The Chassis: A Mixed Bag of Compromises and Trade-Offs

I'm still trying to figure out what this chassis is all about. It's like they took a bunch of different ideas, threw them in a blender, and hit puree. You get a compact form factor, but at the cost of some pretty significant compromises. Let's start with the temperature management. The chassis comes equipped with a 120mm fan, which is a nice touch. But what really gets my blood boiling is that they didn't even bother to include a fan mounting bracket for the top of the case. I mean, come on, who doesn't want to be able to put a fan up there and blow some hot air out of the way? It's like they knew it was a good idea, but just didn't bother.

But let's not focus too much on the negatives. The chassis does have a clear design aesthetic that I'll give them credit for. It's clean, simple, and doesn't look too ugly in my book. And at 67mm tall, it's definitely small enough to fit under most of my desks. Although, I do think it's a bit misleading when they call it an ITX case. It's not that small, but rather just compact. You still get all the features you need from an ITX case, but with a slightly larger footprint.

Now, let's talk about some of the other compromises this chassis makes. One of the things I liked most about the design is that it does have enough room for a big cooler to be mounted in there. In fact, I was able to fit a 200mm fan up there just by taking the front panel off. But again, they didn't include mounting hardware for it, so you're on your own with that one. And don't even get me started on the filter situation. There is no filter in this case, which means you can just stick your finger in there and feel the air blowing out. Not exactly the most elegant solution.

But hey, at least the chassis does have some redeeming qualities. Like I mentioned earlier, it has USBC ports on top, which is nice for all you Apple fans out there. And it's also pretty cheap, coming in at around $115. That's definitely a plus in my book. However, when you compare it to other ITX cases in the same price range, this one just doesn't hold up. There are better options out there that offer more features and better cooling.

One of those alternatives is the H2 10i from NZXT. Now, I know what you're thinking - "Isn't that case like a thousand dollars?" And yes, it is. But let me tell you, it's worth every penny. It's got all the bells and whistles, including a massive 240mm AIO cooler that can handle even the most demanding systems. And at the end of the day, I think it's just a better case overall.

But what about the Loki Ghost S1? Is that another option to consider? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it's a super small and compact case that's perfect for tiny builds. But on the other hand, it doesn't really offer any significant improvements over this chassis when it comes to cooling. It's more of an aesthetic plaything, designed to look good rather than actually perform.

So what do you guys think? Am I way off base with my criticism of this case, or is there something that I'm missing? Do you have another ITX case in mind that offers better cooling and features at the same price point? Let me know down below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys JC cents here and I'm gonna tell you right now some of the best things come in small packages just ask my wife that's why today we're gonna be taking a look at the Silverstone LD is 0-3 a mini ITX case that we looked at at Computex two years ago but has finally made it to market and they told me that it made a lot of revisions to it since we last saw it specifically about air flow and cooling so let's go and take a look at this guy and see if it stands up to that flaw hates saran wrap the elite X g27 0qg from viewsonic breaks their traditional ugly appearance of gaming monitors by providing an ultra clean design while still delivering gamers the features that they want most features like a 1 millisecond response time IPS 165 Hertz overclocked display black brushed aluminum stem with tilt and swivel mouse and keyboard cable anchors and customizable subtle lighting to learn more about the XG 270 ogq from viewsonic and to see current pricing click the link in the description below and I thought they smelled bad on the outside alright so they loosen serious LD 0-3 small form-factor case with artful blend of engineering and aesthetics I'll be the judge of that I Terra now the outer packing was pretty well I was really bad here's the line I was like so the thing that I like about this case and I had Phil bring his system in case he decides to like this case we can switch it his shift case it's running a little hot it's a pretty case but it's running pretty hot it looks nice but he can't even overclock his his graphics very well I see graphics card either huh he's he's got two a iOS in there but even with the a 120 a IO and a his 9900 K at stock speeds it's getting like into the 80s which i think is far too hot okay first things first this thing is light thing is really light as you would expect with Silverstone it's pretty high quality like the mesh design on the top of that so when I started to say Phil's temperatures just run far too hot the the shift case is nice but it's just the way the airflow is that comes in from the sides and air has to make this crazy 90-degree turn it brings some flow while so they say it brings it some air from the bottom there's no fan on top which I feel is a and there's a fan on top of the but I feel like no fan on top it's just the fatal flaw and it's the reason why our the Corsair one case that I did the Star Wars building worked so well there's only one fin in the entire case in the entire system even and that's only on the top pulling all air through vents and exhausting it out ah okay so this is the top plastic see it's got a nice little angular triangular mesh design the way that motherboard is the motherboard is actually mounted to the top so here's IO bracket right there I'm a does not even have doesn't look like we even have a riser cable or anything through a graphics card so it's essentially an ITX chassis but it's hanging from the top of the case but what that should provide us is all sorts of room for a volume of air because that's what we need we need a volume of air that can be moved and that's what will keep things nice and cool so on the side right here you can see we also have what appears to be able to be an intake fan the filter I think could use a little bit of an improvement I don't really like this design alright it's getting to the rest of this here that's so that's where the power cable goes right there on the top which I don't really like because that means it has to lender out down so once you remove that side panel you gain access to these so there's the 3 tempered glass you can see right here this one's also vented so some air can still come through there yeah I bet you these are some of the changes that they made they talked about making improvements to this chassis and its air flow I bet you that was one of them right there only this extra tabs in case you lose or break one all of our mounting screws pwm fans flow you with a nice little paracord sleeve too it's not all plastic key so this hole right here is what the I put that back on there good good night this is where air comes in for your power supply then it comes out right here so the power supply pulls in air and exhaust here so it's kind of got its own little chamber going looks like the bottom fan is obviously how we are going to be getting air up through the case we have a fan on the top as well it's pretty simple though it's pretty light you can see that your power or your motherboard will go here graphics card will go here power supply goes here what that allows you to do is actually use at all air cooler if you want it so you can use an air cooler right here and it'd be completely unobstructed so this is fills alpha cool that came from his expandable AIO radiator so it's a 120 ml but it's fatter on the outside than typical like these little covers really do extend out more than a standard radiator would so if these fit then we'll know that you could fit oh yeah look at that dude plenty of room yeah so as I say if those fit then you know there's plenty of room to to put you know any radiator you want you can even do like a 60 ml thick 120 although I'm not sure how many of those exist sure they do I'll procore likes to make everything up to 80 mil I think plenty room to do push-pull also because that's a thing that think of the radiator the more you want push pull on there alright so the only thing we can really do to determine what a case is like is building is here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna take the parts from the Red Dead Redemption to build I would decide if I'm gonna complete that build honestly I'm just not feeling it just not feeling it well we can to get back into it anyway we're gonna take the 39 50 X 16 core 32 thread AMD CPU and which is actually a larger than normal motherboard to for the ITX but that's not gonna affect anything let's build in here let's see what the temperatures and stuff are like and then we can give you our true opinions on how this system is or this cases will do temperature testing and all that so let's just sort of fast forward to that point all right as you can see we built in there we went with an air cooler as a few things I want to talk about before we get to any temperature testing I don't even test booted this to see if it works where do we start okay one let's talk about the build quality I know this is not a very expensive case it's a little over a hundred bucks hundred fifteen dollars at the time making this video it's not cheap but it's not expensive either if you will it's in the middle because you can easily buy ITX cases that are $200 and up I'm a little disappointed with the build quality I know that once all the glass side panels are on that it's gonna get a little bit more rigid but the actual structure itself of the way these rivets are put together it's got a crap-ton of flex and I'm not putting look these are finger tips okay so this is that's disappointing to begin with and the reason for that and see if Phil can get in here if you look at the rivets right there yes I know my fingernails are dirty I work on my car too you can see that the metal doesn't go flush against this other metal it's got this kind of a dip in there so if this metal were all flushed up it'd be stronger but you can see that that's exactly where it's flexing there same thing at the top up here that's now any flex that's then being strengthened by the glass is forced being also applied to the glass when you start moving it around and stuff I don't think the glass would break very unlikely but still the a couple of other compromises here one look at how much empty space is in here look at how much empty space is on this side alone this is where your SATA drives would go but let's say for instance you weren't running SATA drives why not make this big enough for a 240 a IO so that you could you know then have more cooling than a single 120 at the bottom yes I know the power supply is here but I feel like there would have been enough room to actually put one right there in fact let me see this is a 240 millimeter 30 mil thick radiator from alpha cool pretty much the same sized radiator you typically find with any AIO if they open that 1/2 an inch more you could have fit a 240 in there so I feel like there's a huge compromise there in terms of cooling because the best you can do for this chassis is one 120 millimeter intake on the top and one 120 millimeter exhaust or the 120 on the bottom 120 on the top so you've got assisted convection here because heat rises this convection and so you have assisted there and at least you can see we've got the air cooler in here assisting with that so the air blows to this fan this fan pushes it through this fan exhausted but it's one of those things where I feel like having a chassis then this open with a single 120 and in AIO think about how empty this would look it would literally look like there's a lot of wasted opportunity there and then if you wanted to even run like the graphics card with its own 120 aio we're not positive we could get one to fit up here at least with this particular chassis it wouldn't work because of the mini dim tube that comes with this particular motherboard you probably could then get the radiator to fit right there as long as it doesn't hang down to low and interfere with your your actual CPU mount this is the thing Phil pointed out you can't mount the fan on the outside on the top because they did this kind of a dimple here and then it's got a little bit of the i/o that covers it so you can't move the fan to the outside to gain some clearance on the inside yeah look at this this is just hollow let's talk about the back one it's all scratched to help because I was building on this wooden table as I've done with many cases and as you can see the anodizing on here or not and this is powder coating seems to be cheap because it scratched the hell out of the back I mean you could call that my fault Jay you should put something down to protect it yes that's true but I've almost every system I built on this table has been down on the table and not scratched it because wood is typically softer than metal now you might notice this Jay why is your power supply flipped around toward the intake as blocks as you can see we can pull air from the inside just fine Camero I started earlier saying hey it's got its own intake so it's separate until you look at the cable so what you're gonna notice here is with this particular power supply and I don't have any other SFX power supplies here to sort of sanity check this with because our club on this power supply is all the way on the edge when we had it flipped the other way and all the way down there this couldn't flip around the other way to match the orientation that the plug has to go in because it would impact the side of the case before the curve of the cord could allow it to fit I tried so then I flipped it around this way no Matt holy crap look at the angle that this cable has to bend to get there there's this hole right here that we were like okay maybe it's supposed to go under the motherboard tray because that's where the cable management happens and then pop out there so it's less of a crazy angle this plug is bigger than this hole it won't fit through this hole because for some reason they made this hole smaller than this hole up here which is the other cable management hole so compromise made there now where you got this crazy Bend on this power supply cable and then the power supply is doing nothing but blocking its own intake because of poor design so some of that probably belongs to the power supply owning some of that issue where I don't know if fractal could have made that more in the center these scratches really bug me I don't know if fractal design could have made that more in the center or rotated the other way or or what let's see what else here graphics card I'm feeling one of the changes that they probably made as you can see the graphics card fans go right against where the glass is so flimsy cable goes right against for the glasses and they added this vent to the glass they're not sure exactly where this goes but once it's on there it'll make sense bet you anything that's why that vent is there because they said they made some changes to the chassis to get better cooling I'm almost positive that that's one of the things they change because you put the fans up against the glass nothing good happens same feeling vertical car are risers vertical mounted graphics cards and a lot of even mid Tower and large tower cases or full tower cases is it gets too close to the glass at least that has a big volume of air it can grab through but this is really kind of separate from the main chamber of air here oh cable management in this you can see my power cables are just floating in there and that's fine in fact I kind of welcome that it makes the case look a little bit less empty but the motherboard tray actually comes off which allows you to route some stuff under that but it's such a thin gap it wasn't really all that helpful show another truth it was actually more frustrating anything trying to get the cables to come through supposed to come out but you know what though it's not all negative we do like this they have this opening on the bottom for larger or longer graphics cards that don't exceed a certain width obviously be able to fit through there so that if the card is is longer than normal it can actually just go through here we're using a founders Edition card because the only other cards we have are like super long triple slot cards that are not gonna fit in this chassis anyway so yeah I couldn't get that I tried I tried to get this in there it's not gonna this won't fit in there another very cool but I'd bet you this thing would have melted to death let's go ahead and just put it together see how the cooling is I expect the cooling on this to be fine alright so let's go and talk about temperatures here a little bit we've got Cinebench r20 just going on loop all of these settings and the bios are out of the box that means all the turbo logic and stuff for AMD is in effect our cores are actually at 3.9 gigahertz all core and it's actually three point eight nine two two point eight one seven there's some slight you know fluctuations that happen with the turbo logic but you can see all the cores are half percent loaded and our temperatures are quite interesting so we're just keeping an eye on package temp right now it spikes to 85 see and and then if you guys hear a lot of noise in the background we're sorry there's a truck that decided to park right outside our door and be in it but whatever when you look at the temperatures here you'll see it spikes to 85 C but under the test you can see right now watch it drops back down to about 75 C I remember the cooler that we have on here is actually the big the B rock but the B Rock to be quiet slim so it's not the biggest cooler you could fit in here you could actually fit one of the dark rock rows in this case if you want but we didn't have the mounting hardware for because I lost it so we went with the slim so we're actually asking a lot of this cooler that's in here to cool a 16 core 32 thread CPU with one fan but because we have the natural natural rise and convection like I showed you guys with the air pushing through the fan and then the exhaust fan grabbing that air and moving it out it's still doing really good now the reason why you've seen this spike in temperature is when the test restarts and it comes off a full load the voltage comes back up because the core clock comes up in between the test as well so if we watch it right now the test is get ready to end we're at one point zero eight seven volts and at 75 C but when the test ends its gonna shoot up to like 1.3 something volts 1.337 temps jump up to like 85 C and then see it it's delayed because it's under load and then it will drop back down the temp 75 because the voltage drops back down so this chassis is actually doing a really good job at exhausting the heat we can feel the heat it's smells like new electronics it's the first time these electronics have actually been heat cycled like this but the chassis is actually doing a really good job I keep eating school now in terms of the the GPU I was concerned that there would be you know not enough space between the glass or maybe even this vent wouldn't be big enough to get the job done and it being filtered but that wasn't the case so we're running a twenty twenty eighty non-super just a regular twenty eighty graphics card in here that we did kind of three different tests with here we did heven which is a DirectX 11 loop which really stresses all the CUDA cores and we saw it go as high as 80 to 83 C with the factory curve with the temperature target and the power limit increased so 80 to 83 is we're at danced around then I went ahead and enabled the user fan curve the default one that's on there which is where the minimum fan speed is 40% and then it ramps up and then the temps dropped to about 76 C a lot better than expected then I put the fans at a hundred percent to see what the temperatures would be like with if you were just like screw acoustics full performance at 100% fan speed it dropped all the way down to 67 so that tells us the chassis is clearly doing its job I still would have liked to have seen the ability to put a fan up top up here like even the 120 down there that we already talked about that you know feels like well they didn't make it to get mounted on top that's dumb but I would have liked to have seen even the opportunity to put like a 200 millimeter fan right here or a 140 or something just to further help air to exhaust we already talked about some of the shortcomings of this particular chassis but I did mention that you could put a bigger cooler in here let's see if I can demonstrate how much air is actually comes through the bottom that's a lot that's blowing directly on the cooler Dean that's a good representation right but there is a filter ah there's no filter right there yeah don't stick your finger in there there's the filter that would be on the bottom I don't like the fact though that you can't put the filter on without tipping the whole case on its back so if you want it to like clean this out while it's sitting on your desk or something you can't just pull the filter out you've got to flip it on its back pull the filter off and then do it again when you go to put it back and I think that's a terrible design accessibility of filters when the system is in its position is definitely a plus have the temperatures change now with this open okay so it came down three C by opening the side panels so looks like we're talking two or three or four C difference with the bottom panel or the whole front side panel off which to be honest I don't think that's awful considering the fact that it is a small form-factor chassis but it's not that small do you think about it Lou the size of this thing you want to see small shut up I know someone said a joke out there you use shut up when I said you want to see small to me this is small but I'm always gonna love this this is still my favorite form factor period right there that is small if we compare it to the size of Phil's evolve shift taller but narrower and still in my opinion a more attractive looking form factor here but this definitely runs a lot cooler than this does this has a whole bunch of compromises in a different way but Phil still in love with the form factor he just lives with the temperatures and he's not like throttling or anything he just get overclocking right but when it comes to the chassis oh yes it's about 115 dollars there's not a lot that occupies this price point for this form factor you either go ultra cheap like the cooler master stuff which is just a square cube with perforated holes in it that you could fit a short graphics card in and then they call it a day or you go way more expensive with like the Loki ghost s1 or the n1 case and all that which are even smaller and more difficult to build in those cases are not built for cooling they are built for aesthetics and factor and then you have to really kind of go over the top to get cooling out of it I feel like if you want to know the truth this feels like it could have been a micro ATX case in terms of its size so it's almost feels like it's too big to be an ITX too many compromises made in terms of cooling options you can fit like I said a giant cooler in there if you wanted let me take the front back off to show you this there is plenty of room to fit one in there as you can see but like I said I lost the mounting hardware for it and the stuff from the slim is not the same for this because it's turned differently in terms of alternatives though then you you have to go with some of the other more traditional cases like the h2 10i from NZXT or the standard h2 10 and whatnot the irony that this is the chassis that I took like the stuff out of so as you can see it's clearly longer but it's shorter you can fit a 240 AIO in this but at the end of the day had to build it to find these shortcomings and I think it's an okay case I just feel like it's trying to be a jack-of-all-trades but it's not really a master of any of them don't what you guys think maybe you guys think I'm way off base and wrong and that's okay if you have any other ITX choices or options in the 120 dollar price point comment down below what you think would be a better chassis for the same price Oh at least we have to give it the positive of having USBC on the top feel really like that because phil has a lot of USBC type stuff because Phil's an Apple fanboywhat's up guys JC cents here and I'm gonna tell you right now some of the best things come in small packages just ask my wife that's why today we're gonna be taking a look at the Silverstone LD is 0-3 a mini ITX case that we looked at at Computex two years ago but has finally made it to market and they told me that it made a lot of revisions to it since we last saw it specifically about air flow and cooling so let's go and take a look at this guy and see if it stands up to that flaw hates saran wrap the elite X g27 0qg from viewsonic breaks their traditional ugly appearance of gaming monitors by providing an ultra clean design while still delivering gamers the features that they want most features like a 1 millisecond response time IPS 165 Hertz overclocked display black brushed aluminum stem with tilt and swivel mouse and keyboard cable anchors and customizable subtle lighting to learn more about the XG 270 ogq from viewsonic and to see current pricing click the link in the description below and I thought they smelled bad on the outside alright so they loosen serious LD 0-3 small form-factor case with artful blend of engineering and aesthetics I'll be the judge of that I Terra now the outer packing was pretty well I was really bad here's the line I was like so the thing that I like about this case and I had Phil bring his system in case he decides to like this case we can switch it his shift case it's running a little hot it's a pretty case but it's running pretty hot it looks nice but he can't even overclock his his graphics very well I see graphics card either huh he's he's got two a iOS in there but even with the a 120 a IO and a his 9900 K at stock speeds it's getting like into the 80s which i think is far too hot okay first things first this thing is light thing is really light as you would expect with Silverstone it's pretty high quality like the mesh design on the top of that so when I started to say Phil's temperatures just run far too hot the the shift case is nice but it's just the way the airflow is that comes in from the sides and air has to make this crazy 90-degree turn it brings some flow while so they say it brings it some air from the bottom there's no fan on top which I feel is a and there's a fan on top of the but I feel like no fan on top it's just the fatal flaw and it's the reason why our the Corsair one case that I did the Star Wars building worked so well there's only one fin in the entire case in the entire system even and that's only on the top pulling all air through vents and exhausting it out ah okay so this is the top plastic see it's got a nice little angular triangular mesh design the way that motherboard is the motherboard is actually mounted to the top so here's IO bracket right there I'm a does not even have doesn't look like we even have a riser cable or anything through a graphics card so it's essentially an ITX chassis but it's hanging from the top of the case but what that should provide us is all sorts of room for a volume of air because that's what we need we need a volume of air that can be moved and that's what will keep things nice and cool so on the side right here you can see we also have what appears to be able to be an intake fan the filter I think could use a little bit of an improvement I don't really like this design alright it's getting to the rest of this here that's so that's where the power cable goes right there on the top which I don't really like because that means it has to lender out down so once you remove that side panel you gain access to these so there's the 3 tempered glass you can see right here this one's also vented so some air can still come through there yeah I bet you these are some of the changes that they made they talked about making improvements to this chassis and its air flow I bet you that was one of them right there only this extra tabs in case you lose or break one all of our mounting screws pwm fans flow you with a nice little paracord sleeve too it's not all plastic key so this hole right here is what the I put that back on there good good night this is where air comes in for your power supply then it comes out right here so the power supply pulls in air and exhaust here so it's kind of got its own little chamber going looks like the bottom fan is obviously how we are going to be getting air up through the case we have a fan on the top as well it's pretty simple though it's pretty light you can see that your power or your motherboard will go here graphics card will go here power supply goes here what that allows you to do is actually use at all air cooler if you want it so you can use an air cooler right here and it'd be completely unobstructed so this is fills alpha cool that came from his expandable AIO radiator so it's a 120 ml but it's fatter on the outside than typical like these little covers really do extend out more than a standard radiator would so if these fit then we'll know that you could fit oh yeah look at that dude plenty of room yeah so as I say if those fit then you know there's plenty of room to to put you know any radiator you want you can even do like a 60 ml thick 120 although I'm not sure how many of those exist sure they do I'll procore likes to make everything up to 80 mil I think plenty room to do push-pull also because that's a thing that think of the radiator the more you want push pull on there alright so the only thing we can really do to determine what a case is like is building is here's what we're gonna do I'm gonna take the parts from the Red Dead Redemption to build I would decide if I'm gonna complete that build honestly I'm just not feeling it just not feeling it well we can to get back into it anyway we're gonna take the 39 50 X 16 core 32 thread AMD CPU and which is actually a larger than normal motherboard to for the ITX but that's not gonna affect anything let's build in here let's see what the temperatures and stuff are like and then we can give you our true opinions on how this system is or this cases will do temperature testing and all that so let's just sort of fast forward to that point all right as you can see we built in there we went with an air cooler as a few things I want to talk about before we get to any temperature testing I don't even test booted this to see if it works where do we start okay one let's talk about the build quality I know this is not a very expensive case it's a little over a hundred bucks hundred fifteen dollars at the time making this video it's not cheap but it's not expensive either if you will it's in the middle because you can easily buy ITX cases that are $200 and up I'm a little disappointed with the build quality I know that once all the glass side panels are on that it's gonna get a little bit more rigid but the actual structure itself of the way these rivets are put together it's got a crap-ton of flex and I'm not putting look these are finger tips okay so this is that's disappointing to begin with and the reason for that and see if Phil can get in here if you look at the rivets right there yes I know my fingernails are dirty I work on my car too you can see that the metal doesn't go flush against this other metal it's got this kind of a dip in there so if this metal were all flushed up it'd be stronger but you can see that that's exactly where it's flexing there same thing at the top up here that's now any flex that's then being strengthened by the glass is forced being also applied to the glass when you start moving it around and stuff I don't think the glass would break very unlikely but still the a couple of other compromises here one look at how much empty space is in here look at how much empty space is on this side alone this is where your SATA drives would go but let's say for instance you weren't running SATA drives why not make this big enough for a 240 a IO so that you could you know then have more cooling than a single 120 at the bottom yes I know the power supply is here but I feel like there would have been enough room to actually put one right there in fact let me see this is a 240 millimeter 30 mil thick radiator from alpha cool pretty much the same sized radiator you typically find with any AIO if they open that 1/2 an inch more you could have fit a 240 in there so I feel like there's a huge compromise there in terms of cooling because the best you can do for this chassis is one 120 millimeter intake on the top and one 120 millimeter exhaust or the 120 on the bottom 120 on the top so you've got assisted convection here because heat rises this convection and so you have assisted there and at least you can see we've got the air cooler in here assisting with that so the air blows to this fan this fan pushes it through this fan exhausted but it's one of those things where I feel like having a chassis then this open with a single 120 and in AIO think about how empty this would look it would literally look like there's a lot of wasted opportunity there and then if you wanted to even run like the graphics card with its own 120 aio we're not positive we could get one to fit up here at least with this particular chassis it wouldn't work because of the mini dim tube that comes with this particular motherboard you probably could then get the radiator to fit right there as long as it doesn't hang down to low and interfere with your your actual CPU mount this is the thing Phil pointed out you can't mount the fan on the outside on the top because they did this kind of a dimple here and then it's got a little bit of the i/o that covers it so you can't move the fan to the outside to gain some clearance on the inside yeah look at this this is just hollow let's talk about the back one it's all scratched to help because I was building on this wooden table as I've done with many cases and as you can see the anodizing on here or not and this is powder coating seems to be cheap because it scratched the hell out of the back I mean you could call that my fault Jay you should put something down to protect it yes that's true but I've almost every system I built on this table has been down on the table and not scratched it because wood is typically softer than metal now you might notice this Jay why is your power supply flipped around toward the intake as blocks as you can see we can pull air from the inside just fine Camero I started earlier saying hey it's got its own intake so it's separate until you look at the cable so what you're gonna notice here is with this particular power supply and I don't have any other SFX power supplies here to sort of sanity check this with because our club on this power supply is all the way on the edge when we had it flipped the other way and all the way down there this couldn't flip around the other way to match the orientation that the plug has to go in because it would impact the side of the case before the curve of the cord could allow it to fit I tried so then I flipped it around this way no Matt holy crap look at the angle that this cable has to bend to get there there's this hole right here that we were like okay maybe it's supposed to go under the motherboard tray because that's where the cable management happens and then pop out there so it's less of a crazy angle this plug is bigger than this hole it won't fit through this hole because for some reason they made this hole smaller than this hole up here which is the other cable management hole so compromise made there now where you got this crazy Bend on this power supply cable and then the power supply is doing nothing but blocking its own intake because of poor design so some of that probably belongs to the power supply owning some of that issue where I don't know if fractal could have made that more in the center these scratches really bug me I don't know if fractal design could have made that more in the center or rotated the other way or or what let's see what else here graphics card I'm feeling one of the changes that they probably made as you can see the graphics card fans go right against where the glass is so flimsy cable goes right against for the glasses and they added this vent to the glass they're not sure exactly where this goes but once it's on there it'll make sense bet you anything that's why that vent is there because they said they made some changes to the chassis to get better cooling I'm almost positive that that's one of the things they change because you put the fans up against the glass nothing good happens same feeling vertical car are risers vertical mounted graphics cards and a lot of even mid Tower and large tower cases or full tower cases is it gets too close to the glass at least that has a big volume of air it can grab through but this is really kind of separate from the main chamber of air here oh cable management in this you can see my power cables are just floating in there and that's fine in fact I kind of welcome that it makes the case look a little bit less empty but the motherboard tray actually comes off which allows you to route some stuff under that but it's such a thin gap it wasn't really all that helpful show another truth it was actually more frustrating anything trying to get the cables to come through supposed to come out but you know what though it's not all negative we do like this they have this opening on the bottom for larger or longer graphics cards that don't exceed a certain width obviously be able to fit through there so that if the card is is longer than normal it can actually just go through here we're using a founders Edition card because the only other cards we have are like super long triple slot cards that are not gonna fit in this chassis anyway so yeah I couldn't get that I tried I tried to get this in there it's not gonna this won't fit in there another very cool but I'd bet you this thing would have melted to death let's go ahead and just put it together see how the cooling is I expect the cooling on this to be fine alright so let's go and talk about temperatures here a little bit we've got Cinebench r20 just going on loop all of these settings and the bios are out of the box that means all the turbo logic and stuff for AMD is in effect our cores are actually at 3.9 gigahertz all core and it's actually three point eight nine two two point eight one seven there's some slight you know fluctuations that happen with the turbo logic but you can see all the cores are half percent loaded and our temperatures are quite interesting so we're just keeping an eye on package temp right now it spikes to 85 see and and then if you guys hear a lot of noise in the background we're sorry there's a truck that decided to park right outside our door and be in it but whatever when you look at the temperatures here you'll see it spikes to 85 C but under the test you can see right now watch it drops back down to about 75 C I remember the cooler that we have on here is actually the big the B rock but the B Rock to be quiet slim so it's not the biggest cooler you could fit in here you could actually fit one of the dark rock rows in this case if you want but we didn't have the mounting hardware for because I lost it so we went with the slim so we're actually asking a lot of this cooler that's in here to cool a 16 core 32 thread CPU with one fan but because we have the natural natural rise and convection like I showed you guys with the air pushing through the fan and then the exhaust fan grabbing that air and moving it out it's still doing really good now the reason why you've seen this spike in temperature is when the test restarts and it comes off a full load the voltage comes back up because the core clock comes up in between the test as well so if we watch it right now the test is get ready to end we're at one point zero eight seven volts and at 75 C but when the test ends its gonna shoot up to like 1.3 something volts 1.337 temps jump up to like 85 C and then see it it's delayed because it's under load and then it will drop back down the temp 75 because the voltage drops back down so this chassis is actually doing a really good job at exhausting the heat we can feel the heat it's smells like new electronics it's the first time these electronics have actually been heat cycled like this but the chassis is actually doing a really good job I keep eating school now in terms of the the GPU I was concerned that there would be you know not enough space between the glass or maybe even this vent wouldn't be big enough to get the job done and it being filtered but that wasn't the case so we're running a twenty twenty eighty non-super just a regular twenty eighty graphics card in here that we did kind of three different tests with here we did heven which is a DirectX 11 loop which really stresses all the CUDA cores and we saw it go as high as 80 to 83 C with the factory curve with the temperature target and the power limit increased so 80 to 83 is we're at danced around then I went ahead and enabled the user fan curve the default one that's on there which is where the minimum fan speed is 40% and then it ramps up and then the temps dropped to about 76 C a lot better than expected then I put the fans at a hundred percent to see what the temperatures would be like with if you were just like screw acoustics full performance at 100% fan speed it dropped all the way down to 67 so that tells us the chassis is clearly doing its job I still would have liked to have seen the ability to put a fan up top up here like even the 120 down there that we already talked about that you know feels like well they didn't make it to get mounted on top that's dumb but I would have liked to have seen even the opportunity to put like a 200 millimeter fan right here or a 140 or something just to further help air to exhaust we already talked about some of the shortcomings of this particular chassis but I did mention that you could put a bigger cooler in here let's see if I can demonstrate how much air is actually comes through the bottom that's a lot that's blowing directly on the cooler Dean that's a good representation right but there is a filter ah there's no filter right there yeah don't stick your finger in there there's the filter that would be on the bottom I don't like the fact though that you can't put the filter on without tipping the whole case on its back so if you want it to like clean this out while it's sitting on your desk or something you can't just pull the filter out you've got to flip it on its back pull the filter off and then do it again when you go to put it back and I think that's a terrible design accessibility of filters when the system is in its position is definitely a plus have the temperatures change now with this open okay so it came down three C by opening the side panels so looks like we're talking two or three or four C difference with the bottom panel or the whole front side panel off which to be honest I don't think that's awful considering the fact that it is a small form-factor chassis but it's not that small do you think about it Lou the size of this thing you want to see small shut up I know someone said a joke out there you use shut up when I said you want to see small to me this is small but I'm always gonna love this this is still my favorite form factor period right there that is small if we compare it to the size of Phil's evolve shift taller but narrower and still in my opinion a more attractive looking form factor here but this definitely runs a lot cooler than this does this has a whole bunch of compromises in a different way but Phil still in love with the form factor he just lives with the temperatures and he's not like throttling or anything he just get overclocking right but when it comes to the chassis oh yes it's about 115 dollars there's not a lot that occupies this price point for this form factor you either go ultra cheap like the cooler master stuff which is just a square cube with perforated holes in it that you could fit a short graphics card in and then they call it a day or you go way more expensive with like the Loki ghost s1 or the n1 case and all that which are even smaller and more difficult to build in those cases are not built for cooling they are built for aesthetics and factor and then you have to really kind of go over the top to get cooling out of it I feel like if you want to know the truth this feels like it could have been a micro ATX case in terms of its size so it's almost feels like it's too big to be an ITX too many compromises made in terms of cooling options you can fit like I said a giant cooler in there if you wanted let me take the front back off to show you this there is plenty of room to fit one in there as you can see but like I said I lost the mounting hardware for it and the stuff from the slim is not the same for this because it's turned differently in terms of alternatives though then you you have to go with some of the other more traditional cases like the h2 10i from NZXT or the standard h2 10 and whatnot the irony that this is the chassis that I took like the stuff out of so as you can see it's clearly longer but it's shorter you can fit a 240 AIO in this but at the end of the day had to build it to find these shortcomings and I think it's an okay case I just feel like it's trying to be a jack-of-all-trades but it's not really a master of any of them don't what you guys think maybe you guys think I'm way off base and wrong and that's okay if you have any other ITX choices or options in the 120 dollar price point comment down below what you think would be a better chassis for the same price Oh at least we have to give it the positive of having USBC on the top feel really like that because phil has a lot of USBC type stuff because Phil's an Apple fanboy\n"