giving this away especially with the caliber build going in it in the next video absolutely especially when you modify the front and top panels it's good to go with that you can find this case link down below in the video description you can also find other parts that we've used here for this exact configuring similar maybe in the black version of the animatics a beret then then feel free to do that I think it would look really good in black especially with these components but the component we're going to throw into this case before the giveaway are going to be primarily white so it should fit the theme a bit better again stay tuned for that feel like this video a thumbs up you know what to do if you can sign it for the giveaway coming up next thumbs up that would be appreciated click the subscribe button stay in the loop become a member feeling especially fancy and we will catch you in the next one it's the science studio thanks for watching and thanks for building with us
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