**The Process Behind Gaming Nexus Reviews**

At Gaming Nexus, we're always looking for ways to improve and expand our review scope. Recently, we've been thinking about how to add more depth to our content, particularly when it comes to fans. You see, as a reviewer, I have to learn about flow and pressure and physics, which is a long journey that will take months to get the process in place where we feel okay about it. It's kind of like learning about liquid nitrogen stuff - I'll be able to say I'm not the expert in this thing fans, but I'm good enough to tell you if this thing's any good.

We're trying to focus on one area at a time and become experts in it. This means we don't have a lot of capacity because we try to focus like that to add just monitors or add keyboards for example. That's like keyboards - someone on our team would have to focus on it exclusively for a long time and I respect the hell out of the people who know a lot about keyboards but you got to pick and choose the things you want to be good at in life, generally speaking.

Sometimes we'd like to do something different, so we'll do a one-off where we just like cleaning the GPU. It's rooted in something we're good at, which is taking apart working with GPUs, but it was different because it's like a cleaning video. Sometimes you creatively want to do something different or I might want to enable my editors to work on something different that's not all thousand charts and that's where you get stuff like the factory tours.

We can get good at a lot of those things, and we are pretty good at some of them, especially now, I think. But I guess I'm just bringing this up because you'll see us do something different every now and then, and even if it's not a core focus of ours, just know that we did work very hard to get the quality of that content or the testing or whatever it is as high as we reasonably could for like a one-off or an initial piece. And as we do more of them, we'll get better at it.

The topic reminds me of what bands must deal with when a band puts out a new album and you get the usual comments like "I like their older stuff better" or "They should stick to this genre or they should stick to this aspect of this sub-genre". As I've done more of this on YouTube now, I really understand how the bands must feel when they read those comments where if they even read them, probably like "You know, I wanted to do something different and you people are the reason we can't have anything nice".

We try to do that with videos to some extent - we stay pretty close to our core genre, but uh we do add over time. For monitor reviews specifically, though, I am happy to point you all towards Hardware Unboxed for that. They do a good job of it, and it's just not a component we review right now, I think they'd probably point you to us for cases, so uh I'm happy to point you to them.

**The AskGan Approach**

It's fun to do some AskGan every now and then - it's less scripted, it's more of just like here's a different look at what we do and our thought process. And gives people a better idea for the background of the reviewers that they watch in this case, it's you know me and Patrick and Patrick Stone, that is uh and Mike doing the cooler testing these days, doing all the the sort of technician aspect of it.

**Patreon Support**

So hopefully, that gives you a better idea of what we're trying to do for some of those questions. Hopefully it helps out with the case questions as well. Check back for more - as always, you can subscribe or you can go to patreon.com/gamersnexus if you'd like to get access to the patrons' AskGan episode that we're publishing for Patreon backers specifically. Thank you all for your support that is what's making it possible for us to build out the testing lab we're building out right now and we'll see you all next time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome to an askgn it's been a long time since i've said that so in these videos we do q a basically we take some common questions these days we don't take direct questions in the same way but we basically aggregate sort of the most common things we're seeing in our videos for a given period of time we'll take some from patreon discord and we put together a questions and answers segment that we call askgm we've done over 100 episodes of it but not many in the last year so we're going to talk about the gn case idea that came up a while ago i've answered this in reddit comments and a few other places but not in a formal video we'll be talking about fire hazard testing something we're adding to our case testing suite also going over some of the best cases right now why we don't review certain types of components and a couple of other topics before that this video is brought to you by asus and the rog crosshair 8 series of x570 motherboards for amd asus has both the crosshair 8 hero dark and the crosshair 8 extreme available offering high-end motherboards for high core count amd systems we've used the crosshair series for years for everything from basic overclocking up to liquid nitrogen overclocking and we found them easy to work with particularly for their extremely well organized bios menus learn more at the link in the description below so if you haven't seen an ask gn in the past they are unscripted i have some notes in front of me to make sure i kind of get all the questions i want to get but they're not scripted that means it's going to be a lot more off the cuff and uh we'll see we'll see what happens we'll see how the content quality is but normally it's pretty good because these give you a bit of a behind the scenes look at things without all of the heavy editing work we do to make sure the content conveys certain meaning instead it's more of a let's just let's just talk about what people are asking about so the first one that comes up gn case one that'll be our starting topic for today and i'll mention as well we're going to have a bonus ask jan episode on the patreon page so if you go to patreon.comgamersnexus and you can join there we will be posting an extra patrons to ask you and that we take some questions from the patreon discord all right anyway first question so about the gm case a while ago we did a video where we sort of looked for community feedback where we talked about uh a actually a couple case manufacturers had approached us but one in particular approached us and said would you like to work together on making a case and they said basically it'll be similar to the leanne lee in the 011 dynamic with der bauer collaboration where uh strictly speaking from a design standpoint back when the o11 dynamic first launched and it's been a great case did extremely well we liked it i spoke to dare bauer before the review or at one of the trade shows or something i asked them what was your level of input are they basically just putting your name on this do they license it from you this is all just us talking as peers people who know each other pretty well and uh the thing that i ended up taking away from it and we shared and he gave me permission to share this information because not special was that uh he had about 80 to 90 percent of the input into the design and so in other words what i was trying to figure out at the time was how much of this is you versus how much of this is them and the answer was most of it was derbaur it was roman he did a lot of the design he did a lot of the back and forth he came up with the concepts he came up with the features and lanley made it and sold it but he had a high level of input and so if we ever made a case i decided that would be what i would want where we would have a high level of control we could exercise over it because i don't want to put my name on something if the other company even if it's responsible for making it uh and and having the factories having the connections having the logistics all these things where it's maybe not possible without but if i'm putting my name on something i wanted to make sure we had control over the process and at any point we could say nope we don't like it take our name off of it it's yours now don't say anything about us and that all looks like it would have been possible if we went down the road of working out the legal paperwork with a company at some point to put it together but we decided not to and in that original video where we were talking about it one of the things that i spent a lot of time talking about was sort of the the conflict or the ethics or whatever it's all stuff we'd obviously spent a lot of time thinking about and i'm still confident today that we could probably navigate that but i just ultimately even though there was overwhelming support of us working with a case manufacturer to and brand a case that they would also co-brand we we would work together on even though there was a ton of support for that from you all overwhelming majority said yes do it ultimately i was like i just don't really want to i'd love to make a case and i think it would be fun but i just i just didn't really want to work with anyone in that capacity on it after thinking about it a lot and part of that was navigating the as we review things going forward like if our case ends up really high on the charts what do we do like did we just not mention it uh do we take it off the charts because of a conflict do we mention it with a disclosure whatever and there's ways to navigate that and like i said i'm confident we could have but i just i'm at a point in the career with gn where i just thought if it's not something i'm 100 on board with i just don't do it and i like that so if we do a case what we're thinking these days and we're not designing one right now to be clear uh is if we do and we'll probably go with our own and we would work with a factory directly and and hire things out as needed there's a lot of things with a case that are really complicated compared to anything else we make so we make some pretty complicated stuff the mod maps are not particularly easy there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that makes them challenging the toolkits aren't easy but the thing with the case is it's very large it's potentially very heavy uh and logistically you need that in distributors around the world if you're gonna sell it globally shipping it from the us to say germany for a customer to a b2c a customer to business or business customer order it's just it's it stops kind of making sense a lot of ways because it's too big and so the shipping gets too challenging to deal with and you need that logistical connection with another partner and that's what a case manufacturer would supply in some ways we could work that all out we could definitely establish partnerships with distributors we know people like case kin and other retailers like that is possible but it's just ultimately there's a lot of stuff that i'm doing right now and that everyone in the business is doing right now where we're all busy and we're all pretty happy with what we're doing uh and i don't think that really adding this particular challenge would increase my happiness or anyone else's habits i don't think it would disproportionately increase that to where it would counter balance the increase in stress or workload while we try to juggle all the other stuff we're doing testing reviews uh building out the new space adding lab equipment learning how to use the lab equipment in the new space like the fan tester all that stuff's more exciting to the team right now than i think doing the case we're not saying no and like i said maybe i'll work with a company at some point there's about two i trust right now where i would trust them to listen to me and do what we want within reason and obviously it would be some sort of partnership they'd be providing input too but there's only really two companies i'd trust to say yes you can put our name on that product uh that's not a very big list so um so we're just not right now anyway something like that it'd be very educational that's why we liked it it would teach us all about the behind the scenes we can make all kinds of videos along the way of here's the design phase here's where you strip out features for reasons xyz here's why those reasons are reasons that you strip features out for it teach us a lot it would improve our quality as reviewers but the um just the level of i think it comes down to this we've never really favored uh financial decision over a i don't want to do it decision so and i'm sticking to that where you know i was walking through our new location the other day and it's really coming together well we just did a post on on patreon we'll do one publicly soon but i was walking through the space and looking around i was like we built all of this without needing the without favoring a financial decision if i didn't want to do something i didn't do the thing and we still managed to get that space and we're all really happy with it we've built it out you know to everyone's sort of needs and wants as an employee as a team member as a contributor or whatever as an owner on my end so it's just kind of like the the case it'd be cool from a a learning standpoint from a video standpoint it would make good money if it's a good case so there's that aspect too but when i was looking at it it felt like the the most valuable aspect out of all of that sometimes was the financial side and that's just not that exciting where it's not what we focus on we'd have we'd have a lot more things if we focused on the financial side i personally this is important maybe for you to understand as someone who watches our reviews to understand my perspective when i'm reviewing something personally speaking i very highly value my time even if my time is not valuable does that make sense like even when uh even when i was making nothing i valued my time pretty high and i value what i want to do pretty high over what i might feel like i should do for some reason or another and so when it comes to something like making a product or making a business decision the money doesn't weigh that heavily if i'm not like in dire straits and we've never been there so it's just that aspect i don't weigh it too much i weigh the do i want to do this do i have time to do this is there other stuff i would rather do instead not just opportunity cost from a business angle but opportunity cost from the the mental angle like are you happy with what you're doing so that's what i try to focus it on and that's not why we're not doing a case right now but hopefully that gives you the answer on that one uh too much stress basically to try and trust a company to work with them right now but maybe in the future or maybe we'll just hire it out on our own if we end up in a position where we can do that next one is fire hazard testing this came up on the patreon discord over on patreon.com gamersnexus where one of our members there asked if after the recent issues of the fractal torrent and the nzxth1 was there another one i think there was another one maybe not after those two cases though uh with the fire issues being both both stemming from a pcb that had a 12 volt plane way too close to the surface and getting shorted the question was will you guys start basically testing these devices like fan hubs or pcie risers for a potential fire hazard and the answer is sort of yes and the reason there's a sort of there is because this is something we i don't think we're fully tooled up to do in like a a really wider or deep scope for fire hazard testing that's pretty complex but it's something i'd like to work towards as a validation lab as we have more space for new equipment and uh what we can do is we can at least test for this mistake the one that has now been made twice in the same year and last year that very easily causes a fire so i was talking to patrick about this where he is going to uh start looking at the fan hub pcbs more carefully historically we never really thought about those it's like it's a fan hub we would talk about if it's useful or if it's positioned well or uh how cheap it looks but we wouldn't really think about the safety aspect because it's just a it's a level of you're naive until something like the ndxch1 happens where you just sort of think like oh there's all these stamps on it those mean something right they should know more than us so we're going to defer to all of these organizations and this alphabet soup of letters all over this board we're gonna trust that this thing at some point by one of these was tested for safety and what we've learned after digging through all the certificates and all the validation processes is that there's really not a really thorough safety check for electronic devices uh at least of this nature and i'm not saying we're going to provide that certainly not any time in the immediate future because there's a reason it's not provided it's hard and a lot of it does depend on your unit variants not with manufacturing but with stuff as as far down the line as assembly where with fractal it was they put the pcb in there run a screw and it chips the surface a little bit and when it chips that black coating off the surface now you have the short so that wouldn't even be seen in a test lab that would be seen after the fact how do you account for that as the question and the answer is well it's you can but it's not easy so we're not just to be really clear with everyone we're not going to do like some really in-depth here's like the fire hazard lab result from gn or something it'd be cool maybe in the future we'll add something like that but what we will do is as cases come through now we're going to do stuff like a scratch test where we look for is there a 12-volt plane on the surface that could easily be exposed to a screw when it's being installed in a case at assembly uh or does it seem like it's built properly and we're going to look at things like the through holes they don't always need to be a plated through hole a pth but plated through holes do certainly help prevent issues like this and so we'll look for things like that we'll talk about the quality of the pcb to some extent if it's not super exciting and we didn't find any major issues we might still sort of relegate the mentioning of that fan hub or whatever it is in the case to just mentioning its base qualities but if we see that as particularly high quality from an assembly manufacturing standpoint or particularly low quality or if we're able to create a short with the same thing that created a short in the fractal one that they've fixed to be very clear and the ndxd h1 one that they fixed and then changed and it maybe it's fixed but nzx2 was really like we had to pull all of their teeth out for that one so i'm not really sure i trust the end result but we're going to start looking for that in case reviews now this is just something we never really you don't think of it until you see something like that so i'm excited about it because it's something new we can do and uh i think it's really opened our eyes my whole team editors included where they're not doing the review proper they're editing it but it's open to everyone's eyes where we've talked now about like it's kind of scary there's so much stuff you plug into the wall every day and you're just like yeah this seems good i bought it from amazon eight bucks pretty good plug it in you leave you come back and you hope your house hasn't burned down it's not even that you don't even hope your house hasn't burned down because you don't think about it being a possibility with most of this stuff uh and then you get 180 case in or whatever the h1 cost and realized that this thing could burn a house down and those manufacturers have worked to resolve those issues but they shouldn't happen to begin with even with fractal's extremely good response obviously it shouldn't have happened it's sort of a rookie mistake and um yeah so we're gonna start looking for that stuff quick thing too we've actually started doing some grounding tests with cases now we haven't really been talking about the results too much we included in one of the reviews i think it was a corsair one of some kind but uh we had a basic grounding test of you know there should be a connection to ground ideally at the power supply screws for example and um we've been checking for stuff like that just with simple resistance and continuity checks uh part of it is seeing for example if there's maybe too much paint in an area where there should be a good ground contact this is for both anti-static reasons and other reasons but we talked about that in our anti-static mat video where we explained the science behind the mod mats and that's we'll link that in the description below if you're curious but we've added that to case reviews also all right speaking of cases let's talk a little bit about best cases right now we've seen some of this recently as it's approaching a buying season i suppose so we're going to do a full round up as usual we have a best cases of 2021 so far video from a while ago but we're working on an update we'll push that out closer to probably later november give a little bit more time for some more cases to launch and uh we'll we'll put out a best cases for 2021 video at that point but we can talk about some of the quick highlights if you're in the market for a case right now so we did like the torrent uh the response to the issues was was really encouraging those issues it was the fanhub one shouldn't have happened um but in the current market not even a scratch that in the market not the current market in the world in general a manufacturer identifying an issue putting a stop sale order in place pulling it back and fixing it with a high level of of like over fixing it like they did way more than i needed to that's so rare right now that there's a lot of value there so we did like the torrent for that response but we liked it anyway before that got a really high uh review from us before the the fire issue was even found and then fixed and the reasons we like that where it's unique has really neat airflow patterns that are pretty cool it's got 180 millimeter fans those are interesting and different really good for airflow and so we like that uh but it's expensive and so there are other cases too on the smaller side we like the cooler master nr200p we never did a formal review of it we are working on the o11 air mini right now but we delayed that because they have a new panel revision that was not ready in time for the original reviews so we put that all on hold and we have one coming up with both of the panels both of the airflow panels on it and uh we'll we'll let you know how we like that one but then on the larger side the corsair 4000d is actually a really good airflow focus case get the airflow and not the solid panel one but for under 90 bucks on average it's a good position and it's a return a true return to form for corsair where for years corsair's case offerings were just they were boring or bad like really bad and this was an excellent return to form with the 4000 d the 5000 d series is pretty good too it's more expensive and the 7000 d just has it's a lot of ds it's 3 000 more ds than the 4000 d and therefore anyway that it probably means something but no the 4000 d is good so uh that one's good for budget the fractal meshfy 2 series has been overall pretty good we liked the compact specifically from that series that's close to the 100 ish mark plus or minus 20. and the o11 dynamic is is uh still a great water cooling case too or all around her i think it was the silent base 802 we looked at where it had the swappable airflow or solid panel that one got good reviews uh from and testing from our side of things too so there's a lot of really good cases out there right now and what we're going to do as we always do multiple times per year normally is put together best of round up and go through all the highlights and low lights of each one and hopefully help you figure out what's right for your build but that gives you kind of my personal quick list of here's the ones that are in my mind right now that i've looked at recently i've worked with recently in the lab here and uh what i might personally consider buying if i were buying something right now that gives you a good range of prices too to work in um let's talk about why don't you review blank whatever it is we get this a lot from monitors people really ask us about what monitors do we like what do we think about monitor xyz it's probably actually pretty close to a monitor name at this point they're not good and if we can help with monitor issues i always feel bad to say no sorry i don't really i don't know i don't know if that monitor is good i haven't heard of that monitor i don't pay attention to monitors and no one on our team does it's not something that we do right now so i did want to use this though to talk about why don't we review certain types of components we generally try to focus on things that we're really good at so i feel like our content type has has good variety these days and we've grown to get good at a lot of things so for patrick for example patrick lathan he's an expert in cases for sure he's very good at knowing how to run just benchmarks in general as a concept that's something that we've learned over the years a lot of people just don't have that but he started with me very early and we both figured it out together so he's gotten good at that so cases he's good at benchmarking in general thinking through processes in general which is good because that applies to a wide range of things if we wanted to review monitors i could work with someone with that skill set and we could both troubleshoot it together what would someone want to learn about this product so we can review it uh and he's good at things like working with well specifically research intensive topics like when we did the joshing cpu from a while ago he did all the heavy research for that it came out great so that's stuff he's very specialized and good at patrick stone is learning a lot about power supplies he's becoming a specialist in power supplies he knows the most on our team out of it and he's working to know more for reviews he's just recently added transient load testing for example he added some other kind of testing he was excited about that we'll be talking about soon so he's good at those things he's good at uh educating in general that's his background and on my side i probably have the most the widest range of things i'm pretty good at because i've been doing this the longest and i had to put all the processes in place originally but i would say the things that i'm the most specialized in would be thermal so anything to do with thermal coolers for gpu cpus uh with test engineering so designing test cases for basically any product that's a computer part i can do and then some sort of odd ones like overclocking liquid nitrogen overclocking i've gotten decent at not not competitive level but you know i mean it's liquid nitrogen so better than most people enough good enough to kind of give an informed opinion on some things and gp and cpu reviews so those are the things that we're good at the next thing we're adding is going to be fans fans are sort of related to coolers they at least are part of the cooler review process so we'll be able to expand our quilt review scope to now look at the fan quality not just the thermal performance but how good is the thing that it ships with to do the cooling performance and that's cool because it's kind of related to stuff that we're already good at but we i have to learn a lot about flow and pressure and physics and it's going to be a long journey to learn about fans and that's going to take months to get the process in place to where we feel okay about it we're kind of like the liquid nitrogen stuff where i'll be able to say i'm not the expert in this thing fans in this case but i'm good enough to tell you if this thing's any good and we're going to get better at it as we go it's going to take years to become experts in something like that so that's what we're adding next uh that means we don't have a lot of capacity because we try to focus like that to add just monitors or add um keyboards for example that's like keyboards this whole level of depth that to be an expert in it someone on on my team would have to focus on it exclusively for a long time and i respect the hell out of the people who know a lot about keywords but you got to pick and choose the things you want to be good at uh in life in general and so we're we add stuff pretty slowly because we want to really get good at that thing now all that said sometimes we'd like to do something different so we'll do a one-off where we just like cleaning the gpu i did that a while ago it's rooted in something we're good at which is taking apart working with gp video cards but it was different because it's like a cleaning video and sometimes you creatively you want to do something different or i might want to enable my editors to work on something different that's not all a thousand charts and that's where you get stuff like the factory tours and uh we can and we can get good at a lot of those things and we are pretty good at some of them like the factory tours especially now i think but i guess i'm just bringing this up because you'll see us do something different every now and then and uh even if it's not a core focus of ours just know that we did work very hard to get the quality of that content or the testing or whatever it is as high as we reasonably could for like a one-off or an initial piece and then as we do more of them we'll get better at it so kind of this topic reminds me of what bands must deal with when a band puts out a new album and you get the usual like i like their older stuff better or whatever or or they should stick to this genre or they should stick to this aspect of this sub genre and as i've done more of this on youtube now i really understand how the bands must feel when they read those comments where if they even read them this point where they're probably like you know i wanted to do something different and you people are the reason we can't have anything nice but what i respect is when the in this example the musicians will still try something different and keep trying something different and sort of diversify or increase the variety of the music they offer and so we try to do that with videos to some extent we stay pretty close to our core genre so to speak but uh we do add over time now for monitor reviews specifically though i am happy to point you all towards hardware unboxed for that they do a good job of it and it's just not a component we review right now i think they'd probably point you to us for cases so uh i'm happy to point you to them for monitor reviews and getting some depth there all right so that's it for this one it's fun to do some askgans every now and then uh it's i like it because it's less scripted it's more of just like here's a different look at what we do and our thought process and gives people a better idea for the background of the reviewers that they watch in this case it's you know me and patrick and patrick stone that is uh and mike doing the cooler testing these days doing all the the sort of technician aspect of it so hopefully that gives you a better idea of what we're trying to do for some of those questions hopefully it helps out with the case questions as well check back for more as always you can subscribe or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like to get access to the patrons ask jan episode that we're publishing for patreon backers specifically thank you all for your support that is what's making it possible for us to build out the testing lab we're building out right now and we'll see you all next timehey everyone welcome to an askgn it's been a long time since i've said that so in these videos we do q a basically we take some common questions these days we don't take direct questions in the same way but we basically aggregate sort of the most common things we're seeing in our videos for a given period of time we'll take some from patreon discord and we put together a questions and answers segment that we call askgm we've done over 100 episodes of it but not many in the last year so we're going to talk about the gn case idea that came up a while ago i've answered this in reddit comments and a few other places but not in a formal video we'll be talking about fire hazard testing something we're adding to our case testing suite also going over some of the best cases right now why we don't review certain types of components and a couple of other topics before that this video is brought to you by asus and the rog crosshair 8 series of x570 motherboards for amd asus has both the crosshair 8 hero dark and the crosshair 8 extreme available offering high-end motherboards for high core count amd systems we've used the crosshair series for years for everything from basic overclocking up to liquid nitrogen overclocking and we found them easy to work with particularly for their extremely well organized bios menus learn more at the link in the description below so if you haven't seen an ask gn in the past they are unscripted i have some notes in front of me to make sure i kind of get all the questions i want to get but they're not scripted that means it's going to be a lot more off the cuff and uh we'll see we'll see what happens we'll see how the content quality is but normally it's pretty good because these give you a bit of a behind the scenes look at things without all of the heavy editing work we do to make sure the content conveys certain meaning instead it's more of a let's just let's just talk about what people are asking about so the first one that comes up gn case one that'll be our starting topic for today and i'll mention as well we're going to have a bonus ask jan episode on the patreon page so if you go to patreon.comgamersnexus and you can join there we will be posting an extra patrons to ask you and that we take some questions from the patreon discord all right anyway first question so about the gm case a while ago we did a video where we sort of looked for community feedback where we talked about uh a actually a couple case manufacturers had approached us but one in particular approached us and said would you like to work together on making a case and they said basically it'll be similar to the leanne lee in the 011 dynamic with der bauer collaboration where uh strictly speaking from a design standpoint back when the o11 dynamic first launched and it's been a great case did extremely well we liked it i spoke to dare bauer before the review or at one of the trade shows or something i asked them what was your level of input are they basically just putting your name on this do they license it from you this is all just us talking as peers people who know each other pretty well and uh the thing that i ended up taking away from it and we shared and he gave me permission to share this information because not special was that uh he had about 80 to 90 percent of the input into the design and so in other words what i was trying to figure out at the time was how much of this is you versus how much of this is them and the answer was most of it was derbaur it was roman he did a lot of the design he did a lot of the back and forth he came up with the concepts he came up with the features and lanley made it and sold it but he had a high level of input and so if we ever made a case i decided that would be what i would want where we would have a high level of control we could exercise over it because i don't want to put my name on something if the other company even if it's responsible for making it uh and and having the factories having the connections having the logistics all these things where it's maybe not possible without but if i'm putting my name on something i wanted to make sure we had control over the process and at any point we could say nope we don't like it take our name off of it it's yours now don't say anything about us and that all looks like it would have been possible if we went down the road of working out the legal paperwork with a company at some point to put it together but we decided not to and in that original video where we were talking about it one of the things that i spent a lot of time talking about was sort of the the conflict or the ethics or whatever it's all stuff we'd obviously spent a lot of time thinking about and i'm still confident today that we could probably navigate that but i just ultimately even though there was overwhelming support of us working with a case manufacturer to and brand a case that they would also co-brand we we would work together on even though there was a ton of support for that from you all overwhelming majority said yes do it ultimately i was like i just don't really want to i'd love to make a case and i think it would be fun but i just i just didn't really want to work with anyone in that capacity on it after thinking about it a lot and part of that was navigating the as we review things going forward like if our case ends up really high on the charts what do we do like did we just not mention it uh do we take it off the charts because of a conflict do we mention it with a disclosure whatever and there's ways to navigate that and like i said i'm confident we could have but i just i'm at a point in the career with gn where i just thought if it's not something i'm 100 on board with i just don't do it and i like that so if we do a case what we're thinking these days and we're not designing one right now to be clear uh is if we do and we'll probably go with our own and we would work with a factory directly and and hire things out as needed there's a lot of things with a case that are really complicated compared to anything else we make so we make some pretty complicated stuff the mod maps are not particularly easy there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that makes them challenging the toolkits aren't easy but the thing with the case is it's very large it's potentially very heavy uh and logistically you need that in distributors around the world if you're gonna sell it globally shipping it from the us to say germany for a customer to a b2c a customer to business or business customer order it's just it's it stops kind of making sense a lot of ways because it's too big and so the shipping gets too challenging to deal with and you need that logistical connection with another partner and that's what a case manufacturer would supply in some ways we could work that all out we could definitely establish partnerships with distributors we know people like case kin and other retailers like that is possible but it's just ultimately there's a lot of stuff that i'm doing right now and that everyone in the business is doing right now where we're all busy and we're all pretty happy with what we're doing uh and i don't think that really adding this particular challenge would increase my happiness or anyone else's habits i don't think it would disproportionately increase that to where it would counter balance the increase in stress or workload while we try to juggle all the other stuff we're doing testing reviews uh building out the new space adding lab equipment learning how to use the lab equipment in the new space like the fan tester all that stuff's more exciting to the team right now than i think doing the case we're not saying no and like i said maybe i'll work with a company at some point there's about two i trust right now where i would trust them to listen to me and do what we want within reason and obviously it would be some sort of partnership they'd be providing input too but there's only really two companies i'd trust to say yes you can put our name on that product uh that's not a very big list so um so we're just not right now anyway something like that it'd be very educational that's why we liked it it would teach us all about the behind the scenes we can make all kinds of videos along the way of here's the design phase here's where you strip out features for reasons xyz here's why those reasons are reasons that you strip features out for it teach us a lot it would improve our quality as reviewers but the um just the level of i think it comes down to this we've never really favored uh financial decision over a i don't want to do it decision so and i'm sticking to that where you know i was walking through our new location the other day and it's really coming together well we just did a post on on patreon we'll do one publicly soon but i was walking through the space and looking around i was like we built all of this without needing the without favoring a financial decision if i didn't want to do something i didn't do the thing and we still managed to get that space and we're all really happy with it we've built it out you know to everyone's sort of needs and wants as an employee as a team member as a contributor or whatever as an owner on my end so it's just kind of like the the case it'd be cool from a a learning standpoint from a video standpoint it would make good money if it's a good case so there's that aspect too but when i was looking at it it felt like the the most valuable aspect out of all of that sometimes was the financial side and that's just not that exciting where it's not what we focus on we'd have we'd have a lot more things if we focused on the financial side i personally this is important maybe for you to understand as someone who watches our reviews to understand my perspective when i'm reviewing something personally speaking i very highly value my time even if my time is not valuable does that make sense like even when uh even when i was making nothing i valued my time pretty high and i value what i want to do pretty high over what i might feel like i should do for some reason or another and so when it comes to something like making a product or making a business decision the money doesn't weigh that heavily if i'm not like in dire straits and we've never been there so it's just that aspect i don't weigh it too much i weigh the do i want to do this do i have time to do this is there other stuff i would rather do instead not just opportunity cost from a business angle but opportunity cost from the the mental angle like are you happy with what you're doing so that's what i try to focus it on and that's not why we're not doing a case right now but hopefully that gives you the answer on that one uh too much stress basically to try and trust a company to work with them right now but maybe in the future or maybe we'll just hire it out on our own if we end up in a position where we can do that next one is fire hazard testing this came up on the patreon discord over on patreon.com gamersnexus where one of our members there asked if after the recent issues of the fractal torrent and the nzxth1 was there another one i think there was another one maybe not after those two cases though uh with the fire issues being both both stemming from a pcb that had a 12 volt plane way too close to the surface and getting shorted the question was will you guys start basically testing these devices like fan hubs or pcie risers for a potential fire hazard and the answer is sort of yes and the reason there's a sort of there is because this is something we i don't think we're fully tooled up to do in like a a really wider or deep scope for fire hazard testing that's pretty complex but it's something i'd like to work towards as a validation lab as we have more space for new equipment and uh what we can do is we can at least test for this mistake the one that has now been made twice in the same year and last year that very easily causes a fire so i was talking to patrick about this where he is going to uh start looking at the fan hub pcbs more carefully historically we never really thought about those it's like it's a fan hub we would talk about if it's useful or if it's positioned well or uh how cheap it looks but we wouldn't really think about the safety aspect because it's just a it's a level of you're naive until something like the ndxch1 happens where you just sort of think like oh there's all these stamps on it those mean something right they should know more than us so we're going to defer to all of these organizations and this alphabet soup of letters all over this board we're gonna trust that this thing at some point by one of these was tested for safety and what we've learned after digging through all the certificates and all the validation processes is that there's really not a really thorough safety check for electronic devices uh at least of this nature and i'm not saying we're going to provide that certainly not any time in the immediate future because there's a reason it's not provided it's hard and a lot of it does depend on your unit variants not with manufacturing but with stuff as as far down the line as assembly where with fractal it was they put the pcb in there run a screw and it chips the surface a little bit and when it chips that black coating off the surface now you have the short so that wouldn't even be seen in a test lab that would be seen after the fact how do you account for that as the question and the answer is well it's you can but it's not easy so we're not just to be really clear with everyone we're not going to do like some really in-depth here's like the fire hazard lab result from gn or something it'd be cool maybe in the future we'll add something like that but what we will do is as cases come through now we're going to do stuff like a scratch test where we look for is there a 12-volt plane on the surface that could easily be exposed to a screw when it's being installed in a case at assembly uh or does it seem like it's built properly and we're going to look at things like the through holes they don't always need to be a plated through hole a pth but plated through holes do certainly help prevent issues like this and so we'll look for things like that we'll talk about the quality of the pcb to some extent if it's not super exciting and we didn't find any major issues we might still sort of relegate the mentioning of that fan hub or whatever it is in the case to just mentioning its base qualities but if we see that as particularly high quality from an assembly manufacturing standpoint or particularly low quality or if we're able to create a short with the same thing that created a short in the fractal one that they've fixed to be very clear and the ndxd h1 one that they fixed and then changed and it maybe it's fixed but nzx2 was really like we had to pull all of their teeth out for that one so i'm not really sure i trust the end result but we're going to start looking for that in case reviews now this is just something we never really you don't think of it until you see something like that so i'm excited about it because it's something new we can do and uh i think it's really opened our eyes my whole team editors included where they're not doing the review proper they're editing it but it's open to everyone's eyes where we've talked now about like it's kind of scary there's so much stuff you plug into the wall every day and you're just like yeah this seems good i bought it from amazon eight bucks pretty good plug it in you leave you come back and you hope your house hasn't burned down it's not even that you don't even hope your house hasn't burned down because you don't think about it being a possibility with most of this stuff uh and then you get 180 case in or whatever the h1 cost and realized that this thing could burn a house down and those manufacturers have worked to resolve those issues but they shouldn't happen to begin with even with fractal's extremely good response obviously it shouldn't have happened it's sort of a rookie mistake and um yeah so we're gonna start looking for that stuff quick thing too we've actually started doing some grounding tests with cases now we haven't really been talking about the results too much we included in one of the reviews i think it was a corsair one of some kind but uh we had a basic grounding test of you know there should be a connection to ground ideally at the power supply screws for example and um we've been checking for stuff like that just with simple resistance and continuity checks uh part of it is seeing for example if there's maybe too much paint in an area where there should be a good ground contact this is for both anti-static reasons and other reasons but we talked about that in our anti-static mat video where we explained the science behind the mod mats and that's we'll link that in the description below if you're curious but we've added that to case reviews also all right speaking of cases let's talk a little bit about best cases right now we've seen some of this recently as it's approaching a buying season i suppose so we're going to do a full round up as usual we have a best cases of 2021 so far video from a while ago but we're working on an update we'll push that out closer to probably later november give a little bit more time for some more cases to launch and uh we'll we'll put out a best cases for 2021 video at that point but we can talk about some of the quick highlights if you're in the market for a case right now so we did like the torrent uh the response to the issues was was really encouraging those issues it was the fanhub one shouldn't have happened um but in the current market not even a scratch that in the market not the current market in the world in general a manufacturer identifying an issue putting a stop sale order in place pulling it back and fixing it with a high level of of like over fixing it like they did way more than i needed to that's so rare right now that there's a lot of value there so we did like the torrent for that response but we liked it anyway before that got a really high uh review from us before the the fire issue was even found and then fixed and the reasons we like that where it's unique has really neat airflow patterns that are pretty cool it's got 180 millimeter fans those are interesting and different really good for airflow and so we like that uh but it's expensive and so there are other cases too on the smaller side we like the cooler master nr200p we never did a formal review of it we are working on the o11 air mini right now but we delayed that because they have a new panel revision that was not ready in time for the original reviews so we put that all on hold and we have one coming up with both of the panels both of the airflow panels on it and uh we'll we'll let you know how we like that one but then on the larger side the corsair 4000d is actually a really good airflow focus case get the airflow and not the solid panel one but for under 90 bucks on average it's a good position and it's a return a true return to form for corsair where for years corsair's case offerings were just they were boring or bad like really bad and this was an excellent return to form with the 4000 d the 5000 d series is pretty good too it's more expensive and the 7000 d just has it's a lot of ds it's 3 000 more ds than the 4000 d and therefore anyway that it probably means something but no the 4000 d is good so uh that one's good for budget the fractal meshfy 2 series has been overall pretty good we liked the compact specifically from that series that's close to the 100 ish mark plus or minus 20. and the o11 dynamic is is uh still a great water cooling case too or all around her i think it was the silent base 802 we looked at where it had the swappable airflow or solid panel that one got good reviews uh from and testing from our side of things too so there's a lot of really good cases out there right now and what we're going to do as we always do multiple times per year normally is put together best of round up and go through all the highlights and low lights of each one and hopefully help you figure out what's right for your build but that gives you kind of my personal quick list of here's the ones that are in my mind right now that i've looked at recently i've worked with recently in the lab here and uh what i might personally consider buying if i were buying something right now that gives you a good range of prices too to work in um let's talk about why don't you review blank whatever it is we get this a lot from monitors people really ask us about what monitors do we like what do we think about monitor xyz it's probably actually pretty close to a monitor name at this point they're not good and if we can help with monitor issues i always feel bad to say no sorry i don't really i don't know i don't know if that monitor is good i haven't heard of that monitor i don't pay attention to monitors and no one on our team does it's not something that we do right now so i did want to use this though to talk about why don't we review certain types of components we generally try to focus on things that we're really good at so i feel like our content type has has good variety these days and we've grown to get good at a lot of things so for patrick for example patrick lathan he's an expert in cases for sure he's very good at knowing how to run just benchmarks in general as a concept that's something that we've learned over the years a lot of people just don't have that but he started with me very early and we both figured it out together so he's gotten good at that so cases he's good at benchmarking in general thinking through processes in general which is good because that applies to a wide range of things if we wanted to review monitors i could work with someone with that skill set and we could both troubleshoot it together what would someone want to learn about this product so we can review it uh and he's good at things like working with well specifically research intensive topics like when we did the joshing cpu from a while ago he did all the heavy research for that it came out great so that's stuff he's very specialized and good at patrick stone is learning a lot about power supplies he's becoming a specialist in power supplies he knows the most on our team out of it and he's working to know more for reviews he's just recently added transient load testing for example he added some other kind of testing he was excited about that we'll be talking about soon so he's good at those things he's good at uh educating in general that's his background and on my side i probably have the most the widest range of things i'm pretty good at because i've been doing this the longest and i had to put all the processes in place originally but i would say the things that i'm the most specialized in would be thermal so anything to do with thermal coolers for gpu cpus uh with test engineering so designing test cases for basically any product that's a computer part i can do and then some sort of odd ones like overclocking liquid nitrogen overclocking i've gotten decent at not not competitive level but you know i mean it's liquid nitrogen so better than most people enough good enough to kind of give an informed opinion on some things and gp and cpu reviews so those are the things that we're good at the next thing we're adding is going to be fans fans are sort of related to coolers they at least are part of the cooler review process so we'll be able to expand our quilt review scope to now look at the fan quality not just the thermal performance but how good is the thing that it ships with to do the cooling performance and that's cool because it's kind of related to stuff that we're already good at but we i have to learn a lot about flow and pressure and physics and it's going to be a long journey to learn about fans and that's going to take months to get the process in place to where we feel okay about it we're kind of like the liquid nitrogen stuff where i'll be able to say i'm not the expert in this thing fans in this case but i'm good enough to tell you if this thing's any good and we're going to get better at it as we go it's going to take years to become experts in something like that so that's what we're adding next uh that means we don't have a lot of capacity because we try to focus like that to add just monitors or add um keyboards for example that's like keyboards this whole level of depth that to be an expert in it someone on on my team would have to focus on it exclusively for a long time and i respect the hell out of the people who know a lot about keywords but you got to pick and choose the things you want to be good at uh in life in general and so we're we add stuff pretty slowly because we want to really get good at that thing now all that said sometimes we'd like to do something different so we'll do a one-off where we just like cleaning the gpu i did that a while ago it's rooted in something we're good at which is taking apart working with gp video cards but it was different because it's like a cleaning video and sometimes you creatively you want to do something different or i might want to enable my editors to work on something different that's not all a thousand charts and that's where you get stuff like the factory tours and uh we can and we can get good at a lot of those things and we are pretty good at some of them like the factory tours especially now i think but i guess i'm just bringing this up because you'll see us do something different every now and then and uh even if it's not a core focus of ours just know that we did work very hard to get the quality of that content or the testing or whatever it is as high as we reasonably could for like a one-off or an initial piece and then as we do more of them we'll get better at it so kind of this topic reminds me of what bands must deal with when a band puts out a new album and you get the usual like i like their older stuff better or whatever or or they should stick to this genre or they should stick to this aspect of this sub genre and as i've done more of this on youtube now i really understand how the bands must feel when they read those comments where if they even read them this point where they're probably like you know i wanted to do something different and you people are the reason we can't have anything nice but what i respect is when the in this example the musicians will still try something different and keep trying something different and sort of diversify or increase the variety of the music they offer and so we try to do that with videos to some extent we stay pretty close to our core genre so to speak but uh we do add over time now for monitor reviews specifically though i am happy to point you all towards hardware unboxed for that they do a good job of it and it's just not a component we review right now i think they'd probably point you to us for cases so uh i'm happy to point you to them for monitor reviews and getting some depth there all right so that's it for this one it's fun to do some askgans every now and then uh it's i like it because it's less scripted it's more of just like here's a different look at what we do and our thought process and gives people a better idea for the background of the reviewers that they watch in this case it's you know me and patrick and patrick stone that is uh and mike doing the cooler testing these days doing all the the sort of technician aspect of it so hopefully that gives you a better idea of what we're trying to do for some of those questions hopefully it helps out with the case questions as well check back for more as always you can subscribe or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like to get access to the patrons ask jan episode that we're publishing for patreon backers specifically thank you all for your support that is what's making it possible for us to build out the testing lab we're building out right now and we'll see you all next time\n"