well hello good people I'm Dimitri and welcome to my review of the Cooler Master
h100 ITX enclosure we first saw this and behind closed doors at CES they pulled
us a sign they were like what do you think my first impression was I
appreciate their commitment to the design language of the Age series
obviously it's like a miniature version of the H500 mesh because of the mesh
front panel because of the whole exterior design language but the
interior cube for factor is a bit confusing because it has pretty strong
limitations in terms of cooling and GPU compatibility but interestingly when
they did their market research for this price point for this target audience
they found that a lot of people were using ap use aimed EAP use therefore no
graphics card required and I guess cooling is not really that big of an
issue as long as they have a stock cooler and I understand their direction
to potentially target this case towards that demographic but it's almost like
Cooler master is shooting themselves in the foot by limiting to that demographic
and not doing anything innovative on the interior to potentially cater to
somebody who might want a beefier GPU or more importantly a nice CPU cooler as
well with long battery life an Nvidia MX 150 GPU and Intel Core i7 processor in a
compact design the Razer Blade stealth 13 is a great companion for users on the
go if you want more gaming her hook it up to the core X EGP with support for
both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs the Razer Blade stealth plus the core X the ultimate
power couple and so for $69 it kind of caters to that exact of a graphic who
are not using a beefy GPU or no GPU at all and just going stock cooler ITX
motherboard ATX power supply and that's it so I feel like there are four main
selling points for this enclosure number one is the top handle making this a
pretty portable solution for ITX Alto it's a fairly large case for this foam
factor compared to something like the end case that can actually do water
cooling versus this thing mmm not so much number two we have that massive 200
millimeter fan that front that is RGB it is the 12 volt RGB
connector you can connect it to your motherboard for example but it also has
its own controller so you don't necessarily need to connect it to the
motherboard you can also reroute the reset switch
into the controller unfortunately the pins on my controller were totally bent
out of the way so quality control color master not good the third point is ATX
PSU support which is not common for ITX cases it's great to have it here because
you can potentially reuse your other components to build a system but it's
also a little bit of a compromise in terms of cooling and for number four I
would say it's a pretty good looking enclosure that could go into your living
room or your desktop and given the side panels that completely closed off in
solid you don't really see the mess that it could be inside hiding but that's out
of sight out of mind the i/o is pretty basic with dual USB 3 is power reset
button and your audio jacks it is important to note that the power supply
bracket at the back extends beyond the frame to accommodate extra clearance on
the inside so you can mount a 210 millimeter PSU without the radiator at
the front or up to 160 millimeter PSU if you install a radiator in the front yeah
and moving inside beyond the drive bracket that can house two SSDs we have
a very simple interior you can alter them and remove the other side panel to
access whatever is behind the motherboard so everything is done on the
interior you'll have to do some creative work with cable management otherwise
yeah cables will be all over the place unfortunately none of the motherboard
standoffs are captive so you have to hole your motherboard in place and then
screw everything in and given the power supply is basically installed above the
CPU areum CPU tower clearance is limited to 83 millimeters so basically all stock
coolers are fine or going to low profile design is necessary and I would not
recommend going with the raid heater in here at the front you can do a 120 or
140 or 200 million radiator but going with a radiator at the front limits your
GPU clearance which is already pretty short at maximum 210 millimeters so like
an RTX 2060 founders Edition which is a super short card will not fit inside
this enclosure you have to opt out for actual ITX small form-factor graphics
card to fit inside the h 100 I went to the zotac rtx 2060's super which is the
perfect fit for this enclosure but as you look at the bottom there is no
ventilation area we only have holes for an SSD or a three and a half inch drive
and again that is a massive compromise given there is no ventilation for the
GPU outside of whatever's coming in from that front panel this is a pretty
interesting and disappointing airflow design because there's nothing in the
rear for exhaust simply there's no room so they rely on passive air being pushed
out from the front fan but the top has a ventilation mesh and you could easily
mount a 120mm fan up there even with a handle installed onto the frame and they
didn't so it'd be great to have additional ventilation but it's not
present and so the temperatures really do suffer in the default configuration
86 degrees Celsius on the GPU at 80% fan that is pretty hot while opening a side
panel does drop the GPU temps by 3 degrees and only 2 degrees for the CPU
honestly I was expecting a little bit more innovation from cooler master with
regards to this sort of cube format potentially moving the power supply
literally somewhere else beside the motherboard because there's so much
space wasted that is not occupied by the cables and normally with a cube design
like this you'd expect the power supply to be mounted somewhere at the front to
allow for the CPU tower clearance area because if the power supply wasn't here
you'd have so much space for beefy CPU tower to completely and efficiently cool
the CPU while the GPU compatibility would still be pretty short given the
cube form factor and the price point is also an issue 6 9 bucks is too much I
think this is a $49 case even though we have a 200 mm letter
RGB fan the front but the limitations are too severe to consider building
something you know even mid-range and here because you have to consider GPU
size and CPU cooler and not too hot of a CPU to run in this thing and all that
kind of combines together to give you limitations
that would outweigh the budget price point but you know what guys I'm excited
for the new lian li t150 just showed up and that is where innovation happens
stay tuned for that video make sure to subscribe check out this other relevant
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