If you're into excessive amounts of tempered glass, you might be looking at your next case.
Howdy howdy guys ponchato here, and today we're taking a look at the Talos P1 from Gamdias.
They also sent over one of their Astrape P1 power supplies, which pairs nicely with the
Talos P1.
Thanks to Gamdias for sending this over, and let's get started.
The Talos P1 is a hefty ATX mid tower with tempered glass panels on the front, sides,
and top.
Actually, even though Gamdias calls this a mid tower, I think it's more of a full tower
considering the dimensions: 22 inches tall, 19 inches long, and 8.5 inches wide.
Plus the fact that it can handle extended ATX motherboards makes this a definite "full
tower" in my opinion.
Other than the glass it's mostly steel though the trim pieces are primarily plastic.
Because of its size and the amount of glass, this is also a really heavy case: 10kg or
a little over 22 pounds, completely empty.
The side panels aren't held in with thumb screws, but rather sit on hinges and are held
closed with magnets along the edges.
There's a small overhang on the bottom to grab hold of the panels and pull them open,
which makes for very easy tool-free access to both sides of the case.
It has a full length power supply shroud and supports power supplies up to 220mm long,
GPUs up to 380mm, and CPU coolers up to 170mm.
It also has foam supports for the power supply, to isolate it from the case and reduce noise.
One thing I'm really not fond of here is the expansion slot covers: they're the snap-off
kind, which means you can't put them back in once they're out.
For an otherwise high end case, this seemed like a kind of silly area to cut costs.
In addition to the standard 7 expansion slots, the Talos P1 also has a dual slot vertical
mount for those of you hoping to show off your GPU.
The front panel connections are fairly standard: two USB 3s, two USB 2s, and microphone and
headphone jack.
Where it differs is instead of having a reset switch, it has two buttons to control the
case fan speed and RGB ligthing effects with the case's built-in controller.
Unfortunately I fried most of the LEDs before I could grab footage of them running, so I
won't really be able to cover that in this video.
Other than that, you can swap the Gamdias logo plate at the top of the front panel with
the I/O plate, if you want all your connections at the top of the case instead of the bottom.
Back inside, the tool-free hard drive cage can accept two 2.5" or 3.5" drives, and has
rubber isolation mounts on the cages.
These aren't very soft but we'll see how much they affect hard drive noise later in the
video.
The Talos can also hold two 2.5" drives on the motherboard tray, for a total of 4 SSDs
or 2 SSDs and two hard drives.
The hard drive cage itself is also removable, if you'd rather have that space to hide cables.
In terms of cable management, the Talos P1 is really nice.
It has six large, grommeted holes in front of the motherboard, two grommeted holes on
the upper surface of the power supply shroud, and lots of small holes all over the motherboard
tray to run zip or twist ties through.
There's also about an inch or 25mm of space behind the motherboard tray, which is important
because the side panels are only held in place with magnets.
When putting together the test setup, I didn't expect it to be easy to tidy up the cables
on the backside and close the panel, but it actually went together very easily.
They give you plenty of space for the cables, even thick ones like the 24 pin ATX, and a
lot of room in front of and behind the hard drive cage to shove any extra length.
I have to commend Gamdias here for their attention to detail on the cable management; this is
a really well designed case.
Cooling is also an area where the Talos excels.
Its stock configuration includes three 120mm RGB fans up front behind the tempered glass,
which they intelligently shaped to allow a ton of airflow.
The top panel is almost identical, with plenty of room around the tempered glass to let air
through.
For air cooling, the Talos can handle three 120mm or two 140mm fans up front and on the
top panel, and a 120mm fan in the back.
The story is similar for liquid cooling, allowing a 280mm or 360mm radiator up front and on
top, and a 120mm radiator in the back.
The rear fan mount also gives you 20mm of adjustment up or down if you need it.
The fan controller gives you 3 speed settings: high, low, and off.
Unfortunately it doesn't remember your fan speed between shutdowns, but it does only
take half a second to set it to the speed you want.
The stock fans and built in fan control unfortunately don't use the standard PWM and LED headers,
so you will have to either use Gamdias' fans if you want to use the controller or buy a
different set if you want motherboard control.
For dust filters, the Talos comes with two.
One is under the top panel, held in place magnetically, and the second is for the power
supply intake on the bottom.
Neither of these filters are super easy to access; to get to the top filter, the top
panel needs to be removed, and taking out the power supply filter is a bit of a challenge
without tilting the case to one side.
It also has a 3/4" or 19mm space under the power supply to allow for easy airflow.
Now let's look at some benchmarks.
My test bench is a Ryzen 5 2400G cooled by a Cryorig H7 Quad Lumi, a GTX 1060, and Seasonic
Focus Plus power supply.
Load temps are taken while running Prime95 and Unigine's Superposition and reported as
deltas, or degrees above ambient temperature.
Because the Talos P1 fan controller only has "low" and "high" speeds, for all the benchmarks
I treated low as 50% fan speed and high as 100%.
First we’ll look at noise from the case fans alone.
Despite having 3 fans up front, the Talos P1 is actually not too loud.
In fact at the lower fan speed, it was essentially inaudible in my studio.
At full speed, noise does jump up a bit to 36.7 dB; not obnoxious, but also not super
quiet.
Next we’ll look at hard drive noise.
These measurements are taken with all fans at their minimum speed or off, leaving only
noise from the drives.
I was actually pretty surprised here; the rubber spacers that the drive cages sit on
aren't very soft, yet they did a great job of keeping drive noise from resonating through
the case.
With the side panels closed, even under a stress test, hard drives are just barely audible
in this case.
Now here's the chart of overall noise at idle and load.
Despite having 3 fans up front and a very open design, the Talos P1 kept a reasonable
volume even under load.
Part of that though is I measure noise from the side of the case, and tempered glass is
very good at blocking sound.
Here we'll look at CPU temperature, and you can see the advantage of all that airflow.
Under load the 2400G only reached a delta of 40.8 degrees celsius.
Not bad.
Finally we'll look at GPU temperature.
The Talos P1's open, airy design makes for respectable cooling under load with the 1060
only hovering around 44 and a half degrees above ambient.
As time goes on and more cases are added to this list, it'll be interesting to see how
big of an effect a wide open design like this has.
Overall Gamdias produced a very nearly fantastic case with the Talos P1.
I love the aesthetics, the wide open front and top panels allow for some great cooling,
and cable management is a breeze despite having a tempered glass panel for the right side.
Owing to the tool-free hinged design, getting into the case from either side is also super
easy.
I didn't think it would matter that much, but it's actually a massive improvement over
the typical thumb screw retention for side panels.
But for all its strengths, it does have some weaknesses.
Getting access to the dust filter on the top panel requires you to actually remove the
top panel - it would've been nice for it to be removable like the power supply dust filter.
And the expansion slot covers being non-replaceable just seems like an odd choice to make for
a case like this.
I mean, I know that's a minor issue, but it still triggered me.
And finally, I'm not a fan of the connectors for the fans.
The built in controller does work just fine, but for people like me, we want exact control
over fan speeds, and you can really only get that with a PWM connection.
Now, those are minor flaws in a case that is otherwise awesome.
The cable management and hinged side panels alone way more than make up for those complaints.
The Talos P1 goes for around $160 US dollars and for a high end build, it'll be a nice
choice.
Click the link in the description to pick one up for yourself.
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Thanks for watching, I hope I helped, and I’ll see you in the next video.