**The Phantax G500a Review: A Mid-Tower Case with Limited Upgrades**

In this review, we'll be taking a closer look at the Phantax G500a, a mid-tower case that promises to deliver good build quality and attention to detail, but falls short in terms of thermal performance. While it's designed to compete with other cases in its class, such as the Corsair Y40, we found that it lacks some key features and compromises that make it less desirable.

**Matching Airflow Directions and Negative Pressure Systems**

One of the things that caught our attention about the G500a was how it matches the airflow direction of the GPU. This is a good thing, as it ensures that hot air is properly expelled from the case. However, we also noticed that this creates a negative pressure system within the case, which can have unintended consequences. During testing, we found that the CPU wasn't under significant load for this task, but it was still slightly cooler with side intake than it was with exhaust.

**The Distance from the Glass is Sufficient, But...**

We were pleased to find that the distance from the glass is sufficient now for a thicker card to breathe. This is an important consideration for anyone looking to upgrade their graphics card. However, we also found that the stock configuration of the G500a is not ideal. The case lacks some key features that make it less desirable than other cases in its class.

**Design and Thermals: A Mixed Bag**

The design of the G500a is a mixed bag. On the one hand, we liked the attention to detail and the build quality of the case. However, we also found that some compromises were made in order to achieve this price point. For example, the use of heavy plastics and branding can make the case feel less premium than it would at higher price points.

**Missing Features: The Case is "Trapped"**

We felt that the G500a was "trapped" between a normal mid-tower case and the Corsair Y60. While it lacks some key features, such as radiator support and horizontally mounted GPUs, we also didn't find that these limitations were necessarily a major issue. However, we did find that the lack of these features made the case feel less desirable than other options in its class.

**Limited Radiator Support and Cooling**

One of the biggest limitations of the G500a is its limited radiator support. We found that there are too few stock fans to cool the case effectively, which can make it feel warm inside even when not under heavy load. Adding side fans does help to improve cooling, but it's still not enough to make the case a top performer.

**Comparison to Other Cases: The Lancool 3 and Phantax Y60**

In comparison to other cases in its class, we found that the G500a is bested by the Lancool 3. While both cases offer good build quality and attention to detail, the Lancool 3 offers more features and better cooling. We also compared the G500a to the Corsair Y60, which shares some similarities with our review subject. However, we found that the Y60 offered improved thermal performance and a more premium design.

**The Verdict: A Good Case, But Not Great**

In the end, we felt that the Phantax G500a was a good case, but not great. While it offers good build quality and attention to detail, its limitations in terms of thermal performance and feature set make it less desirable than other options in its class. If you're looking for a mid-tower case with liquid cooling support, we recommend considering the Lancool 3 or the Corsair Y60 instead.

**Recommendations**

If you're looking for a mid-tower case that is similar to the Phantax G500a but offers better thermal performance and features, we recommend considering the following options:

* The Lancool 3: This case offers more features and better cooling than the G500a.

* The Corsair Y60: This case shares some similarities with our review subject, but offers improved thermal performance and a more premium design.

If you're looking for a mid-tower case that is in the same class as the Phantax G500a, we recommend considering the following options:

* The Vanquel 3: This case is similar to the G500a but offers better features and a more premium design.

* Other cases from Corsair or NZXT.

**Conclusion**

We hope this review has been helpful in giving you a better understanding of the Phantax G500a. While it's a good case with some nice features, its limitations make it less desirable than other options in its class. We recommend considering the Lancool 3 or the Corsair Y60 if you're looking for a mid-tower case with liquid cooling support and better thermal performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the 150 height y40 case and it cuts a couple of corners haha literally it got rid of the corner and this is the y60 that got a lot of Praise last year but there's been a massive shift in design in a couple of areas and that's because they're trying to bring the price down from 200 on this to 150 on this one where do you find fifty dollars in product manufacturing it is going to be getting rid of features like this uniquely shaped Corner that later they actually added a separately purchasable LED panel to so kind of a big feature to lose and one that was a distinguishing identifiable Mark for height as a brand but it does bring the price down and they've added some small touches Elsewhere for example a lot of logos some logos as good uh but they've gone as far as branding even the styrofoam that this is packed in so it's a bit overboard comes with two fans for the 150 purchasing price they expect you to buy and include some of your own fans on the side panel for intake and ultimately that is one of the task configurations we're gonna be looking at today so we're gonna be reviewing this biggest change overall is the addition of an extra GPU expansion slot in the pcie area down here so I've gone from three to four that is a massive and positive shift that was necessary for the 40 series to accommodate big air coolers and we're going to be testing that as well so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by linode cloud computing from Akamai our web hosting provider that we've been using for over a decade now and our experience as a long-term customer of linode they've reliable server Solutions and make server setup Easy by providing all kinds of first install scripts and launch points you can quickly build your own self-hosted VPN games servers for CS Go Minecraft and more by using their quick start guides and extremely detailed documentation we also have first-hand experience with their support team and can vouch for the quality even when all the mistakes were mine visit linwood.com Gamers Nexus to get a 100 credit when you sign up today or click the link below so height has a lot of competition at this price point they had even more at the 200 price class and you've got stuff like this back here in the fractal North that fractal cannot keep in stock this has been wildly successful and is also sort of in that mid-range class of cases so it's a really good market right now for someone buying a computer case let's look at some of the internals before we get into more of the commentary and discussion about this and sort of the review criticism proper so internally some of the biggest and most obvious changes from a function perspective only are things like this ventilation where actually although it all looks like ventilation if you look closely you'll see that all this stuff is a actually closed off back here so only the front is truly ventilated with one hole under the GPU but kind of positioned in the wrong spot whereas in the y60 if we just pull this one aside for a second the y60 has ventilation all through the bottom of the case this is going to take more rotations than I thought here you can see the big difference where all of this is ventilated it's all holes all the way into the bottom of the case but you'll also notice that there's a significant height difference in these lower Chambers because in the new y40 it's more of a traditional configuration with the power supply in the bottom and all the cables in the bottom so they've gone to a standard config case except they've tried to make it look as much like the y60 as they could which ultimately borders on making it look like an 011 from Lian Lee so losing this corner and some of these other features it's a little bit of an identity trade-off into something different and new to try and get that lower price one of the other big changes related to ventilation is also the side panel this iconic side panel for the y60 very well known I think it was in most of the thumbnails in the tech YouTube Community this is ventilated across the entire thing which is partly because the power supply wasn't a chamber on the back side of the case and so it actually can make use of that ventilation whereas the new one with this panel it looks like from the outside it's got ventilation punched in here but obviously it's all covered in plastic and that's fine because this area no longer needs the air since the power supply is now at the bottom of the case but it's a little bit different and as far as the direction of height all of this stuff we're talking about it seems like they're really going in the direction of trying to build a brand experience which has the possibility to be a really disgusting gross cultish phrase that starts to border on sort of like jobs in dystopia so hopefully they don't go quite that far and they stop at experience enough to be unique but not enough to be sort of up its own ass about how uh I don't know it just becomes pretentious at some point so anyway the y40 it shows up in disposable styrofoam that is branded with an H it's about as useless as you can get and then they continue those branded ages onto the fans again onto the back of the case panel and some of this we give credit for because it's an attention to detail that is often lacking but where that credit normally stops is how much extra money are you spending to do all of this and pass down to the consumer where you could have maybe had a different feature instead a height says quote multi-dimensional details connect every part into a deeply harmonic design structure we say it looks nice it's unfortunate that the y40 has dropped the y60's most distinctive feature but it's understandable color options are mostly the same as the y60 so they've kept that they have white black or red the white is now a wider white from what height tells us and based on the height why 60s Hollow live collaborations more variants are likely to come the layout of the height y40 as we said is more standard as well it's still a somewhat to use Patrick's word chunky 24 centimeters wide but not nearly as wide as the y60 next to me what this means though is that continuing on the y60s theme this works well for a water cooled system although it should work better now than it used to for air cooling because of that GPU depth we're going to come back to this and talk more about it in a moment but for the water cooling you could have fit the basically well actually hold on we'll just so the radiator sizing is effectively infinite on this and what we're going to do is demonstrate that nice new combined radiator it's a special GN size well that's a problem I can't demonstrate with that one which is very unfortunate because it's the thickest thick boy we have so we're gonna have to come down in size and we ran out of Radiators uh as I was saying it can fit effectively infinite depth radiators because I could have measured it and given like millimeters but uh I think we proved the point now all of this on the radiator sizing make sense because height is working towards building its thick Q60 radiator we showed prototypes of it a couple months ago and they're gonna be able to claim possibly the crown for best performing all in one liquid cooler once they make that because uh because with the thickness and high enough static pressure fans you might be able to Chart top over even say Arctic that's how they got there to begin with so for those radiators the length as you saw is limited to 280 millimeters on the side but the top mount fits up to 360 millimeters and overhanges the motherboard as a result of its positioning and that limits you on what you can put there the larger y60 has a definite advantage in regards liquid cooling compatibility which is a big deal given that both of these are also purpose built for liquid coolant Heights product guide states that quote the case comes with two 120 millimeter fans pre-installed one beneath the floor and one at the rear under the assumption that a liquid cooler will be side mounted and provide an extra set of fans to drive airflow through the case that's a bold assumption but there isn't much else that can be done with the space in the front of the case if it's not used for a radiator and a reservoir as for those fans two 120 millimeter height flow fe12 1300 RPM fans are included with the case one is bottom intake as they stated and one is rear exhaust both are three pin DC control trolled and in the y60 the bottom fans have a dedicated chamber under the case floor while the y40 has a single unprotected fan that also has to share space with Power Supply cables and ignoring the cable conflicts for a moment put in I have a lot of things out here put in one of these fans in the bottom of the case and hoping to push air through what is effectively oh yeah there's also okay need to be careful tilting it too uh pushing air through all this plastic it's not going to work very well because you don't have a lot of space for the air to actually get through so kind of a bizarre configuration and we agree with them that you probably should buy fans and put them aside but then that should be factored into your cost for the case as well installing the power supply horizontally under the Shroud makes it easier to Route front i o cables than it was in the y60 so that's good but it conflicts with the bottom fan Mount height has attempted to solve this with a cable shelf as they call it this is a raised metal ledge with tie points that then surrounds the bottom fan mounts and it can hold cables out of the blades the Shelf is hard to access and would require unusually lawn power supply cables to use for anything except pcie power anyway so we just wedged all of our cables in next to the fan and routed pcie power behind the motherboard instead it was better that way the case lags are the same height as the y60s at one and a half centimeters putting the bottom intake fan extremely close to the table surface and we're going to look at all that in thermal test in a moment but in our test in the past we found that a minimum of about one inch clearance from the bottom of the case to the table is ideal in order to reduce the amount of impedance to the fan so that you can still get air in without having to fight too much to pull it in from the outsides of the case you're making them air make a lot of turns to get into the fan and that's more difficult for it you need higher static pressure performance now go over some of the cable management so we really would have liked to see some velcro ties like most modern cases include but they didn't include any you've got standard tie points they get credit for doing the Baseline minimum uh there's some features here that we like that are similar to fractals torrent but overall it's a really small and simple attentional detail thing to include velcro ties this is ours but they can include things like this and Achieve much the same so this is one of those areas where you look at it you go how many letter H's did we pay for and would one of those have cost the same as 12 velcro ties and if so please the functional velcro tie feature instead for the side panels these have a really nice snap in uh but there's no way to secure them with a screw it's not the biggest deal it just means when you pick this up if you're gonna relocate or bring it somewhere else you need to not pull on the panel in any way because there's nothing to secure it like a screw it some of the other competing cases have screws to hold the panels in place even when they pop out but there's a couple of small features that have been axed here in the height y40 and actually the y60 has screws as well height really spent a lot of time on this Sunburst pattern that's repeated everywhere in the case they tried really hard in speaking with their designer to link say the top panel to the side panel to the other side panel and get everything to match with a consistent design theme and they've done well with that the layout change though also means that the rear ejecting Drive sleds have been dropped the y40 can hold either two two and a half inch drives or one three and a half inch drive with no options for further expansion that's unusually little for a case with these Dimensions but based on Iowa Powers pre-built and Highway power owns height it seems like this is a commitment to go m.2 100 at this point with the extra space afforded by moving the power supply height has added a fourth vertical pcie expansion slot that we mentioned earlier and they managed to keep seven half height slots from the y60 in this the second slot is still a pain to access but otherwise they're all there so vertical mounting is the only option for gpus in the y40 and more space from the side panel is vital for air-cooled cards the pcie Gen 4 Riser is unaltered from the y60 it's nicely done they have custom plastic on it to make it match the theme so they get credit for that the 40 series wasn't out when the y60 was in development and that extra slot didn't seem as important when most cards were one full slot width thinner now with everything at three to three and a half for an air cooler the space is necessary related to all this design Motif stuff they're trying to do that we talked about earlier one of the smaller things is the dust filters which oh foreign we're going to leave some of the fumbling in because it's a real user experience okay the dust filters uh you no longer are supposed to have to lift the case to pull them out unlike the y60 although I still had to lift it a little bit to get in there because it's really not much height but they slide out and unfortunately they slide out in opposite directions so there's two of them there's one on the front one on the back and like I said I have to lift the case uh and because they slide in opposite directions that means you end up in the same scenario you would have been if they slid the wrong way which is you have to move this away from your wall most people have their computer at least one side of it against a wall or a desk or a table leg or something and this just seems like it's an artsy way to design a filter and unfortunately that artistic expression of look at this beautiful flow of symmetry we have does get in the way of function uh and it's just kind of an annoyance and that's pretty much it for the exterior of the case but coming back around to the inside there's only one more point the original y60 supports the ATX boards in the sense that there's nothing physically in the way of them otherwise 40 is the same but it only officially supports ATX since larger boards would conflict with cable cutouts and side fan mounts so your board size is smaller on this one that's enough of talking about the case from a design and function standpoint now we're going to get into the thermal testing so this is where things turn South for the height y40 unfortunately because otherwise there's a lot of places where it's good or not bad at worst and now it gets into the okay it's actually bad territory depending on how it's configured as we mentioned the product guide for the y40 explicitly states that they are expecting a liquid cooler to be side mounted over here but immediately after that line in the product guide they make a big Claim about how big of a CPU air cooler you can have in the case specifically calling out that it can fit up to 180 millimeters which is one of the larger sizes on the market for a mid tower case so for that reason and because it allows us to compare it to all of the other cases we've ever tested with standardized Hardware we stock to the standardized Hardware now that's for the Baseline we did add fans for other tests like we often do but ultimately we kind of come to the same conclusion we have in the past which is if you want to commit to shipping it as a case without any fans at all which this doesn't do it has two of them uh and you want to say you have to BYO fans that's a that's an unfortunate acronym if they want to say you have to byof that's fine but they don't do that instead they say here's some fans also you should buy your own uh and in our opinion if you're gonna drive the line down the middle if the company says you need two more fans they should include two more fans as an aside we limited our GPU thermal testing on our standardized card instead for this one these are for some one-off tests we still have the standardized GPU installed for all the CPU thermal tasks we're going to present and for the noise tests but we have some extra benchmarks at the end of all these charts with a modern gigabyte Aero RTX 470 TI we did this for two primary reasons one of them is we really wanted to see how a flow through design worked on this specifically with fans either as intake or exhaust over here where this card has a massive flow through area it's going the modern direction for design gigabytes at the front of the curve for this one actually and because they're pushing a lot of air that way we want to see what happens you push her that way with the fans Better or Worse additionally we wanted a thicker card to put in here but not going as crazy as the thickest cards out there where they're a little at around four slots so this is just shy of that at about three okay enough of that let's get into some of the charts we'll start with just the y40 and the y60 on a CPU torture chart the CPU averaged 63 degrees during the full system torture test with just the two stock fans installed that's bad is the technical word the exhaust fan is unremarkable but the single intake fan is very deep under the Shroud and as a result there's no way this view cooler is getting it off air and this chart proves it there wasn't any thermal throttling on the CPU but it came close at 63 degrees Celsius above ambient so that would be an average of 84 factoring it back in and once you consider that that's an average of all cores and realize that some cores are hotter than that we're really not far away from the 90s here the y60 didn't perform a specially well in this test either but it did manage a 57 degree average delta T over ambient which is significantly cooler than the stock y40 as expected the stock configuration performs poorly compared to the rest of the cases on the chart that makes the y40 the hottest non-me a case that we currently include on the chart more comparable to past disappointment build winners like the Sakura 500 and the Ramsey 780 than it is to other mid Towers lianley's land cool 3 is comparable in price and function to the y40 but the land cool 3's price includes a full set of fans a lot of really cool mechanical features and the full set of fans pushes its performance into an entirely different category at 42 degrees they're not even close and if you install a liquid cooler big surprise the lanco 3 will scale better than the y40 as well because the Baseline is better we'll look at tests with the y40 adding more fans soon in this review now the GPU thermals report as well not with this one necessarily we'll come back to this but with the standardized card which is actually thinner and should therefore do better it's got a little bit extra room from the glass although this one has sufficient room with only three slots being consumed so for GPU thralls we're looking at no better than the y60s already subpar 59 degrees Celsius over ambient average but the bottom intake and is the problem here it's intended to benefit the GPU but the power supply shroud again makes it really difficult to pull that off it's a lot of plastic in there there's the cable shelf and whatever cable you stuff in and at the end of the day it's just it's the y60 is doing better than it uh and so are most other cases GPU air cooling wasn't great in the y60 to begin with but it's even worse here now switching to only a CPU workload and eliminating the GPU rendering the GM monkey head scene on the CPU resulted in an average temperature of 38 degrees above ambient the vertical GPU Mount directly underneath our CPU tower cooler means that the CPU thermals are strongly affected by GPU exhaust in this test with nearly zero GPU load the y40s average isn't as bad compared to the rest of the chart tying the y60 almost exactly meanwhile the lanco 3 remains significantly ahead at 33 degrees average in the previous test the CPU had to suffocate on GPU exhaust with a little air movement at the front of the case so the GPU contributed to the CPUs thermals here more than it might in a case with a more standard layout speaking of using our standardized set of fans gave us a chance to test height side intake suggestion keep in mind that there are both pros and cons to this set of testing and we have a full methodology video detailing the standardized fan testing approach and why we do it the way we do it was actually originally derived from feedback from the community where people wanted to see this type of test so you can learn how we executed it in the previous video we'll link it below for this we removed both stock fans and we added two 140 millimeter side intakes and one 120 mil exhaust the CPU temperature took a huge dip with that change in a positive direction dropping down to 50 degrees above ambient from the original 63 Baseline it seems like height was more concerned with handing on to remnants of the y60s design than it was with good fan placement sticking fans on the side intake slots rather than under the Shroud is just plain better especially since the Shroud is mostly plastic and remember they do include fans so they could have put them in more intelligent locations but they just chose to bury the main intake fan under a power supply shroud a cable shelf and whatever cables you stuff under it GPU thermals for this test dropped nearly as much with the standardized fans approximately 11 degrees reduced versus Baseline don't rely on the y40 stock fans alone because apparently when the product guide says it expects so I didn't take fans to be added it really means it the giant gap between the red and the blue bars isn't a good thing it's shipping and a poor configuration and that much uplift from a simple change indicates that there was a lot left on the table by height despite only including two stock fans the y40 measured 40 DBA with all stock fans set to max speed this is how we collect the Baseline numbers the stock fans are rated for 1300 RPM but hours ran closer to 1400 that's fine that's within manufacturing tolerance for fans the rear exhaust fan had a distinct rattle as the case shipped and with that rattle factored in because it was part of the noise Pro file reducing the noise level to a 36 DBA Target for our noise normalized testing where we set all cases on the chart to the same noise level with the system components at a known speed that required reducing the pan speeds to 1100 RPM here's the noise normalized chart on the positive side there's not any room for thermals to get worse on the negative side they're already really bad at the reduced speed the CPU averaged 67 degrees above ambient but with an ambient temperature of 21 degrees Celsius CPU temperature is brushed up against 100 degrees Celsius on individual cores during portions of the test cycle and caused minor throttling that means that if we were able to run without throttling this would be above 100 degrees Celsius when not using a delta T value or when we are using it you'd see it in the 70s that's terrible we did some additional testing with a gigabyte 4070 TI Aero OC a card that uses an increasingly popular flow through design for its cooler our goal was to see which is better suited to a modern car Heights suggested side and take layout or a side exhaust layout to line up with the gpu's airflow Direction additionally we wanted to check for a thicker GPU as stated earlier because that matters here as it pushes it closer to the glass we locked all three GPU fan speeds to their natural maximum under ideal thermal conditions that was 63 percent they must be locked for this test in anyone doing tests like this cannot allow them to be automatically controlled this is a common oversight and then we used two additional height fe12 12 120 mil fans for the extra intake and exhaust tests the Baseline for GPU thermals was 54 degrees above ambient measured only using the stock fans at 100 speed and remember this is completely incomparable to the previous data both for the CPU and the GPU because there's an entirely different component now we don't have comparative data other than against itself for this GPU so the number 54 isn't good or bad it's just a starting point with side intake that Delta dropped to 45 degrees above ambient but with side exhaust it was definitely definitely worse at 49. side exhaust May match the airflow direction of the GPU but it also creates a negative pressure system which can have unintended consequences the CPU wasn't under significant load for this task but it was also very slightly cooler with side intake than it was with exhaust and the result of this test in is that first of all the distance from the glass is sufficient now for a thicker card to breathe but secondly that their stock configuration is bad and for the case as a whole I think the quickest way to summarize this and this is going to work out to be a compliment in an indirect way for height so hopefully they understand that this was a candidate for advertising on our Channel we always complete reviews of the product if we are going to review it before we run the ad if we're not going to review it we do an internal task we publish that process previously on the Gen extras Channel but when we intend to review it like this case we complete the review first unfortunately we've decided to reject this from the advertising pool it doesn't meet our quality standards overall the build quality is good but the design thermally is not it's lacking and for that reason we've taken it out of the advertising pool and we're going to inform height and you know maybe they'll run the y60 or something or some other product instead so the y40 then feels kind of like a cut down y60 designed to hit a lower price point which makes the y60 its biggest competitor that's not bad for height especially because the y40 is at least a good build quality but it's not not necessarily good either if you're buying a y40 only because you can't afford a y60 it probably means you want the y60 and that's bad news for the y40. we also don't entirely agree with which Cuts they made in order to achieve this price point so there are features that were added like some of the heavy usage of plastics and branding which although cool and makes sense at the more expensive end of the spectrum at the mid-range like where this is there's just so much competition that they have to be a little fiercer with where they're deciding to go brand experience and where they're deciding to go function and in the opinion of both Patrick and I they kind of miss it so losing things like the chamfered edge uh it's a big design look to lose to Forfeit and the the function isn't quite there to support that loss of a defining aesthetic feature to still appeal to mass Market when there are alternatives at this price point so you can start throwing away features like that and go and do a more standard layout like this with power supply on the floor no chamfered Edge but you've got to really stand out elsewhere so the y40 we think is trapped in a no man's land between a normal mid Tower and the y60 there's limited radiator support there's no possibility for a horizontally mounted gpus this limits other add-in cards as well there are too few stock fans to cool the case effectively and it's still 150 bucks adding side fans helps significantly it makes it kind of competitive actually but it still doesn't make the y40 a top performer if you want a 150 dollar liquid cooling friendly or focused case the Lan cool 3 is the winner here it's a better option uh we don't like waffling with this kind of stuff we're just going to give you a firm conclusion and that's it that's about as far as it gets the phantax g500a is also a better option here we think for liquid cooling friendly case although we prefer the land quote from Langley so if you specifically want uh something that looks like the y40 consider the y60 I guess is where it lands it shares some thermal problems but without the additional compromises and uh the biggest downside is it's 50 more expensive so that's kind of the main loss there where you that's not necessarily a problem you can overcome depending on what class you're buying and what you're sacrificing to get that extra 50 bucks so if you're looking to buy a class of case that is in the mid Tower area uh vanquel three but that's about it for this one the build quality is good the attention to detail is pretty good uh it just it's just not enough so thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net to help us out directly or next time you watch an ad from height on this channel it's probably gonna be a y60 or some other new product instead for the reasons we describe but as we stated that's a good thing for height too because it says when you see the ad it probably means it was worth getting that spot so that's the value we provided them but um yeah a little bit disappointed honestly subscribe for more we'll see you all next timethis is the 150 height y40 case and it cuts a couple of corners haha literally it got rid of the corner and this is the y60 that got a lot of Praise last year but there's been a massive shift in design in a couple of areas and that's because they're trying to bring the price down from 200 on this to 150 on this one where do you find fifty dollars in product manufacturing it is going to be getting rid of features like this uniquely shaped Corner that later they actually added a separately purchasable LED panel to so kind of a big feature to lose and one that was a distinguishing identifiable Mark for height as a brand but it does bring the price down and they've added some small touches Elsewhere for example a lot of logos some logos as good uh but they've gone as far as branding even the styrofoam that this is packed in so it's a bit overboard comes with two fans for the 150 purchasing price they expect you to buy and include some of your own fans on the side panel for intake and ultimately that is one of the task configurations we're gonna be looking at today so we're gonna be reviewing this biggest change overall is the addition of an extra GPU expansion slot in the pcie area down here so I've gone from three to four that is a massive and positive shift that was necessary for the 40 series to accommodate big air coolers and we're going to be testing that as well so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by linode cloud computing from Akamai our web hosting provider that we've been using for over a decade now and our experience as a long-term customer of linode they've reliable server Solutions and make server setup Easy by providing all kinds of first install scripts and launch points you can quickly build your own self-hosted VPN games servers for CS Go Minecraft and more by using their quick start guides and extremely detailed documentation we also have first-hand experience with their support team and can vouch for the quality even when all the mistakes were mine visit linwood.com Gamers Nexus to get a 100 credit when you sign up today or click the link below so height has a lot of competition at this price point they had even more at the 200 price class and you've got stuff like this back here in the fractal North that fractal cannot keep in stock this has been wildly successful and is also sort of in that mid-range class of cases so it's a really good market right now for someone buying a computer case let's look at some of the internals before we get into more of the commentary and discussion about this and sort of the review criticism proper so internally some of the biggest and most obvious changes from a function perspective only are things like this ventilation where actually although it all looks like ventilation if you look closely you'll see that all this stuff is a actually closed off back here so only the front is truly ventilated with one hole under the GPU but kind of positioned in the wrong spot whereas in the y60 if we just pull this one aside for a second the y60 has ventilation all through the bottom of the case this is going to take more rotations than I thought here you can see the big difference where all of this is ventilated it's all holes all the way into the bottom of the case but you'll also notice that there's a significant height difference in these lower Chambers because in the new y40 it's more of a traditional configuration with the power supply in the bottom and all the cables in the bottom so they've gone to a standard config case except they've tried to make it look as much like the y60 as they could which ultimately borders on making it look like an 011 from Lian Lee so losing this corner and some of these other features it's a little bit of an identity trade-off into something different and new to try and get that lower price one of the other big changes related to ventilation is also the side panel this iconic side panel for the y60 very well known I think it was in most of the thumbnails in the tech YouTube Community this is ventilated across the entire thing which is partly because the power supply wasn't a chamber on the back side of the case and so it actually can make use of that ventilation whereas the new one with this panel it looks like from the outside it's got ventilation punched in here but obviously it's all covered in plastic and that's fine because this area no longer needs the air since the power supply is now at the bottom of the case but it's a little bit different and as far as the direction of height all of this stuff we're talking about it seems like they're really going in the direction of trying to build a brand experience which has the possibility to be a really disgusting gross cultish phrase that starts to border on sort of like jobs in dystopia so hopefully they don't go quite that far and they stop at experience enough to be unique but not enough to be sort of up its own ass about how uh I don't know it just becomes pretentious at some point so anyway the y40 it shows up in disposable styrofoam that is branded with an H it's about as useless as you can get and then they continue those branded ages onto the fans again onto the back of the case panel and some of this we give credit for because it's an attention to detail that is often lacking but where that credit normally stops is how much extra money are you spending to do all of this and pass down to the consumer where you could have maybe had a different feature instead a height says quote multi-dimensional details connect every part into a deeply harmonic design structure we say it looks nice it's unfortunate that the y40 has dropped the y60's most distinctive feature but it's understandable color options are mostly the same as the y60 so they've kept that they have white black or red the white is now a wider white from what height tells us and based on the height why 60s Hollow live collaborations more variants are likely to come the layout of the height y40 as we said is more standard as well it's still a somewhat to use Patrick's word chunky 24 centimeters wide but not nearly as wide as the y60 next to me what this means though is that continuing on the y60s theme this works well for a water cooled system although it should work better now than it used to for air cooling because of that GPU depth we're going to come back to this and talk more about it in a moment but for the water cooling you could have fit the basically well actually hold on we'll just so the radiator sizing is effectively infinite on this and what we're going to do is demonstrate that nice new combined radiator it's a special GN size well that's a problem I can't demonstrate with that one which is very unfortunate because it's the thickest thick boy we have so we're gonna have to come down in size and we ran out of Radiators uh as I was saying it can fit effectively infinite depth radiators because I could have measured it and given like millimeters but uh I think we proved the point now all of this on the radiator sizing make sense because height is working towards building its thick Q60 radiator we showed prototypes of it a couple months ago and they're gonna be able to claim possibly the crown for best performing all in one liquid cooler once they make that because uh because with the thickness and high enough static pressure fans you might be able to Chart top over even say Arctic that's how they got there to begin with so for those radiators the length as you saw is limited to 280 millimeters on the side but the top mount fits up to 360 millimeters and overhanges the motherboard as a result of its positioning and that limits you on what you can put there the larger y60 has a definite advantage in regards liquid cooling compatibility which is a big deal given that both of these are also purpose built for liquid coolant Heights product guide states that quote the case comes with two 120 millimeter fans pre-installed one beneath the floor and one at the rear under the assumption that a liquid cooler will be side mounted and provide an extra set of fans to drive airflow through the case that's a bold assumption but there isn't much else that can be done with the space in the front of the case if it's not used for a radiator and a reservoir as for those fans two 120 millimeter height flow fe12 1300 RPM fans are included with the case one is bottom intake as they stated and one is rear exhaust both are three pin DC control trolled and in the y60 the bottom fans have a dedicated chamber under the case floor while the y40 has a single unprotected fan that also has to share space with Power Supply cables and ignoring the cable conflicts for a moment put in I have a lot of things out here put in one of these fans in the bottom of the case and hoping to push air through what is effectively oh yeah there's also okay need to be careful tilting it too uh pushing air through all this plastic it's not going to work very well because you don't have a lot of space for the air to actually get through so kind of a bizarre configuration and we agree with them that you probably should buy fans and put them aside but then that should be factored into your cost for the case as well installing the power supply horizontally under the Shroud makes it easier to Route front i o cables than it was in the y60 so that's good but it conflicts with the bottom fan Mount height has attempted to solve this with a cable shelf as they call it this is a raised metal ledge with tie points that then surrounds the bottom fan mounts and it can hold cables out of the blades the Shelf is hard to access and would require unusually lawn power supply cables to use for anything except pcie power anyway so we just wedged all of our cables in next to the fan and routed pcie power behind the motherboard instead it was better that way the case lags are the same height as the y60s at one and a half centimeters putting the bottom intake fan extremely close to the table surface and we're going to look at all that in thermal test in a moment but in our test in the past we found that a minimum of about one inch clearance from the bottom of the case to the table is ideal in order to reduce the amount of impedance to the fan so that you can still get air in without having to fight too much to pull it in from the outsides of the case you're making them air make a lot of turns to get into the fan and that's more difficult for it you need higher static pressure performance now go over some of the cable management so we really would have liked to see some velcro ties like most modern cases include but they didn't include any you've got standard tie points they get credit for doing the Baseline minimum uh there's some features here that we like that are similar to fractals torrent but overall it's a really small and simple attentional detail thing to include velcro ties this is ours but they can include things like this and Achieve much the same so this is one of those areas where you look at it you go how many letter H's did we pay for and would one of those have cost the same as 12 velcro ties and if so please the functional velcro tie feature instead for the side panels these have a really nice snap in uh but there's no way to secure them with a screw it's not the biggest deal it just means when you pick this up if you're gonna relocate or bring it somewhere else you need to not pull on the panel in any way because there's nothing to secure it like a screw it some of the other competing cases have screws to hold the panels in place even when they pop out but there's a couple of small features that have been axed here in the height y40 and actually the y60 has screws as well height really spent a lot of time on this Sunburst pattern that's repeated everywhere in the case they tried really hard in speaking with their designer to link say the top panel to the side panel to the other side panel and get everything to match with a consistent design theme and they've done well with that the layout change though also means that the rear ejecting Drive sleds have been dropped the y40 can hold either two two and a half inch drives or one three and a half inch drive with no options for further expansion that's unusually little for a case with these Dimensions but based on Iowa Powers pre-built and Highway power owns height it seems like this is a commitment to go m.2 100 at this point with the extra space afforded by moving the power supply height has added a fourth vertical pcie expansion slot that we mentioned earlier and they managed to keep seven half height slots from the y60 in this the second slot is still a pain to access but otherwise they're all there so vertical mounting is the only option for gpus in the y40 and more space from the side panel is vital for air-cooled cards the pcie Gen 4 Riser is unaltered from the y60 it's nicely done they have custom plastic on it to make it match the theme so they get credit for that the 40 series wasn't out when the y60 was in development and that extra slot didn't seem as important when most cards were one full slot width thinner now with everything at three to three and a half for an air cooler the space is necessary related to all this design Motif stuff they're trying to do that we talked about earlier one of the smaller things is the dust filters which oh foreign we're going to leave some of the fumbling in because it's a real user experience okay the dust filters uh you no longer are supposed to have to lift the case to pull them out unlike the y60 although I still had to lift it a little bit to get in there because it's really not much height but they slide out and unfortunately they slide out in opposite directions so there's two of them there's one on the front one on the back and like I said I have to lift the case uh and because they slide in opposite directions that means you end up in the same scenario you would have been if they slid the wrong way which is you have to move this away from your wall most people have their computer at least one side of it against a wall or a desk or a table leg or something and this just seems like it's an artsy way to design a filter and unfortunately that artistic expression of look at this beautiful flow of symmetry we have does get in the way of function uh and it's just kind of an annoyance and that's pretty much it for the exterior of the case but coming back around to the inside there's only one more point the original y60 supports the ATX boards in the sense that there's nothing physically in the way of them otherwise 40 is the same but it only officially supports ATX since larger boards would conflict with cable cutouts and side fan mounts so your board size is smaller on this one that's enough of talking about the case from a design and function standpoint now we're going to get into the thermal testing so this is where things turn South for the height y40 unfortunately because otherwise there's a lot of places where it's good or not bad at worst and now it gets into the okay it's actually bad territory depending on how it's configured as we mentioned the product guide for the y40 explicitly states that they are expecting a liquid cooler to be side mounted over here but immediately after that line in the product guide they make a big Claim about how big of a CPU air cooler you can have in the case specifically calling out that it can fit up to 180 millimeters which is one of the larger sizes on the market for a mid tower case so for that reason and because it allows us to compare it to all of the other cases we've ever tested with standardized Hardware we stock to the standardized Hardware now that's for the Baseline we did add fans for other tests like we often do but ultimately we kind of come to the same conclusion we have in the past which is if you want to commit to shipping it as a case without any fans at all which this doesn't do it has two of them uh and you want to say you have to BYO fans that's a that's an unfortunate acronym if they want to say you have to byof that's fine but they don't do that instead they say here's some fans also you should buy your own uh and in our opinion if you're gonna drive the line down the middle if the company says you need two more fans they should include two more fans as an aside we limited our GPU thermal testing on our standardized card instead for this one these are for some one-off tests we still have the standardized GPU installed for all the CPU thermal tasks we're going to present and for the noise tests but we have some extra benchmarks at the end of all these charts with a modern gigabyte Aero RTX 470 TI we did this for two primary reasons one of them is we really wanted to see how a flow through design worked on this specifically with fans either as intake or exhaust over here where this card has a massive flow through area it's going the modern direction for design gigabytes at the front of the curve for this one actually and because they're pushing a lot of air that way we want to see what happens you push her that way with the fans Better or Worse additionally we wanted a thicker card to put in here but not going as crazy as the thickest cards out there where they're a little at around four slots so this is just shy of that at about three okay enough of that let's get into some of the charts we'll start with just the y40 and the y60 on a CPU torture chart the CPU averaged 63 degrees during the full system torture test with just the two stock fans installed that's bad is the technical word the exhaust fan is unremarkable but the single intake fan is very deep under the Shroud and as a result there's no way this view cooler is getting it off air and this chart proves it there wasn't any thermal throttling on the CPU but it came close at 63 degrees Celsius above ambient so that would be an average of 84 factoring it back in and once you consider that that's an average of all cores and realize that some cores are hotter than that we're really not far away from the 90s here the y60 didn't perform a specially well in this test either but it did manage a 57 degree average delta T over ambient which is significantly cooler than the stock y40 as expected the stock configuration performs poorly compared to the rest of the cases on the chart that makes the y40 the hottest non-me a case that we currently include on the chart more comparable to past disappointment build winners like the Sakura 500 and the Ramsey 780 than it is to other mid Towers lianley's land cool 3 is comparable in price and function to the y40 but the land cool 3's price includes a full set of fans a lot of really cool mechanical features and the full set of fans pushes its performance into an entirely different category at 42 degrees they're not even close and if you install a liquid cooler big surprise the lanco 3 will scale better than the y40 as well because the Baseline is better we'll look at tests with the y40 adding more fans soon in this review now the GPU thermals report as well not with this one necessarily we'll come back to this but with the standardized card which is actually thinner and should therefore do better it's got a little bit extra room from the glass although this one has sufficient room with only three slots being consumed so for GPU thralls we're looking at no better than the y60s already subpar 59 degrees Celsius over ambient average but the bottom intake and is the problem here it's intended to benefit the GPU but the power supply shroud again makes it really difficult to pull that off it's a lot of plastic in there there's the cable shelf and whatever cable you stuff in and at the end of the day it's just it's the y60 is doing better than it uh and so are most other cases GPU air cooling wasn't great in the y60 to begin with but it's even worse here now switching to only a CPU workload and eliminating the GPU rendering the GM monkey head scene on the CPU resulted in an average temperature of 38 degrees above ambient the vertical GPU Mount directly underneath our CPU tower cooler means that the CPU thermals are strongly affected by GPU exhaust in this test with nearly zero GPU load the y40s average isn't as bad compared to the rest of the chart tying the y60 almost exactly meanwhile the lanco 3 remains significantly ahead at 33 degrees average in the previous test the CPU had to suffocate on GPU exhaust with a little air movement at the front of the case so the GPU contributed to the CPUs thermals here more than it might in a case with a more standard layout speaking of using our standardized set of fans gave us a chance to test height side intake suggestion keep in mind that there are both pros and cons to this set of testing and we have a full methodology video detailing the standardized fan testing approach and why we do it the way we do it was actually originally derived from feedback from the community where people wanted to see this type of test so you can learn how we executed it in the previous video we'll link it below for this we removed both stock fans and we added two 140 millimeter side intakes and one 120 mil exhaust the CPU temperature took a huge dip with that change in a positive direction dropping down to 50 degrees above ambient from the original 63 Baseline it seems like height was more concerned with handing on to remnants of the y60s design than it was with good fan placement sticking fans on the side intake slots rather than under the Shroud is just plain better especially since the Shroud is mostly plastic and remember they do include fans so they could have put them in more intelligent locations but they just chose to bury the main intake fan under a power supply shroud a cable shelf and whatever cables you stuff under it GPU thermals for this test dropped nearly as much with the standardized fans approximately 11 degrees reduced versus Baseline don't rely on the y40 stock fans alone because apparently when the product guide says it expects so I didn't take fans to be added it really means it the giant gap between the red and the blue bars isn't a good thing it's shipping and a poor configuration and that much uplift from a simple change indicates that there was a lot left on the table by height despite only including two stock fans the y40 measured 40 DBA with all stock fans set to max speed this is how we collect the Baseline numbers the stock fans are rated for 1300 RPM but hours ran closer to 1400 that's fine that's within manufacturing tolerance for fans the rear exhaust fan had a distinct rattle as the case shipped and with that rattle factored in because it was part of the noise Pro file reducing the noise level to a 36 DBA Target for our noise normalized testing where we set all cases on the chart to the same noise level with the system components at a known speed that required reducing the pan speeds to 1100 RPM here's the noise normalized chart on the positive side there's not any room for thermals to get worse on the negative side they're already really bad at the reduced speed the CPU averaged 67 degrees above ambient but with an ambient temperature of 21 degrees Celsius CPU temperature is brushed up against 100 degrees Celsius on individual cores during portions of the test cycle and caused minor throttling that means that if we were able to run without throttling this would be above 100 degrees Celsius when not using a delta T value or when we are using it you'd see it in the 70s that's terrible we did some additional testing with a gigabyte 4070 TI Aero OC a card that uses an increasingly popular flow through design for its cooler our goal was to see which is better suited to a modern car Heights suggested side and take layout or a side exhaust layout to line up with the gpu's airflow Direction additionally we wanted to check for a thicker GPU as stated earlier because that matters here as it pushes it closer to the glass we locked all three GPU fan speeds to their natural maximum under ideal thermal conditions that was 63 percent they must be locked for this test in anyone doing tests like this cannot allow them to be automatically controlled this is a common oversight and then we used two additional height fe12 12 120 mil fans for the extra intake and exhaust tests the Baseline for GPU thermals was 54 degrees above ambient measured only using the stock fans at 100 speed and remember this is completely incomparable to the previous data both for the CPU and the GPU because there's an entirely different component now we don't have comparative data other than against itself for this GPU so the number 54 isn't good or bad it's just a starting point with side intake that Delta dropped to 45 degrees above ambient but with side exhaust it was definitely definitely worse at 49. side exhaust May match the airflow direction of the GPU but it also creates a negative pressure system which can have unintended consequences the CPU wasn't under significant load for this task but it was also very slightly cooler with side intake than it was with exhaust and the result of this test in is that first of all the distance from the glass is sufficient now for a thicker card to breathe but secondly that their stock configuration is bad and for the case as a whole I think the quickest way to summarize this and this is going to work out to be a compliment in an indirect way for height so hopefully they understand that this was a candidate for advertising on our Channel we always complete reviews of the product if we are going to review it before we run the ad if we're not going to review it we do an internal task we publish that process previously on the Gen extras Channel but when we intend to review it like this case we complete the review first unfortunately we've decided to reject this from the advertising pool it doesn't meet our quality standards overall the build quality is good but the design thermally is not it's lacking and for that reason we've taken it out of the advertising pool and we're going to inform height and you know maybe they'll run the y60 or something or some other product instead so the y40 then feels kind of like a cut down y60 designed to hit a lower price point which makes the y60 its biggest competitor that's not bad for height especially because the y40 is at least a good build quality but it's not not necessarily good either if you're buying a y40 only because you can't afford a y60 it probably means you want the y60 and that's bad news for the y40. we also don't entirely agree with which Cuts they made in order to achieve this price point so there are features that were added like some of the heavy usage of plastics and branding which although cool and makes sense at the more expensive end of the spectrum at the mid-range like where this is there's just so much competition that they have to be a little fiercer with where they're deciding to go brand experience and where they're deciding to go function and in the opinion of both Patrick and I they kind of miss it so losing things like the chamfered edge uh it's a big design look to lose to Forfeit and the the function isn't quite there to support that loss of a defining aesthetic feature to still appeal to mass Market when there are alternatives at this price point so you can start throwing away features like that and go and do a more standard layout like this with power supply on the floor no chamfered Edge but you've got to really stand out elsewhere so the y40 we think is trapped in a no man's land between a normal mid Tower and the y60 there's limited radiator support there's no possibility for a horizontally mounted gpus this limits other add-in cards as well there are too few stock fans to cool the case effectively and it's still 150 bucks adding side fans helps significantly it makes it kind of competitive actually but it still doesn't make the y40 a top performer if you want a 150 dollar liquid cooling friendly or focused case the Lan cool 3 is the winner here it's a better option uh we don't like waffling with this kind of stuff we're just going to give you a firm conclusion and that's it that's about as far as it gets the phantax g500a is also a better option here we think for liquid cooling friendly case although we prefer the land quote from Langley so if you specifically want uh something that looks like the y40 consider the y60 I guess is where it lands it shares some thermal problems but without the additional compromises and uh the biggest downside is it's 50 more expensive so that's kind of the main loss there where you that's not necessarily a problem you can overcome depending on what class you're buying and what you're sacrificing to get that extra 50 bucks so if you're looking to buy a class of case that is in the mid Tower area uh vanquel three but that's about it for this one the build quality is good the attention to detail is pretty good uh it just it's just not enough so thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net to help us out directly or next time you watch an ad from height on this channel it's probably gonna be a y60 or some other new product instead for the reasons we describe but as we stated that's a good thing for height too because it says when you see the ad it probably means it was worth getting that spot so that's the value we provided them but um yeah a little bit disappointed honestly subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"