The 207 case is one of the best performing cases in its class at a competitive price. We've seen it go as low as $60 for the non-RGB variant, which has been frequent recently, but it's a completely different class of performance than what we've tested anytime recently. The 2O6 is sort of the closest that we've tested recently, but even that is $20 more expensive. When you factor in the price again, the 207 holds the new crown for the best performance for the price and nothing else that we've tested has come close.

The biggest problem with the 207 is the cable management and the power supply fit. The problem with getting the side panel on over the power supply and its cables is potentially a huge obstacle for some cable-heavy or thicker cable configurations. It's not shared by any of the other cases we've mentioned, which makes it a concern for builders who are less experienced or maybe just less patient. We recommend choosing a 150mm deep power supply rather than 160, and opting for slimmer cables in terms of thickness, depending on your power supply and the cables you use.

There is a risk that the side panel just won't easily fit and you'll get annoyed enough to reconsider some of the part options. Flat slim cables have a better chance of working without issue, but it's something we think is more of a challenge for builders who are less experienced or maybe just less patient. If the case were more expensive at $80, it would be a much larger component of a review in a much more critical way. However, due to the price, it's something that we can get over.

We had some complaints about smaller things like the tab for the power supply filter being pulled out and the power supply breathability, but these are not anywhere near as big of a complaint as the cable management issue. The build quality on this case is excellent, with the top panel being solidly constructed, reflecting across most of the way the front panel attaches. The mesh part is pretty nice, and they've really done a good job with building it in a way that feels like a case worth a little more than the current price.

The 207's build quality is on par with some higher-end cases, making it one of the most competitive cases on the market for its price. We think this is one of the most well-built options in its class, and it definitely gets a recommendation from us. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when building with this case: planning ahead and patience can go a long way in ensuring that your build turns out well.

We're starting to work through more of these cases as they come out, including some new ones from Fant Texas. We'll be reviewing them and adding them to the charts, so if you see a case that's pretty new or one that you'd like us to test, let us know in the comments below. We also want to thank our audience for keeping an eye on cases coming out soon or things they saw at Computex that we could review. This would help us keep up with the latest and greatest in PC case design and functionality.

We have a ton of case reviews posted in the last two months, including six or seven different ones. We've been playing around with airflow animations on many of them, so be sure to check back for more content from us. As always, you can support us directly by grabbing one of our shirts, an anti-static PC Building mod mat, or a solder project mat from the store at gamersnexus.net. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you all next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the new best performing case on our thermal charts and it's $80 this is the lean Lee lanol 207 and the reason it performs so well is because they've moved the power supply to the Front Bottom of the case and what that does is it opens up the traditional shroud top in the case for two intake fans directly into the GPU additionally lean Lee has made it so that the front of the case is shaped to fit these two sunken 140 m fans and at the back it is entirely ventilated with wide perity and spacing of the holes to provide a lot of exhaust here for the positive pressure and then a lot of intake here from a usability perspective sometimes it struggles with some aspects like cable management where there's not a lot of depth here which really just means that you don't have a lot of help or compensation the threshold for bulging cables on this particular case is pretty low you see that we've got this nice Bend here where that middle snap was not snap is that the uh is that the past tense of snap snap closing the right side panel isn't always easy especially if you have cables with a thicker gauge wire and sleeving or accessories that add a ton of cabling the side panel is toolless the back compartment is shallow and the power supplies orientation complicates power supply length requirements and cable Bend angles so the lanol 207 is an extracise compromise but some of those compromises don't need to exist today we're reviewing the 207 with our new case testing methodology and the lanol series has actually been one of lean Le's most aggressive and competitive over the years the 215 and the 216 that we looked at previously were among those and this case in 2024 at $80 shows a very aggressive lean Lee let's get into it before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failures we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexis or click the link below the Lan Quil series was lean Le's departure from the expensive aluminum cases several years ago the L 215 was about $70 when we reviewed it in 2020 that case impressed us this one's close to that we saw the 207 at computex this year and we've spotted a few changes to the case since that showing the weird removable plate at the bottom of the front panel is simply gone the bottom intake fans are conventional rather than reverse blade and the side panel vent is smaller none of these changes are meaningful from a consumer perspective the removable plate never had an assigned function anyway other than to possibly be DLC add-ons and the bottom intake fans look basically the same and the functional area of the side vent hasn't changed overall today we like this case we have a couple of negatives to talk about which are going to be the power supply and cabling situation but since we're mostly positive we'll start with the basics and the positives the paneling pulls apart in three primary sections excluding the top and the front there's a typical glass panel here there's a lower quarter panel that's mesh and ventilated and this exposes that chamber that's different where this is your traditional power supply shroud and power supply location notice though this this is covering the power supply and they've sunken the fans here by a little bit to further expose them to access to air give some room for the gpus and then instead of pulling air in through the bottom and elevating the case say on feet about an inch up like that they end up just flattening the bottom filling it in with steel and making it drive cages with a 3 and 1 half in Drive there's still plenty of space here for air intake and it pulls all the air in through the uh heavily ventilated side and then on this other side this is the the third of the three side panels there's that lower mesh section here without a filter for either of them which we agree with talk about that later to pull air in through the other side for the pans now the last location that air comes in is going to be the back of the case where because this is positive pressure all of this will be exhaust and then that ends up as actually intake this time it's going to go straight in through there into this sunken fan and then straight up into the GP the panels are also exceptionally sturdy for a case of this price where they're using this folded over steel these columns on either side and the front of the top panel which gives it some rigidity so you don't get that cheap stamped steel wobble we get in a lot of the sub $100 cases and corsair's 200 plus doll 6500d and then it just snaps in with sort of typical studs and snaps solution the sturdiness of this top panel also appears to be a direct response to the issues we found with the lanol 216 previously where there was actually about a half a cenim depression in the center of the top panel so they fixed that now the front panel also uses folded over steel if we look at the top of the front panel you'll see two screws that are driven through two magnets so those magnets just stick and catch to the folded over steel up top which also helps with rigidity but also just provides that magnetized surface and then the front panel is a heavily ventilated mesh or an ultra fine mesh as we've been calling it uh and this means that le le doesn't need to use a separate dust filter this is actually how we prefer to see cases done if the mesh is fine enough it will serve the vast majority of the purpose of a dust filter anyway and you lose that issue of uh the filter lining up in a way you don't want with the holes of the front mesh causing airf flow problems and this case is all about air flow and performance so fortunately they they noticed that would be an issue for that and they just went with an ultra fine easily cleanable filter via the mesh panel instead the entire front panel can be removed there's really no reason to do it though if you do so anyway the io cables have been screwed down to the corner of the panel for strain relief the paracity of the back of the case is also at insane levels for mostly good reasons we typically see much smaller holes with thicker steel resulting in a lot less breathability but because this case is fully positive pressure we don't really need to worry about dust ingis from the rear of the case it'll get pushed out naturally this shows an attention to detail that illustrates Le and Lee actually seems to understand why you'd make the decisions like denser holes for intake and wider for exhaust but there is one missed point in that attention to detail category for the rear ventilation which is as we talked about earlier air comes in through here so this is a situation where it actually should be either an ultra fine mesh or they should just put a separate dust filter in there uh because that's going to be the primary Place dust gets in it's also the most likely it's at the floor level it's probably pretty close to a wall in your house uh and so that's going to be where dust kind of accumulates anyway so we do think that's an oversight for the dust management where we thought the front panel did just fine overall Le and Le has come a long way since we criticized some of its older cases for airf flow problems and it's really starting to show a Mastery of thermal design with the small details the only fit and finish issue we noticed out of the box were some imperfections and scratches in the infinity mirror fan hubs but these aren't visible when the fans are spinning at least on ours the motherboard tray is kind of interesting too it's offset from the standard creating an ATX sized indent this means that the case is absolutely not compatible with any so-called eatx boards and that there's only about 1 cm of clearance behind the motherboard tray but it also means that compatibility with the motherboard Edge connectors on boards that have them is excellent lean Lee also claims that the offset better aligns with the GPU for bottom intake fans but cable routing is the more tangible benefit with the exception that sinking it does reduce the kale management space back here so it's a positive for the edge connectors and not really for the backside front iio is extremely basic it's two USB 3.0 type A One USB 3.1 type- c one audio jack and the power button the flat flexible type-c Cable in particular is the least annoying one we've worked with so that was nice to see the case also has a convenient all-in-one front panel connector however we'd actually rather see the old-fashioned two pin connector here because it's just for the power button there's no reset button ially these would combine power reset and power led the case has two vibration damped Drive mounts in the floor for a single three and a half or 2 and 1/2 in Drive each the drive mounting holes are suboptimal though SATA cables have to be bent at an uncomfortable angle to fit and the 2 and 1/2 in mounting holes could have easily been moved to alleviate this each pair of fans has a four pin fan connector and a three- pin argb connector and the two fans within each pair are linked by proprietary connectors we'll begrudgingly accept this as a compromise since it does cut the number of fan cables in half in a case that already has Cable Management challenges the downside is that it's impractical to replace or reconfigure individual fans contributing to a much larger downside of having to go through lean Lee for Replacements if one breaks the front and bottom fan mounts aren't compatible with any sizes other than the ones that are pre-installed so that's 140 mil front 120 mil bottom on top of that the front mount is built around lean Le 30 mm thick fans and all four stock fans are attached with radiator screws if you still want to replace any lean Lee includes 16 additional screws sized for 25 mm thick fans all of this is non-standard and deviates from what an experienced Builder would expect it's workable but it'll impose atypical limitations on fan compatibility if you want to change them for instance you typically have 120 mm options where 140 mm fans install here that's not the case now the downside of this is the same as the upside which is that there's one less set of fan rails in here to accommodate different sizes so you can see we've basically just got spots for the four corners to install for 140s where in a lot of cases you'll see those doubled up rails to accommodate multiple sizes the downside of that is it's a lot more obstructions as small as they are they add up and so lean Le here seems to be going for a this is the way you build it to get the best air flow and that's it and for performance that's fine with us as long as it looks good in the thermal section it's at the cost of flexibility so it's a very focused airflow approach lean Lee describes the 207 as a quote compact matx sized case with ATX compatibility which is only true by lean Le standards the 207 is the same size of a normal mid Tower it has almost exactly the same dimensions as a fractal North in fact it's really not much different than most of the cases in this comparison shot the Silverstone 515 XR is an example of a truly compact ATX case or the Easy Bake Cooler Master q500l now to some of the complaints the power supply for starters actually really the primary one where the power supply area on the spec sheet is compatible with up to 160 mm lawn power supplies it's rotated 90° but even our 150 mm lawn power supply is crafted here and 150 is about the smallest you get without dropping out of the ATX spec because of the rotation cables are pointed at the toolless side panel and have to bend sharply to Route using flat cables helps as we'll show in footage but this is a situation where you'll need to consider how the cables in your power supply are sleeved we'd also strongly recommend sticking to 150 mm rather than using the maximum 160 under spec another strong recommendation would be using only modular power supplies for this case although those are pretty common these days the power supply shroud is effectively a fan Mount And even if you could find a way to stick extra cables under it it' interfere with the intake fans and the entire point of the design all of this would only be an inconvenience except that the steel side panel is tooless if you're using bulkier cables with individually braided sleeves like in our example it could be possible to choose a power supplying cable combination that make it extremely difficult to snugly close the side panel it's still possible to do and we did it with these bulky sleeved cables to prove that but this took a good amount of time to manage and flatten we'd strongly recommend flat cables like the ones shown in the 207 at computex the more accessories and pcie power cables especially that you run the more difficulty you're going to face managing the cables in this particular case screws for the side panel wouldn't help this by allowing more tolerance for cable bulge now the manual illustrates installing a lean Le Edge power supply which looks like it could help with this problem however the 207 is $80 and the cheapest Edge power supplies cost at least $130 to $140 this is a mismatch of the most likely buyer for the case and The Edge power power supplies the illustration also shows The Edge power supply being installed fan side up which isn't an officially supported option for other power supplies the usual arrangement of mounting holes requires installing standard ATX power supplies fan down in the 207 with only 1 cm of clearance above the table now other than the thermal benefit that we've already talked about for moving the power supply the other benefit for all these down sides is that the modular cables are really easy to access so that is nice if you want to add one later you forgot to plug one in it's a little more accessible it's just it comes with all those downsides depending on the cables you use and the power supply length so there is one other downside though with the power supply setup which is the thermal situation this thing we'll try to get a shot of the bottom is really not that elevated from the table or the floor surface there's not a lot of depth here to pull air in and the filter itself is actually consuming like half of the actual available sort of Gap in there for breathability so this is going to put the power supply I meant I meant to to do that uh anyway the bottom intake so it's very restricted for the power supply now uh objectively it's going to make the power supply hotter whether it's too hot is kind of a question we don't currently answer the answer in most situations is probably no uh but it could be better and one of the things this made us think about is as you all know we've recently revised our testing methodology but there's something that because of this case I might go and AD which is I might attach a thermal couple on the power supply somewhere maybe a apfc fed or something and start pulling the power supply internal temperatures as well just to start testing that in case your us it's not something we normally need to do because they're normally pretty exposed power supplies are very resilient a lot of Standards test them at 40 to 50° Cel ambient so it's not normally needed but something that's made us think we might do either way suboptimal spacing for the floor for the power Supply the power supply filter is another small design fault it's easiest to lift the case to remove the filter which isn't a deal breaker but could be fixed with a more accessible tab back to the cable management side in the back of the case the attachment points for the built-in velcro straps are angled so that straps curl over as they're inserted which is a much bigger quality of life Improvement than it sounds like the manual describes intended cable paths most of which are obvious but there are specific routes for 24 pin streamer cables and for CPU 8 Pin cables the eight pins are held in by plastic hooks the hooks would work better we think if they were flipped though there isn't a suggested path for GPU power cables in the manual but this is something we would have liked to see for new Builders as for vertical gpus the expansion slots are bridgeless so other vertical GPU add-in kits may work but lean Le specifically markets its Universal four slot bracket as demonstrated at computex this bracket uses a solution that would block the bottom intake fans and we don't recommend using it it's also basically the entire point of buying this case is pure thermal performance so as soon as you turn that GPU into a vertical GPU uh pushes it closer to the glass you potentially block off those bottom fans it kind of kills a lot of the point so we just don't recommend vertical for this one finally for radiators it may technically be possible to get a 280 mm radiator installed in the front of the case but it need to have exactly the right hole placement lean Le doesn't claim any formal radiator support anywhere except for the top of the case and we agree 120 mm wide radiators fit more easily than 140 for the top which may make CP power cutouts difficult to reach with the 140 wide ones and now we're going to get into the thermal testing so in addition to testing it with all of our standard approaches we did some optional tests such as taping off uh with two layers of tape this side vent just to see if it did anything now in some cases that will definitely matter in this case it is so heavily ventilated in this this side and in the back of the case it might not that's what the testing's for we have a couple others we'll look at too let's get into the charts the 207 is one of the cheapest cases on our current charts the new charts we did this year and out of recent reviews it lands between the $100 Silverstone 514 X and the $68 515 XR we also retested the older lancool 216 which is actually still available for around 100 bucks in terms of fan layout the 27 is most similar to the more expensive antech flux Pro now for the 216 retest we only ran the basic tests and standard mode there's also an air cooling mode they call it but in our original review we found that this helps the GPU thermals while simultaneous L hurting CPU thermals with our bench Hardware you can see our Lan coil 2 and6 review for more detail on Alternate configurations including the external fan bracket attached to the back of the case the 207 is a loud case with all fans at full speed but we'll start with noise normalized results instead for this tasting all case fans are lowered to reach a Target noise level of 27 DBA measured at 1 meter in our Hemi and aoic chamber with CPU and GPU fan speeds controlled and constant we'll start with noise normalized GPU thermals since those those bottom fans should help there the GPU temperature averaged 42° above ambient 47 on memory and 55 hotspot that's 1 Dee better than the 216 in each category but still close impressively the fractal torrent Remains the leader in this particular test it's not always true it won't be in later test but it is here it has its own bottom intake fans that feed the GPU directly which helps we haven't always seen a benefit from shroud top intake fans but cases like the 207 and the flux Pro that commit to building the case around the concept do show good results Al if anything it's a testament to the 216s cooling that it comes close to the 207 without any shroud fans the antech flux Pros average GPU temperature was about 1 degree cooler than the 207's there's no contest versus the 514 X and 515 XR which fall in the complete opposite end of the chart the 207 is in a different class in many ways but lean Lee has priced it so aggressively that we have to make the comparison it undercuts the 514 X and it's only $12 over the 515 XR at which model fractal's pop air is another price competitive case but it lands at the bottom of this chart it's still a good case and when it's on sale it's impressively cheap for the quality you get but the 207 is just thermally Superior here's the CPU noise normalized chart instantly the lancool 207 is tied for chart leader and CPU thermals the average all course CPU temperature was 41° celi above ambient and 44° on just the Pees the 216s numbers round differently but its results were near identical to the 207's and within error the 216 was one of our all-time best performers for noise normalized CPU cooling when we originally reviewed it so that's good news for the 207 the 207 technically tops our updated chart with an error of the 216 but the antech flux Pro is also within a 1 degree margin the flux Pro is at least $180 though which puts it into a different price class and we haven't looked at the non-pro yet in comparison to the more closely price matched 514 X at 48° and 515 XR at 53° allore the 207 has a massive lead so far the 207 looks like another Lan coil with an unbeatable price to Performance ratio at full speed the 207 sounds like a server rack the 41.6 DBA result ties the 216 the 216 is the best performer when allowed to Brute Force its performance by fan speed roughly tying the 207 when we remove its front panel to test restrictions with the panel the 207 ran at 41.6 De for peores or about 2° warmer than without a front panel as far as restrictions go it's pretty good actually the panel is not substantially hurting performance unlike a lot of other cases that we've tested if you buy the optional filter that would change but two degrees in exchange for something that'll uh first of all cover the fans but also filter some of the Dust it's really not a bad trade-off using two layers of gaffer tape over the small mesh section on the steel panel would affect GPU thermals if anything so it's not surprising that it had no impact on CPU thermals the 207 at 41.6 De ties the flux Pro for performance again though the noise normalized results are a better case toase comparison now for GPU temperatures at full speed in the same test the GPU was 38° above ambient taping the side panel vent actually did nothing here we think this is simply because the bottom intake fans have plenty of other ventilation available through the mesh on the opposite side of the Shroud and the wide openen unfiltered vent at the rear of the case if these inlets had been compromised in some way or minimized it might have mattered more to have that opposite side as intake uh it still doesn't hurt to have it and some configurations it's possible it helps more but in ours just didn't really do anything for GPU thermals GPU thermals effectively tied the flux Pro but with some back and forth over the memory and hotspot temperatures no matter what though the 207 sits alongside the torrent and the flux pro at the top of this chart the 216 fell behind here with an average GB temperature of 43 degrees above ambient which is still excellent but not as good as the Brute Force bottom intake of the 207 our standardized Fant test uses three noctua fans always the same ones there's two 140s front and one 120 rear exhaust all at 100% speed we regularly explain the limit ations of this testing because it is imperfect like most testing and you can learn about those and our methodology in the link in the description below this allows us to remove stock fans as a variable and compare just the enclosures with cases like the 207 the comparison is theoretical since it doesn't make any sense to replace the stock fans at least not like this but viewers request it so here's the data our standard fan configuration was obviously worse for GPU thermals than the stock configuration with the standard fans average GPU temperature was 43° above ambient 48 for the memory and 56 for the Hotpot on the CPU with standardized fans we measured CPU temperatures at 38° above ambient all core and 42 for the peores this is within error of the top scoring torrent mesh fronted cases with straightforward front to back airflow patterns do well in this test and the 207 CPU thermals are particularly good because the front fan slots are biased High sending more air above the level of the GPU back plate we usually try to position the intake fans for a better balance with the GPU thermals but it's not an option in the 207 the vrm and system memory are located close to the CPU in our test system so for this chart it makes sense that a case with good CPU thermals would have good thermals in those two categories as well the 207 slightly outperformed the flux Pro for the lowest memory temperature for the ddr5 at 21 degrees above ambient tied with the torrent The vrm was tied with the flux pro at 27° for the fet that we measure but that's tied at the top of the chart the 216 was warmer for both sensors 23° for the system memory and 28 for the vrm all right so like the lanoil 26 and the 215 the 217 is an extremely competitive case primarily because of its price but it's also one of the best performers thermally it tops a lot of these charts or basically ties with some of its closest competition including land ley's own 216 uh that we've retested we haven't rerun the 215 but the cases that perform equivalently are more expensive like the antech flux Pro or they're just older like the torrent and more expensive in that case and the cases that are in the same general price category that we've tested recently perform worse like the Silverstone 514 X Le Lee already has some strong self competition in this area including again the 206 but the 207 is even cheaper than the 216 which typically they have a $20 price difference fantex has its new cases from compex coming out soon and those should give the 207 some competition but they're not here yet and they might end up a little more expensive but we're not sure we'll see when that finalizes the fractal pop air remains a good quality Case in terms of build quality and lately it's been kind of stupidly cheap we've seen it as low as 60 bucks for the non RGB variant when it's on sale which actually has been frequent recently but it is a completely different class of performance the 207 holds the new crown for the best performance for the price and nothing else that we've tested anytime recently is even close when you factor in the price again the 2on six is sort of the closest that we've tested recently but even that is 20 bucks more the biggest problem with the 207 is the cable management and the power supply fit the problem with getting the side panel on over the power supply and its cables is potentially a huge obstacle for some cable heavy or thicker cable configurations and it's not shared by any of the other cases we've mentioned this is something we really want to emphasize because it's normally safe to just kind of buy whatever power supply and assume it fits in this case we recommend choosing a 150 mm deep power supply rather than 160 and opting for Slimmer cables in terms of the thickness depending on your power supply and the cables you use there is a series ious risk that the side panel just won't easily fit and you'll get annoyed enough to reconsider some of the part options so flat slim cables have a better chance of working without issue this is something we think is more of a challenge for Builders who are less experienced or maybe just less patient if you have the patience to sit there and really route the cables I mean you're only doing it once so not too bad uh this would be a much larger component of a in a much more critical way in this review if the case were more expensive uh at $80 it is definitely a factor it is something you absolutely need to be aware of uh but it's something that we can get over because of the price so that's sort of the only major issue we encountered we had some complaints about smaller things like just the tab for the power supply uh filter being pulled out and the power supply breathability but these are not anywhere near as big of a complaint as the C management build quality on this case is excellent so the top panel as we showed earlier really solidly constructed and this kind of reflects across most of the the way the front panel attaches for just the mesh part is pretty nice as well so they've really done a good job with building this in a way that feels like uh a case that is worth a little more than the current price it's it's more like the $80 case of six years ago rather than today if you plan ahead then uh and you have the patience to thoroughly route the cables and if you can stick to a shorter power Spide it'll be okay to work with if a little bit more annoying than cases that have more space uh and and we think this is one of the most competitive cases on the market for its price so definitely gets a recommendation there with that uh exception of planning ahead for the cables now there aren't a lot of well- built options in this price class we're starting to work through more of them uh Fant Texas things coming out we're getting into review montech has the kin 65 that's supposed to come out soon we're planning to review that as well and if you have any other specific requests so there's a lot of cases we've reviewed in AG's past all those reviews are still up uh some of the cases are still relevant today where ret casting a few of them but it's sparing uh what we're interested in from the audience is if you see cases that are pretty new like 2024 uh and you'd like us to test it or get it on the charts at least even if not a full review post the requests below we will check through them and what we're going to do is kind of like the 26 here some of them might get readded without a full revisit so it's at least on the charts and represented thermally uh but otherwise the the thing that would help us the most is keeping an eye on cases coming out soon or stuff you saw at compex like us to test cuz that's going to be all the new stuff that we haven't reviewed before so all right that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more as always check out the channel we have a ton of case reviews WE Post in the last two months I think it's like six or seven something like that so a lot to check out if you're building a system and you want to learn about cases uh and we've been playing around with airflow animations on a lot of them so check back for more And subscribe as always you can go to store. Gamers nexus.net to help us out directly like by grabbing one of these shirts one of our anti-static PC Building mod mats or our solder project mats and we'll see you all next timethis is the new best performing case on our thermal charts and it's $80 this is the lean Lee lanol 207 and the reason it performs so well is because they've moved the power supply to the Front Bottom of the case and what that does is it opens up the traditional shroud top in the case for two intake fans directly into the GPU additionally lean Lee has made it so that the front of the case is shaped to fit these two sunken 140 m fans and at the back it is entirely ventilated with wide perity and spacing of the holes to provide a lot of exhaust here for the positive pressure and then a lot of intake here from a usability perspective sometimes it struggles with some aspects like cable management where there's not a lot of depth here which really just means that you don't have a lot of help or compensation the threshold for bulging cables on this particular case is pretty low you see that we've got this nice Bend here where that middle snap was not snap is that the uh is that the past tense of snap snap closing the right side panel isn't always easy especially if you have cables with a thicker gauge wire and sleeving or accessories that add a ton of cabling the side panel is toolless the back compartment is shallow and the power supplies orientation complicates power supply length requirements and cable Bend angles so the lanol 207 is an extracise compromise but some of those compromises don't need to exist today we're reviewing the 207 with our new case testing methodology and the lanol series has actually been one of lean Le's most aggressive and competitive over the years the 215 and the 216 that we looked at previously were among those and this case in 2024 at $80 shows a very aggressive lean Lee let's get into it before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failures we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexis or click the link below the Lan Quil series was lean Le's departure from the expensive aluminum cases several years ago the L 215 was about $70 when we reviewed it in 2020 that case impressed us this one's close to that we saw the 207 at computex this year and we've spotted a few changes to the case since that showing the weird removable plate at the bottom of the front panel is simply gone the bottom intake fans are conventional rather than reverse blade and the side panel vent is smaller none of these changes are meaningful from a consumer perspective the removable plate never had an assigned function anyway other than to possibly be DLC add-ons and the bottom intake fans look basically the same and the functional area of the side vent hasn't changed overall today we like this case we have a couple of negatives to talk about which are going to be the power supply and cabling situation but since we're mostly positive we'll start with the basics and the positives the paneling pulls apart in three primary sections excluding the top and the front there's a typical glass panel here there's a lower quarter panel that's mesh and ventilated and this exposes that chamber that's different where this is your traditional power supply shroud and power supply location notice though this this is covering the power supply and they've sunken the fans here by a little bit to further expose them to access to air give some room for the gpus and then instead of pulling air in through the bottom and elevating the case say on feet about an inch up like that they end up just flattening the bottom filling it in with steel and making it drive cages with a 3 and 1 half in Drive there's still plenty of space here for air intake and it pulls all the air in through the uh heavily ventilated side and then on this other side this is the the third of the three side panels there's that lower mesh section here without a filter for either of them which we agree with talk about that later to pull air in through the other side for the pans now the last location that air comes in is going to be the back of the case where because this is positive pressure all of this will be exhaust and then that ends up as actually intake this time it's going to go straight in through there into this sunken fan and then straight up into the GP the panels are also exceptionally sturdy for a case of this price where they're using this folded over steel these columns on either side and the front of the top panel which gives it some rigidity so you don't get that cheap stamped steel wobble we get in a lot of the sub $100 cases and corsair's 200 plus doll 6500d and then it just snaps in with sort of typical studs and snaps solution the sturdiness of this top panel also appears to be a direct response to the issues we found with the lanol 216 previously where there was actually about a half a cenim depression in the center of the top panel so they fixed that now the front panel also uses folded over steel if we look at the top of the front panel you'll see two screws that are driven through two magnets so those magnets just stick and catch to the folded over steel up top which also helps with rigidity but also just provides that magnetized surface and then the front panel is a heavily ventilated mesh or an ultra fine mesh as we've been calling it uh and this means that le le doesn't need to use a separate dust filter this is actually how we prefer to see cases done if the mesh is fine enough it will serve the vast majority of the purpose of a dust filter anyway and you lose that issue of uh the filter lining up in a way you don't want with the holes of the front mesh causing airf flow problems and this case is all about air flow and performance so fortunately they they noticed that would be an issue for that and they just went with an ultra fine easily cleanable filter via the mesh panel instead the entire front panel can be removed there's really no reason to do it though if you do so anyway the io cables have been screwed down to the corner of the panel for strain relief the paracity of the back of the case is also at insane levels for mostly good reasons we typically see much smaller holes with thicker steel resulting in a lot less breathability but because this case is fully positive pressure we don't really need to worry about dust ingis from the rear of the case it'll get pushed out naturally this shows an attention to detail that illustrates Le and Lee actually seems to understand why you'd make the decisions like denser holes for intake and wider for exhaust but there is one missed point in that attention to detail category for the rear ventilation which is as we talked about earlier air comes in through here so this is a situation where it actually should be either an ultra fine mesh or they should just put a separate dust filter in there uh because that's going to be the primary Place dust gets in it's also the most likely it's at the floor level it's probably pretty close to a wall in your house uh and so that's going to be where dust kind of accumulates anyway so we do think that's an oversight for the dust management where we thought the front panel did just fine overall Le and Le has come a long way since we criticized some of its older cases for airf flow problems and it's really starting to show a Mastery of thermal design with the small details the only fit and finish issue we noticed out of the box were some imperfections and scratches in the infinity mirror fan hubs but these aren't visible when the fans are spinning at least on ours the motherboard tray is kind of interesting too it's offset from the standard creating an ATX sized indent this means that the case is absolutely not compatible with any so-called eatx boards and that there's only about 1 cm of clearance behind the motherboard tray but it also means that compatibility with the motherboard Edge connectors on boards that have them is excellent lean Lee also claims that the offset better aligns with the GPU for bottom intake fans but cable routing is the more tangible benefit with the exception that sinking it does reduce the kale management space back here so it's a positive for the edge connectors and not really for the backside front iio is extremely basic it's two USB 3.0 type A One USB 3.1 type- c one audio jack and the power button the flat flexible type-c Cable in particular is the least annoying one we've worked with so that was nice to see the case also has a convenient all-in-one front panel connector however we'd actually rather see the old-fashioned two pin connector here because it's just for the power button there's no reset button ially these would combine power reset and power led the case has two vibration damped Drive mounts in the floor for a single three and a half or 2 and 1/2 in Drive each the drive mounting holes are suboptimal though SATA cables have to be bent at an uncomfortable angle to fit and the 2 and 1/2 in mounting holes could have easily been moved to alleviate this each pair of fans has a four pin fan connector and a three- pin argb connector and the two fans within each pair are linked by proprietary connectors we'll begrudgingly accept this as a compromise since it does cut the number of fan cables in half in a case that already has Cable Management challenges the downside is that it's impractical to replace or reconfigure individual fans contributing to a much larger downside of having to go through lean Lee for Replacements if one breaks the front and bottom fan mounts aren't compatible with any sizes other than the ones that are pre-installed so that's 140 mil front 120 mil bottom on top of that the front mount is built around lean Le 30 mm thick fans and all four stock fans are attached with radiator screws if you still want to replace any lean Lee includes 16 additional screws sized for 25 mm thick fans all of this is non-standard and deviates from what an experienced Builder would expect it's workable but it'll impose atypical limitations on fan compatibility if you want to change them for instance you typically have 120 mm options where 140 mm fans install here that's not the case now the downside of this is the same as the upside which is that there's one less set of fan rails in here to accommodate different sizes so you can see we've basically just got spots for the four corners to install for 140s where in a lot of cases you'll see those doubled up rails to accommodate multiple sizes the downside of that is it's a lot more obstructions as small as they are they add up and so lean Le here seems to be going for a this is the way you build it to get the best air flow and that's it and for performance that's fine with us as long as it looks good in the thermal section it's at the cost of flexibility so it's a very focused airflow approach lean Lee describes the 207 as a quote compact matx sized case with ATX compatibility which is only true by lean Le standards the 207 is the same size of a normal mid Tower it has almost exactly the same dimensions as a fractal North in fact it's really not much different than most of the cases in this comparison shot the Silverstone 515 XR is an example of a truly compact ATX case or the Easy Bake Cooler Master q500l now to some of the complaints the power supply for starters actually really the primary one where the power supply area on the spec sheet is compatible with up to 160 mm lawn power supplies it's rotated 90° but even our 150 mm lawn power supply is crafted here and 150 is about the smallest you get without dropping out of the ATX spec because of the rotation cables are pointed at the toolless side panel and have to bend sharply to Route using flat cables helps as we'll show in footage but this is a situation where you'll need to consider how the cables in your power supply are sleeved we'd also strongly recommend sticking to 150 mm rather than using the maximum 160 under spec another strong recommendation would be using only modular power supplies for this case although those are pretty common these days the power supply shroud is effectively a fan Mount And even if you could find a way to stick extra cables under it it' interfere with the intake fans and the entire point of the design all of this would only be an inconvenience except that the steel side panel is tooless if you're using bulkier cables with individually braided sleeves like in our example it could be possible to choose a power supplying cable combination that make it extremely difficult to snugly close the side panel it's still possible to do and we did it with these bulky sleeved cables to prove that but this took a good amount of time to manage and flatten we'd strongly recommend flat cables like the ones shown in the 207 at computex the more accessories and pcie power cables especially that you run the more difficulty you're going to face managing the cables in this particular case screws for the side panel wouldn't help this by allowing more tolerance for cable bulge now the manual illustrates installing a lean Le Edge power supply which looks like it could help with this problem however the 207 is $80 and the cheapest Edge power supplies cost at least $130 to $140 this is a mismatch of the most likely buyer for the case and The Edge power power supplies the illustration also shows The Edge power supply being installed fan side up which isn't an officially supported option for other power supplies the usual arrangement of mounting holes requires installing standard ATX power supplies fan down in the 207 with only 1 cm of clearance above the table now other than the thermal benefit that we've already talked about for moving the power supply the other benefit for all these down sides is that the modular cables are really easy to access so that is nice if you want to add one later you forgot to plug one in it's a little more accessible it's just it comes with all those downsides depending on the cables you use and the power supply length so there is one other downside though with the power supply setup which is the thermal situation this thing we'll try to get a shot of the bottom is really not that elevated from the table or the floor surface there's not a lot of depth here to pull air in and the filter itself is actually consuming like half of the actual available sort of Gap in there for breathability so this is going to put the power supply I meant I meant to to do that uh anyway the bottom intake so it's very restricted for the power supply now uh objectively it's going to make the power supply hotter whether it's too hot is kind of a question we don't currently answer the answer in most situations is probably no uh but it could be better and one of the things this made us think about is as you all know we've recently revised our testing methodology but there's something that because of this case I might go and AD which is I might attach a thermal couple on the power supply somewhere maybe a apfc fed or something and start pulling the power supply internal temperatures as well just to start testing that in case your us it's not something we normally need to do because they're normally pretty exposed power supplies are very resilient a lot of Standards test them at 40 to 50° Cel ambient so it's not normally needed but something that's made us think we might do either way suboptimal spacing for the floor for the power Supply the power supply filter is another small design fault it's easiest to lift the case to remove the filter which isn't a deal breaker but could be fixed with a more accessible tab back to the cable management side in the back of the case the attachment points for the built-in velcro straps are angled so that straps curl over as they're inserted which is a much bigger quality of life Improvement than it sounds like the manual describes intended cable paths most of which are obvious but there are specific routes for 24 pin streamer cables and for CPU 8 Pin cables the eight pins are held in by plastic hooks the hooks would work better we think if they were flipped though there isn't a suggested path for GPU power cables in the manual but this is something we would have liked to see for new Builders as for vertical gpus the expansion slots are bridgeless so other vertical GPU add-in kits may work but lean Le specifically markets its Universal four slot bracket as demonstrated at computex this bracket uses a solution that would block the bottom intake fans and we don't recommend using it it's also basically the entire point of buying this case is pure thermal performance so as soon as you turn that GPU into a vertical GPU uh pushes it closer to the glass you potentially block off those bottom fans it kind of kills a lot of the point so we just don't recommend vertical for this one finally for radiators it may technically be possible to get a 280 mm radiator installed in the front of the case but it need to have exactly the right hole placement lean Le doesn't claim any formal radiator support anywhere except for the top of the case and we agree 120 mm wide radiators fit more easily than 140 for the top which may make CP power cutouts difficult to reach with the 140 wide ones and now we're going to get into the thermal testing so in addition to testing it with all of our standard approaches we did some optional tests such as taping off uh with two layers of tape this side vent just to see if it did anything now in some cases that will definitely matter in this case it is so heavily ventilated in this this side and in the back of the case it might not that's what the testing's for we have a couple others we'll look at too let's get into the charts the 207 is one of the cheapest cases on our current charts the new charts we did this year and out of recent reviews it lands between the $100 Silverstone 514 X and the $68 515 XR we also retested the older lancool 216 which is actually still available for around 100 bucks in terms of fan layout the 27 is most similar to the more expensive antech flux Pro now for the 216 retest we only ran the basic tests and standard mode there's also an air cooling mode they call it but in our original review we found that this helps the GPU thermals while simultaneous L hurting CPU thermals with our bench Hardware you can see our Lan coil 2 and6 review for more detail on Alternate configurations including the external fan bracket attached to the back of the case the 207 is a loud case with all fans at full speed but we'll start with noise normalized results instead for this tasting all case fans are lowered to reach a Target noise level of 27 DBA measured at 1 meter in our Hemi and aoic chamber with CPU and GPU fan speeds controlled and constant we'll start with noise normalized GPU thermals since those those bottom fans should help there the GPU temperature averaged 42° above ambient 47 on memory and 55 hotspot that's 1 Dee better than the 216 in each category but still close impressively the fractal torrent Remains the leader in this particular test it's not always true it won't be in later test but it is here it has its own bottom intake fans that feed the GPU directly which helps we haven't always seen a benefit from shroud top intake fans but cases like the 207 and the flux Pro that commit to building the case around the concept do show good results Al if anything it's a testament to the 216s cooling that it comes close to the 207 without any shroud fans the antech flux Pros average GPU temperature was about 1 degree cooler than the 207's there's no contest versus the 514 X and 515 XR which fall in the complete opposite end of the chart the 207 is in a different class in many ways but lean Lee has priced it so aggressively that we have to make the comparison it undercuts the 514 X and it's only $12 over the 515 XR at which model fractal's pop air is another price competitive case but it lands at the bottom of this chart it's still a good case and when it's on sale it's impressively cheap for the quality you get but the 207 is just thermally Superior here's the CPU noise normalized chart instantly the lancool 207 is tied for chart leader and CPU thermals the average all course CPU temperature was 41° celi above ambient and 44° on just the Pees the 216s numbers round differently but its results were near identical to the 207's and within error the 216 was one of our all-time best performers for noise normalized CPU cooling when we originally reviewed it so that's good news for the 207 the 207 technically tops our updated chart with an error of the 216 but the antech flux Pro is also within a 1 degree margin the flux Pro is at least $180 though which puts it into a different price class and we haven't looked at the non-pro yet in comparison to the more closely price matched 514 X at 48° and 515 XR at 53° allore the 207 has a massive lead so far the 207 looks like another Lan coil with an unbeatable price to Performance ratio at full speed the 207 sounds like a server rack the 41.6 DBA result ties the 216 the 216 is the best performer when allowed to Brute Force its performance by fan speed roughly tying the 207 when we remove its front panel to test restrictions with the panel the 207 ran at 41.6 De for peores or about 2° warmer than without a front panel as far as restrictions go it's pretty good actually the panel is not substantially hurting performance unlike a lot of other cases that we've tested if you buy the optional filter that would change but two degrees in exchange for something that'll uh first of all cover the fans but also filter some of the Dust it's really not a bad trade-off using two layers of gaffer tape over the small mesh section on the steel panel would affect GPU thermals if anything so it's not surprising that it had no impact on CPU thermals the 207 at 41.6 De ties the flux Pro for performance again though the noise normalized results are a better case toase comparison now for GPU temperatures at full speed in the same test the GPU was 38° above ambient taping the side panel vent actually did nothing here we think this is simply because the bottom intake fans have plenty of other ventilation available through the mesh on the opposite side of the Shroud and the wide openen unfiltered vent at the rear of the case if these inlets had been compromised in some way or minimized it might have mattered more to have that opposite side as intake uh it still doesn't hurt to have it and some configurations it's possible it helps more but in ours just didn't really do anything for GPU thermals GPU thermals effectively tied the flux Pro but with some back and forth over the memory and hotspot temperatures no matter what though the 207 sits alongside the torrent and the flux pro at the top of this chart the 216 fell behind here with an average GB temperature of 43 degrees above ambient which is still excellent but not as good as the Brute Force bottom intake of the 207 our standardized Fant test uses three noctua fans always the same ones there's two 140s front and one 120 rear exhaust all at 100% speed we regularly explain the limit ations of this testing because it is imperfect like most testing and you can learn about those and our methodology in the link in the description below this allows us to remove stock fans as a variable and compare just the enclosures with cases like the 207 the comparison is theoretical since it doesn't make any sense to replace the stock fans at least not like this but viewers request it so here's the data our standard fan configuration was obviously worse for GPU thermals than the stock configuration with the standard fans average GPU temperature was 43° above ambient 48 for the memory and 56 for the Hotpot on the CPU with standardized fans we measured CPU temperatures at 38° above ambient all core and 42 for the peores this is within error of the top scoring torrent mesh fronted cases with straightforward front to back airflow patterns do well in this test and the 207 CPU thermals are particularly good because the front fan slots are biased High sending more air above the level of the GPU back plate we usually try to position the intake fans for a better balance with the GPU thermals but it's not an option in the 207 the vrm and system memory are located close to the CPU in our test system so for this chart it makes sense that a case with good CPU thermals would have good thermals in those two categories as well the 207 slightly outperformed the flux Pro for the lowest memory temperature for the ddr5 at 21 degrees above ambient tied with the torrent The vrm was tied with the flux pro at 27° for the fet that we measure but that's tied at the top of the chart the 216 was warmer for both sensors 23° for the system memory and 28 for the vrm all right so like the lanoil 26 and the 215 the 217 is an extremely competitive case primarily because of its price but it's also one of the best performers thermally it tops a lot of these charts or basically ties with some of its closest competition including land ley's own 216 uh that we've retested we haven't rerun the 215 but the cases that perform equivalently are more expensive like the antech flux Pro or they're just older like the torrent and more expensive in that case and the cases that are in the same general price category that we've tested recently perform worse like the Silverstone 514 X Le Lee already has some strong self competition in this area including again the 206 but the 207 is even cheaper than the 216 which typically they have a $20 price difference fantex has its new cases from compex coming out soon and those should give the 207 some competition but they're not here yet and they might end up a little more expensive but we're not sure we'll see when that finalizes the fractal pop air remains a good quality Case in terms of build quality and lately it's been kind of stupidly cheap we've seen it as low as 60 bucks for the non RGB variant when it's on sale which actually has been frequent recently but it is a completely different class of performance the 207 holds the new crown for the best performance for the price and nothing else that we've tested anytime recently is even close when you factor in the price again the 2on six is sort of the closest that we've tested recently but even that is 20 bucks more the biggest problem with the 207 is the cable management and the power supply fit the problem with getting the side panel on over the power supply and its cables is potentially a huge obstacle for some cable heavy or thicker cable configurations and it's not shared by any of the other cases we've mentioned this is something we really want to emphasize because it's normally safe to just kind of buy whatever power supply and assume it fits in this case we recommend choosing a 150 mm deep power supply rather than 160 and opting for Slimmer cables in terms of the thickness depending on your power supply and the cables you use there is a series ious risk that the side panel just won't easily fit and you'll get annoyed enough to reconsider some of the part options so flat slim cables have a better chance of working without issue this is something we think is more of a challenge for Builders who are less experienced or maybe just less patient if you have the patience to sit there and really route the cables I mean you're only doing it once so not too bad uh this would be a much larger component of a in a much more critical way in this review if the case were more expensive uh at $80 it is definitely a factor it is something you absolutely need to be aware of uh but it's something that we can get over because of the price so that's sort of the only major issue we encountered we had some complaints about smaller things like just the tab for the power supply uh filter being pulled out and the power supply breathability but these are not anywhere near as big of a complaint as the C management build quality on this case is excellent so the top panel as we showed earlier really solidly constructed and this kind of reflects across most of the the way the front panel attaches for just the mesh part is pretty nice as well so they've really done a good job with building this in a way that feels like uh a case that is worth a little more than the current price it's it's more like the $80 case of six years ago rather than today if you plan ahead then uh and you have the patience to thoroughly route the cables and if you can stick to a shorter power Spide it'll be okay to work with if a little bit more annoying than cases that have more space uh and and we think this is one of the most competitive cases on the market for its price so definitely gets a recommendation there with that uh exception of planning ahead for the cables now there aren't a lot of well- built options in this price class we're starting to work through more of them uh Fant Texas things coming out we're getting into review montech has the kin 65 that's supposed to come out soon we're planning to review that as well and if you have any other specific requests so there's a lot of cases we've reviewed in AG's past all those reviews are still up uh some of the cases are still relevant today where ret casting a few of them but it's sparing uh what we're interested in from the audience is if you see cases that are pretty new like 2024 uh and you'd like us to test it or get it on the charts at least even if not a full review post the requests below we will check through them and what we're going to do is kind of like the 26 here some of them might get readded without a full revisit so it's at least on the charts and represented thermally uh but otherwise the the thing that would help us the most is keeping an eye on cases coming out soon or stuff you saw at compex like us to test cuz that's going to be all the new stuff that we haven't reviewed before so all right that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more as always check out the channel we have a ton of case reviews WE Post in the last two months I think it's like six or seven something like that so a lot to check out if you're building a system and you want to learn about cases uh and we've been playing around with airflow animations on a lot of them so check back for more And subscribe as always you can go to store. Gamers nexus.net to help us out directly like by grabbing one of these shirts one of our anti-static PC Building mod mats or our solder project mats and we'll see you all next time\n"