I finally have an AC unit so temperature controlled environment invites some case
temperature testing one might say quarantine hair yellow good people I'm
Dimitri and what we have here on the review table is the be quiet pure base
500DX we saw this case CES and I gotta say what they've done here is both
competitive affordable and I'm hoping more companies follow and what be quiet
is doing here the 500DX is basically an airflow iteration of the pure base 500
you can check out that review over here but the guts remain identical with a few
exterior changes that make this a very competitive and an airflow excellent
enclosure so now that we find ourselves in a temperature controlled environment
I want to do some airflow testing both move some fans around add some fans and
see what is the most optimal fan configuration for an airflow focused
enclosure like the 500DX with my airflow system configuration and the
reason why I think this testing will apply not only to the 500DX but many
other cases in 2020 is because many brands are choosing the whole front mesh
panel and including quality fans so the 500DX for example comes with 3 140
millimeter pure wings 2 fans which spin at 900 rpm don't worry about the lower
rpm because the larger fan does move more air and having non-restrictive
front intake it gives us fantastic intake and also the 900 rpm gives us
that whole peak quiet operation which they're obviously known for so in this
video let's test out 7 different fan configuration options all using 140 more
fans just so that we can utilize what is already included with the 500DX and see
what fan configuration is best right after this the X299 CLX from asrock is
the best place to house your new core X processor it features aluminum alloy
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brackets learn more down below alright so before we get into the air flow
testing let's quickly recap what is new on the 500DX so
see the front panel mesh is new we have quite high density of the holes in both
the left and right side with that a RGB strip in the middle and I do find their
illumination implementation inside this enclosure quite tasteful plus we have an
internal RGB strip inside the case that is not visible when the side panel is on
and it does help to illuminate whatever is in the top section on the case and it
does actually spill to the bottom all the way through the glass creating this
like pretty cool line at the bottom I also really like how it illuminates the
power supply shroud corner so it helps to separate the internal sections I
think it looks quite nice obviously you can change the color and modes of this a
RGB strip with a button up top and here we also find a type c connection only a
single USB 3 port and i really do not like this pattern and this direction
that many case brands are now doing now the good thing about the front panel is
that we have pegs instead of wires that connect the main panel to the contacts
on the chassis but it's really difficult to remove this thing and one more thing
when reinstalling the panel make sure all three pegs are making contact with
that frame because otherwise this front illumination will not light up so behind
this front mesh we have a dust filter spanning the entire portion of that
intake and we also have a bottom dust filter removal from the front without
the need to remove the front panel first nice the glass panel is attached with
the regular thumb screws and the rubber bits on the frame stay with the frame
they're glued there and they don't fall out when you remove the glass panel
which was the case with a dark base series as for the top panel we no longer
have the closed off section that we only have the mesh magnetic plate and behind
it you can install dual 140 s or 120 s and their respective radiators as for
airflow at the front you can do triple 120 s or dual 140 mm fans with their
respective radiators too as for the interior nothing has changed here ATX
motherboards support a perforated power supply shroud doula says these beside
the motherboard and this nice little cable covered
heids whatever is exiting from the back and the right side panel has some noise
dampening form applied to it that helps to compress some of the cables and just
really dampen whatever is exiting through the right side of the case I
don't really have anything else new to say about the 500DX so now let's begin
the airflow experiment I kept the room at 22 degrees Celsius I
have this thermal meter with dual temperature probes one that kept on the
outside of the case to measure ambient temperature just to make sure that my
control point was on point and correct and fluctuations for that temperature
probe was only 0.1 degrees Celsius I'm very happy about that
and the second probe I kept right above the VRMs on the motherboard just to see
if a hot pocket would accumulate there and if you add more fans or remove fans
what will happen to that space so first let's establish a reference
point with our default fan configuration out of stock cooling here we have 74
degrees Celsius and 78 degrees Celsius on GPU and CPU respectively these are
pretty decent temps and that front panel is not a massive bottleneck for air flow
so we only drop one degree Celsius on the GPU and two degrees on the CPU but
that front mesh removed now removing the dust filter as well so we have totally
unrestricted intake we do drop slightly on the CPU but the GPU remains the same
73 and 73 and the really interesting thing about the noise profile with a
dust filter and the mesh removed is they do dampen this sound a little bit but
it's basically like it sounds like an open and closure already which is why
having lower rpm fans helps a lot this machine behind me has six fans
running and it's very quiet actually the fan on my light is louder
I can hear it more than the system with six fans in it so let's see if we can
move some fans around and get better temperatures so the first thing I wanted
to do is move the top fan to the front so both the CPU and GPU have that nice
fresh column of air and as expected that fresh column of air does actually drop
our CPU temperature by three degrees and only one degree on the GPU and this is
without adding any fans we're just reconfiguring what is already here am i
testing previously with cases like the H510 from NZXT having dual exhausts
one at the top one in the rear does actually help with CPU temperature but
that case has a pretty restrictive front intake whereas here it seems like that
benefit of having fresh air intake and having like plenty of exhaust at the
back is enough to drop our CPU temperature by a little bit and I
welcome that but what if we move those front fans to top exhaust and this
actually surprised me quite a bit because our CPU temperature actually
increased to 79 degrees Celsius that is higher than our default control point
and the GPU temperature also increased by a degree so it seems like having no
intake inside the 500DX is not a good thing and having everything being
exhausted isn't enough to cool whatever is being accumulated inside the
enclosure I then decided to flip the top fans to intake air and a CPU temperature
did drop to 78 degrees so back to our control point but the GPU actually
increased in temperature I'm guessing there's just nothing to remove whatever
air is being accumulated at the bottom and finally let's populate all 140 ml of
fans thoughts in here having to the front to the top and one for exhaust so
I kept the top fans as intake and having two front fans delivering air so there's
a lot of intake happening here and both the CPU and GPU temperature has reached
a 74 degree equilibrium giving us the coolest CPU temperature 74 degrees
Celsius but still not too far off from the 78 degree of our control point and
finally I rotated the top fans as exhaust and weirdly the CPU temperature
did go back to 70 80 degrees Celsius while giving us a nice cool GPU staying
at 73 now what about that internal temperature probe above the V RMS and as
you can see this space is only adequately cooled when there's intake of
air either from the top or the front with the good balance of temperatures
when we reposition the top fan to the front but what's really interesting here
with the top fan set to exhaust this area becomes really toasty because of
competing airflow streams between the lateral CPU cooler and vertical top
exhaust so something that should be mitigated if you rotate the CPU cooler
and it seems like for this type of Tower if we don't have enough front
intake GPU temperature suffer and if we don't have enough top exhaust GPU
temperatures suffer again and the most interesting thing here is that if we
have all fans populated the best configuration is have both top intake
and front intake as well gives us better CPU and GPU temperatures at 74 degrees
Celsius but the second next best configuration is to simply move that top
fan to the front intake which is pretty surprising but then maybe we're
encountering the law of diminishing returns of like adding too much air flow
where the components are adequately cooled already out of the box for my
concluding remarks this whole thing has been quite interesting being in a
temperature controlled environment and playing with some variables to see what
happens with our GPU and CPU temperatures and the most impressive
thing is you don't need to buy any more fans simply relocating the top fan to
the front will improve both GPU and CPU temps and if you really want to go all
out and having the best temperatures inside this enclosure then in my testing
having intake at the top is better than exhaust for the CPU and as long as you
have adequate intake for the front GPU temperatures will not suffer so I hope
you guys enjoyed this one I'm really interested to test this type of airflow
configuration with many other airflow mesh front enclosures coming up in the
future like the Phanteks P500a coming out something from Lian Li with the LANcool 2
so yeah let me know in the comments what do you think of this experiment and
potentially move your friends around to see what gives you better temperatures
now Dimitri thanks much for watching check out this how the relevant content
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