It's not a long distance driver,
but the main issues that I've seen people run into
have actually not really been with anything that would bother a modern computer.
It's mostly been around hard drives. So I remember there was this one guy
that I was chatting with that actually had
a Plex NAS running in his semi and he would just chew through hard drives.
So as long as you're not, oh, you know what? Oh, we can go, oh, this is great.
Oh, these straps, dude. Elijah, it's got the double straps,
like a weightlifting belt. Yes, because I know what that is.
You look like you would. I don't weight lift.
I mean, I don't know, you look like you might have weight lifted at some point.
I mean, I did when I did gymnastics, I guess. Okay, so that- But I didn't use a belt.
Elijah, do you know what a weightlifting belt is? No, I just did it.
Okay, all right, fine. Well, whatever.
It has like the one strap and then the other strap,
like double-sided velcro style. It keeps your organs from going spreeze.
Yeah, so you can really strap down the cables back here,
which I really like. That's awesome. Keep the computer's organs from going spreeze.
Well, I mean, wouldn't you want to? I don't know.
My computer's in the server rack. I don't care where its organs go. That's fair enough.
How long is it's in the server rack? Anyway, so this-
The server rack is like a weightlifting belt. Oh!
I, okay. You're doing good, Linus. Thank you.
Okay, so that can go a little something like that. Oh, dude, this is awesome.
They've got little clips here to hold all of my stoops. Man, you're really, you're loving this case.
I am loving this case. I'm trying to just make sure we're under the expectation
of is it because it's that good of a case, or is it in comparison?
And we actually get to compare three more. I know.
I mean, I think that's a good question.
I think it's a fair question. Overall, it's very thoughtful.
And while some of these features might be relatively normal,
I don't get to build in every case anymore these days.
The implementation in this case is really good.
Everything is just really well fought out, and I only had that one little situation
where there was a small stumbling block. And other than that,
it's been practically effortless for me to build
a pretty fine looking computer.
Like, okay, yeah, we could, you know, we could tuck this a little like that,
tuck that a little like that. But overall, man, this came together so easily.
I just got to plug in my RGB connector here, and then I'm good to go.
And then we'll have to make sure we rate it properly. Oh, where did I, where did I leave off
on that merge message? I feel like I wasn't quite done answering that. What was the question again?
Something about cringe segues. You did say that. No, no, there was something else we were talking about.
Help me out, chat.
Yeah, there was, but it was... I was done with that merge message. I think we were moved on to something else.
Yeah. Can I start reading another one?
I can't remember. I don't know. We can do another one. Oh, the socks and sandals,
and it was the cringiest, memorable segue. Building a semi in...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the semi one. Right.
So hard drives, big problem. Anything that's susceptible to damage from vibration,
big problem. Modern system, I really wouldn't expect any issues.
I would still, I would probably, like anything on a big rig,
I would probably check on it once in a while and make sure that it hasn't vibrated itself loose.
You know, I'd probably put some blue thread locker
on all of your screws and stuff like that. You know, like I would just take the appropriate precautions,
but other than that, no, yeah, go for it. I think that's a great idea.
I've seen some pretty sick,
like top of the cab, like sleep area gaming setups
over the years, very cool. There's a religious WAN Show watcher
who always shows off his sick gaming rig in his rig.
So cool. A gaming rig, rig.
Write that down, write that down. Yo, dawg, I heard you like rigs, so I put a rig in your rig.
What would have been a great option for RG rig reboot? So you can rig while you rig.
The rig, rig, reboot? The rig, rig, reboot, what, the... The wrong rig, rig, reboot.
Okay, not the finest cable management of all time,
but I suspect good enough that most people probably wouldn't care
to put any more work into it. And because you've got those nice straps
to keep everything nice and, you know, strapped down,
boom, just pop it on like that and you're GGG.
I love this case. I'm ready to score it.
How did this go on? Don't worry, I got you. I got you, brother.
So first, this one goes on. Oh. There's your problem.
There's your problem right there. Okay. Oh, yeah, there, bud.
Oh, yeah, bud. Oh, yeah, bud. Here you go, bud.
I'm not your buddy, guy. I'm not your friend, buddy.
I broke it. The amount of times you just randomly quote South Park in this office is too many times.
We're adults. Oh, oh, is there no-
I already peeled it. I already peeled it. Oh, now I just went and put fingerprints on it.
Dang it, Linus. Okay. Alrighty.
Price. It was 90 US dollars. I like.
My wife. That is a fine looking build.
Very fine, very build. Here, should we, oh, we never fired the other one up.
No, no. What are we doing? Are we crazy? I don't think it was RGB.
Oh, no, no. I thought I had some RGB in it, didn't it?
Oh, balls. Right. There we go. Okay, okay.
Boop. Ooh.
Uh-oh. The CPU cooler's not. Oh, where's my RGB yet?
Where's my RGB yet? I'm pretty sure I plugged it in. Oh, yeah, I see it.
Unless I missed. I mean, it is a really horrible connector.
Sometimes there can be gaps and you can accidentally plug all the pins
into just like gaps in the housing around them.
Oh yeah, no, there goes the cooler and there goes the front. There goes the front.
Boom, look at that. That looks pretty good. That's a pretty looking little build. Okay, let's rate it.
All right, price out of 10. Yes. It is a 90 dollar case.
It is more expensive than the last one.
Oh yeah. I can double check to confirm.
I don't know if it's our most expensive one though.
It is not our most expensive one.
I'm going to go with another,
oh man, it's really good. I'm going to go with an eight.
On price. I'm going to go with eight on price. So the one that was $40 gets lower.
But isn't price kind of inherently value? I guess we did, yeah, we can make the argument
that it's value and I think you would say you- No, I think we were doing it the other way.
No, you're right. Okay. Okay, so 90 dollar price, I mean, yeah,
I'll give it a five. It's more expensive, yeah, right? That's the most that I would recommend spending on a case.
And you feel like you got more than enough out of it. If you're not, you kind of don't care.
Like if $20 means anything to you,
don't be spending more than a hundred bucks on a case.
So in terms of the value. Yeah, I'll give it a, I'll give it a,
I'll give it a, but it's so, whoa, the value is so good.
Six, six. Final answer. I'm putting it down.
Okay, six. With features we gave an eight.
Building experience. Ah, 10. You could not shut up, so yeah.
I said I would take off one for not being able to put in that USB thing.
Nine and a half. I also agree that 10 minus one is nine and a half.
Nine and a half. All right. Okay. Cable management out of five.
Four and a half, four.
They could have had more grommets, four. Okay. Yeah.
Does it get any bonuses? I feel like the fans being one cable.
I like these Infinity Mirror included RGB fans.
Like. GPU sag rack in. Of course there would charge us $90 for just these two fans.
Okay, not quite, but still. I mean, you get what I'm talking about here, right?
Easy compatibility for up to a triple radiator.
Like with tons of room, like you could actually definitely have a radiator there.
Definitely have a dual in the front.
Three bonuses. Three bonus I, okay? Yeah.
All right. Okay. Let me do my math. You're not gonna let me see it.
Seven plus six is 13. Plus eight is 21.
Plus nine point five is 30.5.
That's pretty good. Yeah. 30.5 out of 35.
This was the Landcool 207 from Lee and Lee.
The most popular case at Micro Center.
Yes. Now that's an interesting element to this
that I don't think I had considered. Micro Center does most of their business retail.
That would make sense then why it has such a low amount of reviews.
Yes. I feel like. But it would also make sense
how it would be able to differentiate itself from the other cases in an environment
where people can touch it and feel it
and appreciate why this is 90 bucks. Cause on paper, you should be able to get an ATX case
for $20 less. And if you're just shopping online and you're just looking through a spec sheet,
then there might not be any reason in your mind to spend any extra on something like this.
But this just, like it feels,
it feels really good for 90 bucks. I really, I really like this case. And you had a good building experience for sure.
Like a 9.5 is pretty dang great. That was a great building experience.
All right. Too bad, let's move on to the next one. Let's move on.
All right. Well, you have three more to pick from. Mm.
Which one do you want to pick? Corsair, Fractal, or Phanteks.
I also got a question here. Are any of them back to front compatible?
The first one was. The first one was, which was the Cooler Master,
MasterBox Q300L. This one didn't look like it.
It looked like it, sorry, we should say. This one didn't appear to be. Yeah.
So no promises. I kind of want to see what my friends at Corsair
have been up to. Cool. I haven't checked out the Frame 4000.
Oh my gosh, this is so heavy.
Fun fact, Fractal, speaking of old friends, was the first case brand that I was the product manager for.
Ooh, wait, were they? No, it might have been Antek.
Well, the first one that's still kicking butt. No, actually Antek's doing pretty good.
All right, here it is. Ah, coming to you from Corsair,
this is the top selling case at Best Buy USA
for a price of $109.99. That's right, my friends,
you will be paying the Corsair tax if you want to get your hands on the Frame 4000.
We have the black finish with airflow mesh panel variant of this case.
That's something that I feel like, ooh, Corsair has really, I don't want to say struggled with
over the years, but certainly come up against is having so many variants of their products
that I have a hard time fully understanding their lineup.
Like I remember that when they started.
Corsair had the 800D,
and if you didn't like the D, too bad.
That was it, that was all they had. Then they had, I believe it was the six, ouch, zapped.
I believe it was the 600T that came next.
And after that, it's all kind of a blur because the product lineup just got very complicated.
Ow, dang it. I swear, this is gonna stop zapping me sometime soon.
I realized we haven't really talked about packing materials. So far, they have all been pretty unexceptional.
Yeah. I haven't seen anyone show up to play
with like a more flexible foam.
It's all this kind of one impact,
and then it's not really gonna take anything more after that, which means that while it's fine
to ship a case in this, it's not fine to build a system,
like if you're a system integrator, put it back into this packing material
and then ship that to a customer.
All right, let's take a look. This is like a really common mistake that so many SIs do.
Right out of the gate, I like the width. I can tell that Corsair in their typical fashion
has put a lot of thought into how this system will be built in, and the answer is,
with a lot of cable management space at the back.
Corsair really, it seems like,
approaches their case design from a marketing standpoint,
right from the get-go. With the 800D, there was very clearly a way
that you were intended to build in it, so that everyone's 800D build,
well, might look kinda samey,
but would look really good, and really good in a consistent way.
And so I'm already seeing that there's certain ways
that Corsair has just kind of defined what their contribution to the case category is,
and stuck with it. This has to be the loosest mesh
that I have ever encountered. If they were going for maximum airflow here,
they definitely got it. It looks really trippy in person.
I would have to go all the way to, here, check this out. I have to go all the way almost profile
before I can't see through this anymore. Like that is, wow, you can see a whole Elijah through there.
Thanks, Elijah. That's terrific.
Good job, Corsair. This is also not a super dense dust filter,
which, okay, you might not like in the sense
that it might let a little bit of tiny dust particles through to your system,
but if I had to guess, I'd say that Corsair has probably determined
that most of what the typical gamer gets stuck in their dust filters, cat hair, guilty.
And this would have no problem catching that, so it won't kill you to dust every once in a while,
and this will, I mean, this is clearly a very airflow forward design.
This will give you some kind of benefit in terms of airflow.
All right, let's put these aside for now. What do we got? We got three fans in the front, pre-installed,
all 120 mil, and curiously, Corsair determined,
and I, again, I'm making a bit of an assumption here,
but Corsair determined that it was cheaper
to provide a 140 millimeter width adapter
on each of these fans than to have two separate rails,
one for 140 millimeter, and one for 120 millimeter width.
Actually, no, that can't be cheaper. No, that would have to be more expensive.
It's gotta be an aesthetics thing. So it's gotta, or airflow.
Oh, sure, yeah. Because if you had a 140 millimeter fan here, if you had two 140 millimeter fans mounted to these,
then they would have that 120 millimeter rail sitting in the way, whereas now,
whether you have 120s or 140s, they are as clear as they can be
to draw air through the front of the case. Cool. Okay.
Already, some thoughtful design choices that we did not see on the Lee and Lee.
Very cool. Very cool, very nice, is nice.
Only the three included fans and no RGB. And no exhaust as well.
Corsair wants you to pay for the RGB.
I mean, you were joking about how their fans are expensive, so.
That was no joke. Sorry, sir.
When I joke, you'll be able to tell. And it will not be about Corsair's RGB being expensive.
Another really open mesh on the top.
This is a very airflow, I don't wanna say airflow only,
but it's certainly an airflow first design. Oh, this is cool.
This is cool. All right, they've got this little slider up here.
I like, I like. So you undo the Phillips head.
There's a Phillips and there's a Torx. So you undo the Phillips head to loosen it.
And then you go ahead and you slide this rail between the 120 and 140 millimeter mounting positions,
depending on what kind of fans you wanna put up here. This also keeps a 120 millimeter rail
out of the way of a 140 millimeter fan.
Corsair didn't include any of the aforementioned fans.
So it's just gonna be empty in our build today, but hey, if you could afford, you know, $400 in fans
to fill this with Corsair RGB fans, then they would be, your view of them would be unobstructed.
That's probably what it is. I was just gonna say, it's aesthetics.
Just the view of the fan? Yes, cause you paid $40 for them,
you better be able to see them. They're $40? They can, they have some of them.
I think it's like 30, 36 or something like that the last time I looked for some of their relation.
I also just noticed that there's like, is this the 120 or 140 adapter or something?
Hold on, what is this? What is this doing? Is this gonna, hello buddy?
How you doing there? How you doing there, pal?
I don't know, how are you? Oh, what?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel free. Do whatever you guys gotta do.
Okay, well, we've got the side panel off without bending anything. I'm not quite sure how it happened though.
Neat. Wow.
Wow, is that ever a lot of room for cable management, my friends.
I have that much depth for cable management
over here behind where the front intake fans are.
That's wild. Also, question for you, Elijah.
Yes. Yeah, this, oh, you know, I have the back panel.
Is that just taped on there? Yeah, that's, well, you know what, that's not, I'm okay with it,
because this is magnetic. Oh, okay, okay. So this is just to keep it in place for shipping.
Nope, I'm okay with it. I'm okay with it. I thought it was holding it, so. I'll give them a pass for that.
What is this? What, what is what? This is a computer case.
Thank you. What is this? Well, it doesn't have a manual.
You have to use it through your QR. Okay. So thank you.
The other side of the case. Sometimes you mount fillings, tractions, actual.
I'm, we're cooking, we're cooking, Dan. We're cooking.
That is a side fan mounting bracket.
Uh-huh. Ooh, I see.
Oh, cool. Okay, I was gonna get there.
I was gonna get there eventually. So instead of having a cable management cover shroud thing.
Mm, you could have fans. Boom.
You could put all the fans. Only fans, you might say.
Boom, just like that. So you can go from not an O11 clone
to O11 clone in less than 30 seconds.
Actual genius. Okay.
Well, we don't have any fans because we couldn't afford them. So we're gonna take this.
We paid 110 for the case, so.
But hey, if we could afford $400 in fans,
we would have this bracket to put them on. How many fans are you missing?
What else you got? What else in here is there's front panels? Ooh, oh, I do like this.
Wait, no, I don't. Oh, that's weird. That's the opposite of what I would have expected.
Okay, so they've got an adapter to go from
if your case has just the block style. Oh, because this case does.
Oh, this is great. Okay, so you can plug in your block style adapter
that's included with the case and it has a breakout to all the individual ones
if you have a motherboard that uses a non-standard pinout. Brilliant.
Okay, I like it. I've got one of these.
You also have this. Ah, yes, a magnetic this. I'm getting to that.
That is called a side panel blank out insert.
Oh, this is a mini GPU anti-sag mount.
Cool. All right. Yeah.
No, no, no, yeah, that's good. Oh, no, no, I get this one, I get this one. So if you have bad cable management in the bottom here.
Oh, oh, I, oh God. Instead of having a bit of like a window situation.
Oh, I see. You can just blank it out. Okay, that's kind of cool then.
We'll have to figure out what this one's for, but we'll get to that later.
Okay. All right, you know what?
So far I like. So okay. Oh, I thought this one had the same power supply thing,
but no, it's power supplies in the back there. For $20 more, I'm going to need to find
some more thoughtful little additions. I think at first glance, comparing both at first glance,
I would still stick with the land cool, but we got to wait and see. Let's wait and see.
Let's wait and see. Maybe the build experience in this will be so life changing for us that we will say,
you'd be crazy not to spend the extra 20 bucks. Considering how much you were raving over the last one though,
I need to hear you rave $20 more.
Does seem like a tall bar. I will say this, one screw to remove this.
Very nice. Pretty nice. And this, boy, does this ever give us a lot of room
to get at things and build. This might win for ease of build.
This pops off like this. Are you sure? You gotta unscrew it first.
But that's, oh, is that one holding? There you go.
Got it. Like, as far as stripping cases down to the,
as far as stripping cases down to the skeleton goes, Andrew Dan's summoning you.
Like, dude, the case is almost as see-through
as that front mesh. Like once you've got all the pieces removed from it,
I think this is gonna make for a really, really easy
building experience. Oh yeah. Okay, where's the motherboard at? There's another one.
Do we want to get in the habit of maybe just mounting the coolers to these before we start?
Oh, do we owe Valkyrie? I mean, we can keep talking about it.
Yeah, no, no. Why don't we talk about their AIO? Do you want to grab it? Oh, sure.
Yeah. While I install it. While you install this one, we can grab the AIO. Cool, perfect.
This one. This one's good. Ugh.
All right. So our sponsor for the stream today is Valkyrie.
And I'm gonna get to the thing. Yeah, there we go.
Cool. And they're featuring a couple of their coolers.
The surge SL125, which is the air cooler that we've been
using because after we built a bunch of PCs during that
charity stream with water coolers, I told the team never, never again AIOs for live streams.
They take so long and there's nothing to talk about.
So yeah, we're using all the air coolers today, but we did tell Valkyrie who sponsored the stream
that we would feature their AIO in some way. So this is their V-Lite AIO or rather their V-Lite AIOs.
They're available in a variety of configurations, either in 240 mil or 360 mil configs,
and either in black or white. This is obviously the 360 millimeter white.
Do you want to hold that up for the camera? That's pretty cool. It features a patented high speed pump
and copper cold plate. Includes new high speed fans that are designed specifically
for use on radiators for liquid cooling. They have a distinctive square pump with an ARGB LED
lighting solution in both the pump and in the fan rotors.
And they have the, like a mecha aesthetic.
Oh, that is kind of cool. Actually, I should show you one of their boxes
because it was, oh, that was a good one, Dan.
And they have a mecha aesthetic for a unique style.
The magnetic cover rotates in 90 degree increments.
Look at that. It rotates for an always upright installation orientation
and the pump spins it up to 2,800 RPM
and it's backed by a five year international warranty. Pretty sick.
What did you want to show the people? This box for one of their coolers.
It like is so over the top and extra. It feels like a GPU and it has an animate girl.
Can you be less predictable, please?
Sorry for supporting women.
Ah, I just dropped it all. Oh no.
You know, it hasn't come up nearly as much lately
but I remember in some of his earlier on camera appearances.
Go ahead, keep talking. The comment section would be full of like,
how exactly did this guy get a job? And I would have to kind of defend him and go, no, no, no.
But like he has redeeming qualities, I promise.
He's technically my fault. This is the first time I felt like that. Actually, yes, if you go butterfly effect.
Yeah, I hired him for logistics. This is the first time I felt like that
in a very long time. That I kind of like, I have to defend you.
Always on streams.
He has lots of redeeming qualities. You could name some anytime.
The problem is, is you don't name them. I really like your hair.
That's not a reason to like have me working here though.
We were saying earlier it covers the dent in his head from his fall.
From what Ariana pushed me, yeah. Okay, okay, that is not a thing.
Nobody pushed him. Her wall still has a scuff on it from my jeans
when I fell down. For those of you who are new to the channel,
Elijah fell down the stairs and concussed himself
at Ariana's AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade.
Some would say it launched my career.
Not at an upward trajectory.
Oh, I'm sorry, Andrew, am I supposed to be getting this for you? Yeah, we're going, okay, Dan,
do you want to hit us with a merge message? Yeah, absolutely, we still got loads to get through.
Let's see what we've got. Hello Linus, in case the Xbox series consoles
were to get steam, do you think a significant amount
of people would return to Xbox and make it more competitive?
That's a really good question. That is a really good question.
I'm having a really hard time figuring out what exactly Microsoft's path forward is here
because they very clearly telegraphed
that when it comes to handheld PCs,
they are pretty much going the traditional Windows OS route at this point
with partnered hardware devices and trimming the fad on Windows
to provide a more seamless and energy efficient
handheld gaming experience. One of the elephants in the room at that event
when they showed off the ROG Xbox,
AllyX or whatever the thing is called, the partner product with ASUS,
is hey, you guys say this is an Xbox and I can play my Xbox games,
but not every Xbox game, and like that's super cool,
for the ones that include the PC license with the cost of the Xbox license,
but not every Xbox game does, particularly third party ones.
Now it's clear where Microsoft's ambitions are
that they do want, did you take away my adapter cable?
Also, I only need two of these.
Before I took away too much. It's clear where Microsoft's ambitions lie
that they want every game for Xbox
to be licensed for PC as well and vice versa,
and they want this future where every screen is an Xbox to happen,
but it's equally clear that it hasn't happened yet,
and there's gonna be kind of a painful
awkward adolescence for this concept.
So coming back to your question of,
what was the question again? About if Steam came to Xbox devices.
So if Steam comes to Xbox, I don't really see how that aligns with Microsoft's vision.
It's clear that Microsoft wants every device
to be an Xbox, but the only reason for Microsoft to care
about devices being Xboxes is so that they can take their cut on the Xbox store, right?
Otherwise, why wouldn't they just want the Xbox to be a PC with all of the various marketplaces,
Epic Games Store, Steam, good old games, et cetera, et cetera?
So with that dynamic in mind,
I do not see Steam coming to the Xbox anytime soon,
but with that said, Microsoft's vision has gotten
a little bit muddy here because for the first time,
they've gone and put Xbox branding on what is essentially a PC with Windows
that is slightly tuned for better battery life on handheld.
And they have made it explicitly clear, not quite explicitly clear,
but they have made it implicitly clear, nice,
LTTstore.com, let's go.
They've made it implicitly clear that Steam will be supported on the Xbox Ally X edition.
Console, supposedly console. Have they said if there's any sort of working together
on adjusting the margins and the cuts from a Steam sale?
No. Okay, so I was curious if that would be the reason why then. No, they didn't even explicitly acknowledge
that Steam would be available on the device. They just said leading PC game places.
And I was like, okay, like, Steam, right?
And they're like, okay.
They wouldn't say Steam. Sure, yeah. But they would say, well,
what do you think is the leading PC game marketplace?
And we'd go, okay, Steam. And they'd be like, well, we said leading PC game
marketplaces, right? And we're like, okay, so Steam, right? And they're like, well, what do you think is a leading game?
Like, I get it. I get it. PR people got a PR. So the answer is Steam,
but you'll never hear Microsoft say it directly. So with that kageness in mind,
I think ever is a big timeframe, you know?
I can't try to predict what will happen ever.
But what I can say is I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
I don't think you're gonna see Steam on the Xbox because otherwise what reason exists
for the Xbox to be a thing? They already sell them at like a loss, right?
Do you have our accessories? Like our screws and stuff?
Oh, I put it back in the box.
Like I said, like I said, half a brain cell today.
Thanks, Elijah. I'm trying, but... Dan, you got another message?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Hey, Linus and Elijah.
Oh, I'm sorry, baggy. We got a baggy, which at $90 in the last one,
we got a little sorting thing. If they're labeled, I'll excuse the lack of...
No. They're not labeled. I saw this labeled and I thought that was it for a second.
No, they're not labeled. They are individually sorted by type, though.
That's something. That's something. Not resealable. No.
Meh. Okay, hit me, Dan.
Hey, Linus and Elijah, my favorite.
Why don't you cover enbaric or retoy to devices anymore?
I get that emulation devices are a sore subject, but it feels like a missing opportunity.
Love you, Elijah. I wouldn't say that it's a sore subject.
I think for me, with all these emulation devices
that are out there right now, what new is there to talk about sometimes?
Like even when we just bought the Game Stick,
I think it was called for the buying every tech ad,
it was kind of just a case of like, I'm buying this HDMI plug-in that has ROMs installed.
I could just download an emulator, right? I don't know, I feel like there hasn't been anything new.
And whenever we're determining whether to make a video about something or not,
sometimes it's not really up to us in a sense. The answer is, okay,
well, is there enough material for a video here?
Some stuff like isn't even really necessarily long enough for a short.
I do think that anything experiential, where there's an ergonomic element to it,
like a human interface element to it, like a handheld console,
yeah, there's probably a video's worth there.
But at that point, it's a pretty significant investment
that you're asking someone to make in learning about the product.
And the proliferation of these handheld devices
has led to us, I think generally just,
has led to kind of a saturation. Yeah, I agree.
Where when they were novel, I think you'd get not only people
who are interested in a handheld gaming device at all, and the people who are interested in that particular one,
but you'd get people, you'd just get kind of like looky-loos that are flying by going like,
oh, whoa, that's kind of cool. Handheld PC, wow, that's kind of neat.
Oh, is that like an Android device? It's like just for emulation?
Wow, that's neat, I've never seen that before. But now it's kind of become a bit more
of a mature product category. And so I think you're basically limiting your audience
to people who are legit interested
in buying that particular model. And at the end of the day,
we've got to, we can only make a limited number of videos.
And there's no shortage of ideas. So we've got to try to whittle it down
to the ones that we think are going to.
Be the best video we can make, essentially. Yeah, and there's different measures of best video.
Sometimes best video is about doing what's right.
I think a great example of that was the one that we uploaded yesterday.
We had no guarantee whatsoever that that video was going to perform in any way.
But when we heard about what was going on with HouseFresh,
we just felt like we were at sort of a tipping point
in the industry where if we didn't say or do something
and the situation with brands suing reviewers
for their honest testing could spiral out of control
and threaten the entire consumer information pipeline.
Like we're sitting there going, okay, well, we make this video or the game changes
in a way that is not for the better. This is the hill to die on.
This is the point where we have to make a stand. Obviously, can I have the screws for this?
Oh, sorry. Obviously, it's not always an existential threat
that prompts us to make a video. Be it for us or be it for one of our peers in the industry,
like when NVIDIA with threatening hardware unboxed way back when.
Sometimes it comes down to what helps us
continue to support the team.
Pool robots, anyone? Do you like pool robots, Elijah?
You know, I've made one of them. I made a video about it. Honestly, I thought you did a great job.
I thought it was pretty interesting. I think it's still a funny video. It just didn't get a ton of views.
Well, it didn't help that half of the video was blurred.
And that's not Elijah's fault. Let's make that. I would like to make that abundantly clear.
That is not Elijah's fault. And I promise you it was discussed as well.
Lots of conversations happened about it, so. But hey.
And then other times, it's because we are trying to make
whatever gets the most views, whatever delights our viewers.
So usually it's some combination of the three.
I'm a little confused right now. What's up?
There's a couple of thumb screws that are like pre-attach emulated here
that appear to be to mount power supply.
I noticed that when you first unboxed it. So if you wanted to just not bother
with these not thumb screw ones, you could just put two screws in your power supply
and call it a day.
That was a new note.
I'm thinking, I'm having a think. Quick and easy install?
I like quick and easy. I do like that.
Power supplies are heavy though. It's at the bottom.
Yeah. You're hitting all types of notes.
Ideally, yes. Sure. Then I pick up my computer, I'm going to a LAN.
Well, that's your fault. Yeah. You're holding it wrong.
But my only anchor points are here. And with some very long, very heavy power supplies.
That could be an issue. There could be some leverage. It's probably fine.
It's probably fine. I would certainly never ship a system like this.
Even just in the back of my car, driving across a couple of states or whatever.
You know what?
I'll allow it.
Man, going back to the traditional orientation for the power supply now, I'm just like...
I know. The other one was so nice to plug those cables in, right?
Two Corsairs credit. They have managed to create a pretty much unprecedented
amount of space here for plugging in these cables. Like this is my best case scenario
for being able to plug in cables traditionally. They've even got mesh here that I can totally see through
so that I can see what I'm doing. It's just that, man, after I experienced
the one from Lee and Lee, I'm spoiled.
I'm officially spoiled. You heard it here first. Spoiled brat.
We all knew that already. Go ahead, call me spoiled brat. Spoiled brat. That's weird.
Okay, Mr. Portia. What? Who did you?
No, I just... Linus is not brat.
Let's have a brat show. Okay, now hold on a second. I think we've talked about this on Wanshow.
I forget what brat is. Not you.
It was just like, it was the summer album last year. Like, brat.
That was a year ago? Yeah. Last summer. Lord.
Charlie, whatever.
Angels? Boop, boop, boop.
Oh, that's James Bond. You see what I mean? Not brat.
You are like a giant, like... Empty vault?
Yes. No, that's not what I was gonna say. I was gonna say like cultural reference crock pot.
Like you just, you don't know where things are from
and then very occasionally you'll like pull out a reference
that I'm like, where's that from? You'll be like family guy.
And I'll be like, no.
Family guy was making a reference. And then every once in a while he's like,
no, I've seen E.T. I was like, oh, like, you've seen like no movies.
Why E.T. Yeah, why E.T. My grandma had it on VHS
and they decided to give me nightmares. So they were like, watch E.T.
I did not sleep well that night.
Deep breaths, Linus. E.T. was pretty scary.
The scariest part for me was like near the end when he was like very sick
and he was like looking super pale and he's like, I was like, nightmare fuel.
I was out. I was out fast.
Speaking of out fast, we got these cables out of the way really fast.
The King of Segways, dude. Thank you. Thank you.
Appreciate that. Even though we write most of them. Look at that.
Sorry, continue. You know very well that I often change the Segway.
I never make it better. No, you always make it worse.
We'll have like a natural Segway that like makes sense. And we're like, that's cool.
And then you'll start changing the intro completely. So when you get to my Segway,
you're like, this doesn't make sense now. I'm like, yeah, because you changed it. I don't question why it doesn't make sense.
I know why. And sometimes it does make sense.
And I change it to be worse just for fun. Like he'll have like a really nice Segway.
And he'll be like, we should just put like Beep Boop Segway sponsor.
Yeah, in the PureWare video yesterday,
we had a nice Segway written and you were just on set. We're like, I'm going to go fight this Segway.
And I'm like, that's stupid, but okay. Like I guess we'll throw it in the video.
You also did something, something to Segway. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, something, something.
You get a little tired and it's just like, eh, Segway. Bye.
Sponsored here. There is one, I forget which video it is where we're talking and you just like turn to camera
and go Segway and it just cuts like immediately. And it's like, okay.
This is so good. You know what you're doing, I'll tell you that.
I can almost fit my whole head through here to like see the 24 pin while I plug it in.
You also just do it from the front. You don't always need to go in the back.
But I like it this way.
Look at that. That's great. There's no way.
You had- There's no way. You had to intend that.
Please tell me. Don't even pretend. Please tell me. Stop pretending now.
All right, I'll stop pretending. You can stop pretending. Sure.
Oh, I did this wrong. Oh no, I didn't. Okay, cable management.
Pretty okay. Bull management.
No, that's not ding worthy.
You can't give me credit for bad dings because that will take away the high
that I get from the good dings. They're all bad dings. We're trying to remove all pies
that you get from the dings because we need you to stop. You don't need me to stop.
I will increase the minimum quality. Thank you.
He's upping the setting in the Dan membrane.
Dan, you want to hit me with a merge message? More sad dings. Yeah, I guess I've got a lot.
Let's see, are there any cases that separate GPU and CPU intake and exhaust?
Sure, there would be some interference with PCI brackets, but why not go back to side panel fans?
That is such a good question. That's so funny because that was actually
in that conversation at Computex that I was talking about earlier
where I was kind of being asked, okay, is there anything that you feel
like case manufacturers are overlooking? That was actually one of the things we talked about
is yeah, what happened to the whole cooling zone paradigm
that was introduced by the Ntech P180 back in the day?
And that was, and also while we're at it,
the P4 style side intake fan.
I think that those are ideas that could be more relevant today
than they were back when they were current meta.
So good question. Yeah, good question. I, especially for these flow through GPUs
that have really taken off in popularity like this 9070 XT Tai Chi from ASRock here,
where you've got this big old, oh, sorry.
Where you got this big old fan here that's blowing through a big fat heat sink
and then blowing all the way through the back of the card. Being able to capture this heat,
like this is gonna be your hardest working, best cooling fan on this particular design.
Being able to capture this heat and just duct it right out of the case
could make a measurable difference to CPU temperatures,
not to mention your RAM and your VRMs and all that good stuff. What am I holding this for?
I don't need this yet. Okay. Sorry about that, Elijah. No worries.
I'll hold it. You can have it back. Thank you for all this camera. You're welcome.
No. Thank you.
Dan, go ahead and hit me. Hanging up too much. I deserve it.
Hey, Linkus, Dinkus and Elijah. Have any of you played Game of the Year
Claire Obscure Expedition 33 yet? You can e a French person wearing a baguette
and fight oversized mimes.
Wee-wee. No, I have not played it.
I've been asked a lot to play it, but it doesn't look like my type of game,
so I probably will not play it. I, meanwhile, have also been asked to try it,
and I will play it because it looks like my type, for sure.
I'm pretty excited to try it out, and it's what, like 30, 40 bucks or something like that?
Yeah, it's not triple A priced. Double A priced? Yeah. My Game of the Year, though, is Blueprints.
That game is unbelievably good. If you have not seen it, it's on Game Pass.
You can go give it a try. As a Game of the Year? I think it's my Game of the Year.
It's gonna be tough to beat Split Fiction because Split Fiction was also incredible, but.
Do you play any good games? No, I'm kidding. What the heck?
I also really, really liked Blueprints. That was great. I thought it was amazing. Game of the Year, though, not sure.
I'm like 60 hours in to Blueprints. What?
What? Is your RNG that bad? No, when you complete the game,
you don't complete the game. Oh, you're doing new Game Plus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah.
So,
this is okay. In terms of cable management? Yeah, just everything's just, everything's kinda,
it's kinda okay. I'm just gonna kinda plug this in here,
do a little thing like that. Yes, I know, technically I don't have to
put it under like this. I just find it a little bit easier to really
wrench it down if I do that.
Do you feel like it's worse than the last one? The way these fans are daisy-chained,
you know, back to the whole reusability. Yeah, that's an advantage.
It's nice that you can just use them as normal fans if you want,
instead of like a triple fan thing, but it means they're just kinda,
they're kinda hanging here like this, even though you do get the benefit of being able to plug them in with one header.
It's okay, you know? Here's a little strap.
We can give it a little strappy strap.
Whoa, no. And, oh yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
Okay, I figured out how to put that in there. It's from the back. Okay, that makes way more sense.
Neat. Wow, that, oh man, yeah, let's see. Ah, see, this is hard though.
This is hard and annoying.
There, ugh. All right, I think I'm ready to,
I think I'm ready to start working on the rating. Yep, what do you wanna go, do you wanna do features?
Where do you wanna start? Let's do features. That's what we did for the last one. Sure, let's do that.
So features such as things like extra fans, rubber grommets, fan filters, organized screw box,
things like that. Do you think, eight was the Leon Lee,
which is our best one so far. Do you think our features have been worse, are on par?
I think this falls a little short for me in terms of things that I would consider to be extras.
I really like these movable frame pieces
so that you don't have any obstructions in the way of either the aesthetics
or the airflow of your fans if you decide to use larger 140 millimeter fans
rather than the default 120 mils. I do really like the ability to,
with just a couple of screws, strip everything off of this thing.
I mean, is that where they got the frame name from?
I would, I would assume so. I like how open all the meshes are on it.
They managed to mesh it up without it feeling as cheap as our first case.
There's almost no metal left here, but you can clearly see why.
Cause you can clearly see right through it, right?
I really like that, but I do feel like there's little touches missing
like the integrated power connectors
for the multiple fans. I definitely miss the,
where'd our other system go? Oh man, it's so cool.
Oh, the power supply. Oh, the ease of plugging in the power supply
was so awesome on the other one.
So our master box was a five. Lee and Lee was an eight.
I want to give this a seven. I think that's very fair.
I think it's really good, but I don't think I would take the trade-offs
compared to our Land Cool, which is Lee and Lee.
We're not quite done building yet, so we won't do building experience.
I'm pretty close, but yeah, sure. What about cable management? Cause you were just talking about that.
Our last one, the Lee and Lee got a four and the master box got a two.
And this is out of five. Yes.
I would say that this is a three and a half.
Well, wait, no, hold on. I was going to say, we haven't quite put that on yet.
Yeah, I got to put this on before I can fully judge it.
How did this go in again? I don't know. Good gravy. No, I see it. Ooh, it has two different positions as well.
That's nice. So you could have more or less room for the...
Exactly. Exactly, that's very cool.
Buh, buh, buh, buh. You know what?
I'd say this can match the Lee and Lee. Cause once we've got this shroud in place,
which by the way can also be replaced with a fan holder,
this is pretty clean. So a four? Yeah. Cool.
Yeah, we can hit this with a four. Oh, this gap.
This is an awkward sized gap, Elijah.
Cause I can... Oh man, can I get this USB three cable through here?
Oh, I don't think you're going to. No, I can't get this through here,
but I can't do this in the tighter position,
but still run that cable through there. Oh wait, yes I can. Yeah, you can.
I have to do it after the fact though. Oh, that's something.
That could determine like your mother boy choice, right? Cause you've maybe had a slightly smaller mother board,
but oh no, cause that's ATX. Yeah, this is going to do tax. Okay, no, no, it's okay.
It's okay. Now it's covering it and it does fit. Okay, I stand by it.
Was that by a four? Yeah, well I think it's on par. Yeah, yeah, I'm ready to call this a tie.
You're pretty close to the building experience.
Do you think you can start compiling your thoughts? Out of 10, the Lee and Lee got a 9.5.
What do you think this lies?
It's always dangerous to evaluate the intuitiveness
of something because your intuition is colored
by your past experiences. With that said, I think there are things
that I could argue I found objectively more intuitive
about the Lee and Lee case.
Like the daisy chaining of the fans, then just already being plugged in,
not needing to be re-routed around this stupid piece that I just took out.
I found, for instance, these cable straps,
just a little less easy to use, even though I actually have seen these before
and I had not seen the Landcool style ones in the past.
The power supply mounting was something that was different and yet very intuitive.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, bear in mind, as I say this,
that I actually encountered more novel ideas
in the Landcool Lee and Lee case than I am in the Frame 4000,
but I found this case less intuitive to work in.
Not a ton more work,
but definitely a little less smooth.
Like now that it's time to button it all up and put it back together,
I'm having a hard time remembering.
Like where things go and... Actually, no, I remember where this went.
No, okay, okay, you know what? No, I shouldn't say I'm having a hard time remembering anything.
I can remember where the pieces go.
It's just not as good. I give it an eight. An eight. Yeah, do you think I'm being unfair?
I don't think you're being unfair. You're the one building, so. Well, I mean, you're here, you're watching me do it.
Usually do. What's the thing with him?
He always escalates. Does that count as a ding? He won't back down.
Let's pretend it didn't happen. Yeah, we can move on. Let's not ding anything.
Let's put the top cover on you. Oh, we can put our GPU back in.
I was gonna say, we have to get our GPU in.
Take the cover off and we're gonna need to pull the PCI-U covers as well.
Awesome. Oh, yeah, right. Oh man, this didn't quite click in.
Yeah, it's just, it's little things.
Especially because this one is, I think our most expensive one, at $110,
do you think the value of this case is on par with the others,
or do you think it's a worse value? Well, it's price, not value, is our evaluation component.
So we have to give it, like obviously, this isn't the world's most expensive case either.
It's $110, that's a perfectly reasonable price for a well-cooled, pretty well-thought-out case.
It's compatible with vertical mounts, which is nice to see.
I don't, ooh, I don't love how this kind of interferes
with getting at some of these thumb screws here. And for a thumb screws sticking out of the case setup,
my screwdriver is actually quite angled to get into this.
Part of that is that it is a multi-bit screwdriver, so it has to have like a female socket for my bit.
But I think that's something that is fairly safe
to assume that a lot of people are using, so I don't know about this Corsair.
Do you want an extension? Nope, the extension won't help,
because it's the same thickness. There was a thickness problem?
Yeah. Yes. Even if I had a perfectly skinny shaft,
there's kind of a ridge here.
Don't make a face. There's kind of a little lip.
Why are we talking about a shaft? I think price-wise, I have to give it,
like I have to give it kind of a four. Four? All right. Yeah, like the price is five.
All right. I think it's a fine, I think it's a fine price for a fine case.
All right, let's get this GPU in here.
And then as you're kind of wrapping it up here and closing it out, the last one is a bonus.
Do you think this thing deserves any bonuses?
Man, Corsair, I like being able to add a bunch more fans.
I like being able to strip everything away so that I can really see what I'm doing.
I don't know if I can give any bonus marks for that though, because I kind of already gave them points for that.
Sure. And they'd like ease of use. Yeah.
Do you think any of like the other accessories that you get, like the, you can swap it out to the more solid color
or any of the other like mounting options?
Hmm. Do we have some zip ties?
Yep. Cool. Do those come with the case? All right, that's nice to see.
Oh yeah, they didn't have the... See, this is the thing. This is what's happening here.
Is the more I think about it, the more I'm reminded of things that it doesn't have.
It doesn't have the little sorting tray for all of my hardware. So now I have to just, I don't know,
put that in this giant box that I can't get rid of now.
I'm not criticizing them for including the accessories that are in there.
That's super cool. Thank you, Corsair. But I have to keep track of this box now,
instead of being able to just put my accessories into a nice little cubby and tuck them into my case, right?
What would you give it a bonus for?
Probably the amount of airflow that it probably has. I think a lot of cases sometimes try to go for more aesthetics
and make it all clean and sleek. And I know NZXT for a long time had the issues
with what it was, like the H5s and the H7s or whatever. They looked really good,
but you couldn't get a single ounce of air through the front, right?
You know what? I think that's really fair. This is probably from looking at them,
which you really can tell a lot from a case by looking at it, especially when you can see
right through it. This is probably the best airflow case
that we're going to look at today. Yeah.
Especially that front panel. That front panel was like crazy.
So do you think they get one point? However, hear me out.
Okay, so let's look. And again, the comparisons, the thief of joy,
as Puff always said. That has a looser mesh, you know?
It has more fan filtration than this one does. This actually doesn't have a filter on these front fans.
That, I kind of want to take off a half a bonus point for that actually, now that I noticed that.
That's a downer, if you have pets especially. I can adjust it.
Yeah, I think we should do that. But while this doesn't have as open a mesh as that one,
what it does have is four fans. Sure, yeah. Two of which are blowing directly into the bottom
of our GPU while Corsair with the frame 4000 here
is relying on old paradigm just kind of blowing here
and hoping any of it isn't heated up by the time it makes it all the way over here.
So that's tough. Is the airflow better in a way that is meaningful
to our hottest component in the system?
Yeah, I would say no then. So I don't think I can...
No bonus points? I don't think I can give it a bonus point for that, but... I did dock the 0.5.
Yeah, they managed to get something docked from their competitor and hey,
your competitor's loss is your win, right?
Sure. I mean, that's a philosophy.
I don't know that that's Corsair's philosophy, but it's a philosophy.
All right, five plus seven plus eight plus four is 24.
24 out of 35? Yes. Okay.
It's in second place right now. That's okay.
Should we fire it up so we can see what it looks like? We should and we should get all the side panels on
and everything. Oh man, that kind of makes me want to give... Did we give a bonus to the other one for all the RGB?
Which other one for the RGB? Langkool. I don't believe we did.
They did fine. They're already winning, there you go. I think they're pretty comfortably coasting
to first place here. What is this? Is this slightly too big?
No, I just think it was not in properly. Okay, I got it.
I got it, I got it. That's an interesting thing that I don't know
that I would actually want to be see-through. And I guess that's why Corsair includes
the blackout version of it. Okay, I get that now.
Good job, Corsair. You don't get a point though.
I feel like price is one of those things that we try to isolate by having a separate category for it,
but you almost can't do it because everything has to come through the lens of, okay,
but how much am I paying for it? Sure, yeah.
Makes it really hard to assess the value of things just in general when you could pay more,
twice as more and get twice as many features or whatever. That's a fine looking build.
Yeah. Maybe even a touch cleaner.
Try not to dock the white cooler. No, I get it, I get it.
But no, I'm saying because of this. Maybe even it ends up a touch cooler,
then a cleaner than the land cool. But it lacks the RGB, it was $20.
A few more, a few more fans included. I think. Solid, feels good.
I wouldn't necessarily say better. Feels good though.
Sorry, what are you gonna say? I was gonna say, I feel like watching you build
the land cool seemed overall like a better situation.
This was easy, but the land cool gave me joy. I think, yeah, and that's why I think,
I think we made the right choice with this one, not scoring as high.
Even though you keep kind of going back and forth on, oh, was this and that, but.
That's the thing. It's good, but it's not exciting, if that makes sense.
But am I just a jaded PC reviewer?
Like if you guys are having a different experience, like yeah, hit me up in the chat.
Be like, hey Linus, I think you're being totally unfair, or hey, I think you're being totally too fair the other way.
If it didn't excite you, you should be giving it a two out of 10.
Call for blood, you know? Yeah, Linus, I think you are idiot.
Not my blood. Oh, idiot.
How much do you love this power button?
Why? Oh, is it bad? It's something.
That's the power button? I would not have guessed that. Crosshair.
Looks like a butthole. Crosshair. Okay, okay, okay.
Sven is nodding violently. It makes it even weirder, that Linus was just like rubbing his finger over it.
Well, I didn't think anyone was gonna make it weird.
Jeez, you guys.
I don't know, I'd give the case less points for that.
Chat disagrees. It loses the butthole bones.
I actually don't know that Chat disagrees. Chat probably agrees knowing them.
What, did you want me to move? No, just so I can see. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot to see in this one, unfortunately.
That's about it. We get a little bit of RGB on that GPU from Asrock.
We get some RGB on the CPU cooler from Valkyrie,
our sponsor. And,
yep. It doesn't, I think it doesn't look as good now.
Yeah. Cause it had, even though like these are Crosshair fans,
that one had like two RGB fans at the front, right? Yeah.
I don't know. I think we made the right choice. I think we made the right choice.
All right. On to case.
Where does this go? Oh, it's going to take over one of our ones that we're going to work on.
Do you want to work on that, Shafi? Put it here. All right.
Mashify. I think this is the first of the cases
that we've looked at today that I've actually built in before. Oh, okay, that's good.
So this, there won't be any surprises. This is the top selling case on B&H for 99.99.
So we're expecting this to land right smack dab
down the middle of the last two cases that we looked at
if it's going to compete on value.
Boy. There we go.
Come on. Come on. You can do it.
You can do it. Mashify. All right.
Am I going to get zapped? Ow, yo. I heard that.
That was a good one. Ouch.
Okay. Dang it.
Again, same kind of... Crummy packing material. One hit packing material.
Again. How y'all doing, chat?
Oh, a lot of Fractal fans out there.
Yup. Fractal was a big disrupter in the case industry
when they showed up. I actually ordered,
I don't think the first, but maybe the second container
of Fractal design cases to North America. It was the Define R2.
And I believe New Egg was the first to stock it.
And then I saw it. I saw the reviews for it.
And I was just like, we got a couple samples of it, if I recall correctly.
And there were just so many little things that they had innovated on.
Elijah, if you want to install the cooler on this. Oh, sure. Probably swell.
So many little things that they had innovated on. They managed to get the look of the Antec P180,
which was kind of the case at the time, at a much lower price.
They didn't have the airflow zones of the P180,
but they managed enough airflow.
And they had this bitumen material, this acoustic dampening material on the inside
that really made a huge difference
to the acoustic profile of the system without costing as much as the like,
six layer dip version that Antec had
on their front panel of the case and on the side panels.
So it was kind of, they came in as sort of
like a budget knockoff, no offense fractal.
I mean, search your feelings. You know this to be true.
And over time, they've evolved as a company to become an innovator and to become one of the brands
that is often copied. And I think the Meshify is actually an excellent example
of just a well-executed, great value case
that others have looked to and gone, oh, I kind of wish I thought of that.
Front IO is not as robust as what we've seen
on the last two more expensive cases, no USB-C,
but we do have two USB 3.0 ports, but we have magnetic filters on the top,
as well as a slide out from the front filter on the bottom.
That's a little touch that so many companies try to do right
and many fail because it's a lot more work
to slide it out at the back when it's, you know, down below your desk and everything's all plugged
into it at the back. It's kind of hard to get a long filter out there. So that's pretty nice to see.
How's our, how's our front panel? Come on, there we go, give it the old, there we go.
Already, there is one thing that I'm not liking compared to the frame.
You can see, I can't really just remove all the pieces of it and get them out of my way.
This is going to be a much more conventional order
of operations build.
Can't just like tear the whole thing apart and then tackle it in any order that I want.
Do have a nice little removable basement cover here though.
So this gives us the flexibility to either clear up space
in the front to install up to a triple 120 millimeter radiator, which we won't be doing today.
So we're going to leave it in for a much cleaner look
that covers up all of our, you know, ugly power supply cables down in the bottom.
These little nice fractal touches, it's good to see them staying true to their roots.
We've got a nice little vibration dampening strip down here on the bottom, as well as another one
up here on the top for our tempered glass side panel. I kind of take tempered glass for granted
in any case that is anywhere near the $100 price point these days.
It used to be that you could kind of get bonus points for that, but I don't think Fractal will be getting
any here. Captive screws, all these love to see those,
but again, that's, you're not going to stand out
for them at this price point. Oh, hello.
Oh, there we go, nice. Internet says you can remove only the middle part
of the front. Sorry, only the middle part of the front,
as opposed to what? You think, I don't, I'm not sure.
I mean, let's have a look, let's see if we can figure out what you guys are talking about.
Oh, the cover on it, or what? Let's hear, we'll remove this.
There we go.
Is there going to be a third screw over here? Nope. Okay, so that pops out, and then you can pop out
these hard drive cages, and that'll give you the additional
room that you need here. Oh, the mesh is a door. Yeah, I forgot about that too.
Yeah, so if you put the front cover back on. Mm-hmm.
Yep. And then just remove the door. And just remove the door.
So if you pull the Fractal Logo, I built in a couple of these.
Fractal Logo on the front, pull on that, it's a door.
Oh, it doesn't look like it. I'm sure it is.
Maybe it's secured in some way. Or pull harder.
Yeah, don't be a win. I don't think, here, close up, you can see how hard I'm pulling on this thing.
Try from the top, I don't know. It's gotta be secured, it's gotta be secured in some way.
Hold on, hold on.
Is it screwed shut?
You might have broken it earlier. Don't pull the logo.
Hold on. Pull the mesh on the panel. What are you stuck on?
Oh, you just removed the entire door, yeah. But it's a door.
It's a door. I mean, how sure are you, Dan?
Maybe that was on the larger one? I think it's definitely stuck on something.
Yeah, here, tell you what, I'll get a second opinion here.
I do not believe that this is a door based on my current situation.
This goes into the top like that.
And this clips onto the bottom, all along here.
Oh, maybe this model of a variety doesn't have a door.
Okay. But anyway, that was the intended way to get into the front of the case.
Uh-huh. Not a door. You know what?
I like my way better. This was more work. Yeah, yeah, cause it's not a door.
Cause I couldn't even, here, here, I'll show you guys what I mean.
Look at this. Oh, the door is on the mesh if I too. Thanks Floor Plane for helping us break the case.
So I, oh, no, I can reach that.
Okay, okay, hold on. Okay, so here's how it works.
You reach up into here and you can release this latch.
There you go. To remove this. Which meshifies this?
This is meshify one. And this is the meshify, this is the meshify C.
Yes. Okay, so this is a fan filter,
but it's not an easily cleanable one. It's a foam style one.
And it's just attached to the, you know,
the kind of cool, tessellated looking shape thing
that they've got going on here. Are the fingerprints is apparent in IRL spaces?
The fingerprints are very apparent in person. Yes. But I also wouldn't have had my grubby finger paws
all over them if you guys hadn't told me that I could remove it as a door.
So. The newer ones are a door. That's on me.
Okay. All right, let's go ahead and fix this bad boy now.
You know what? No, I'm going to keep this out for now. Just because maybe that'll make the build.
Nope, that will not make the build process even slightly easier.
Cool. Let's throw our motherboard in here.
With our coolers. Fractal does a great job of this. And yeah, here we go.
This case is no exception. They've got the nine included.
Nope. Just one included.
Motherboard standoff. Oh boy.
So this is the first version. They're up to version three now.
Look, we didn't pick the cases. We bought the most popular cases.
I just find that interesting. How much is a Meshify three?
Is it $99?
I got 99 Meshfies, but this ain't one.
It's like 200 bucks. Maybe she told us that.
Oh, sorry. Did you say $200? Is that the middle one?
The middle one. Because they do a large one. Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, okay. Look, either way.
Oh, it's very different. Oh yeah. This is the Meshify C,
and this is what we're comparing today. This was the most popular on V&H.
Yep. Oh man. Okay, so they're at least sorted into separate baggies.
Labels are really out of fashion though. I mean, I guess it makes sense from a skew management perspective.
You know, you take these two blank bags
or just one skew, but as soon as you put labels on them, now they're two skews.
So I get it. I often like it. $190 US dollars for the version three of this case.
Yeah, so that's a markedly more expensive case, and I don't think is really comparable.
I think we need to stay focused on the actual case that we have here today.
The case that doesn't have the standoffs pre-installed in it.
Oh, that's one. It has the one center one,
which means that out of every case we've looked at,
including the $40 case, this has the fewest pre-installed standoffs.
Okay, I would argue that the ones installed
in the $40 case almost seemed like a mistake
because it had the center one and then the top center one and no other one.
It's a, and if you consider that that was for an MATX case,
the proportion of the standoffs that were installed in it
compared to how many I would need to finish my build was actually much higher.
Don't think that's a fair way to rate it, but okay. I don't, I mean, look,
do I have to be fair when I'm unhappy?
Yeah, that's. Yes.
Although I have to talk about this in your annual performance review,
and I'm not happy about it. Yeah, the fact that you have to do
an annual performance review. Yeah, I'd be very unhappy. That's why you're not happy about it.
If he makes it to the review anyway. That's true.
Well, have I not made it to an annual performance review?
Is this a record I'm not getting? No, no, I'm saying Elijah might not. If I make it, because you know, you might ever, you know,
kick me in your pool or something. I'm legitimately kidding. I am not Elijah's manager
and I don't do his annual performance review. Yes.
What if one day. It's so ominous. What if you hire me a CVO too?
And then you technically would be my manager, right? I don't think that's how that works.
I don't think, when you hire someone, you hire them as the sequel of your own position.
CVOE?
Exec, or no, CV. What about, what about CVO Ultra?
Or it's like Ultramax. Oh yeah. Oh dude.
We at Apple love to have a CVO too.
Do that to ACAM. Does this only include two rinky dink fans?
Sorry, I can't. Oh, you're right. Oh my goodness. Oh yeah, this one.
Oh, uh-oh, yeah. No RGB, no, you know, daisy chain by default.
I gotta say, I am looking back on my time
with the Corsair Frame 4000,
much more favorably at this point.
Yeah. For a $10 difference between this and that,
I feel like you get more than $10 so far.
Or for saving $10 by going with the Land Cool,
this is a no-brainer, dude.
It's, to be clear, I haven't seen anything that is bad.
Yes. Sure. It's fine. It just is not standing out
compared to the competition at this point.
Would you like to do a merge message while you're installing? Yeah, I would. Dan, hit us.
Sure thing, let's see. Hi, lead.
What unusual, exotic, or non-existent case feature
would you like to see become more standard? And what standard feature would you like to see
disappear from the market? Ooh, I think that's almost too easy of one.
The standard feature that I'd like to see disappear from the market
is the current just disgusting mess that is ARGB.
Yeah. The industry standard connector is so terrible
that I don't blame the companies like Corsair
for trying to reinvent that wheel because it's a stupid triangular wheel.
And then the closed ecosystem connectors
are so expensive that I totally understand why nobody wants to...
That was close. Ooh, that was close.
That I totally understand why nobody wants to invest in them and then get locked into this bloody ecosystem
that they don't even know if they're gonna have any continuity in. Like, I hate it.
It sucks. As for stuff that I like,
that I would like to see become standard, well, I think we've seen some examples today for sure.
Rackmount gaming. Oh, okay. That's my...
I wish it was just cheaper. I understand that it's a low volume item.
You're not gonna sell as many consumer grade gaming rack-mounted chassis,
but the ones I got from Sliger are like 220 US dollars each.
And it's like, oh, and that's like a cheap one because I think Rosewell has some as well.
Like, it's too expensive.
Yeah, I can see that. The problem is that to have your gaming setup
be compatible with it, you have to have a rack.
And that's a lot of food you gotta eat.
I'm working on the new rubric. Ding?
That was probably one. I was gonna, my gut said ding.
Some gamers, some gamers, they're naturally gonna acquire the rack, you know?
For their networking equipment. Like one percent or less. For their networking equipment.
Either way, rack-mount gaming, I want more of it.
Shoot, I actually had thought of something that wasn't something that we looked at today
and now I'm really upset that I forget. So I'm just gonna cheat
and I'm gonna go with something that we saw today and that is I loved that sideways power supply mount.
Oh, yeah, I agree. I would love to see that just become fairly standard.
I don't know that it needs to be in every case. Certainly there will be more value-oriented cases
where it doesn't really make sense, but I'd say if you're charging $100 for your case
and your competitor has that feature, you should just have it. I agree.
There are trade-offs still. Like you're probably giving up some flexibility around
like hard drive mounting and stuff like that, but for most cases I feel like that is such a low priority
already anyway that I'd say just, yeah, just take it away. Yeah, like hard drive mounting is just a low priority.
Now, right, like having 3.5-inch drives or whatever.
Are you making fun of me? Yeah. Why?
Because it's so easy. Well, no, no, no, I'm saying like having a lot of space
for 3.5-inch drives in your system is a low priority. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Like having 3.5-inch drives,
are we arguing about the same thing? I have no idea what you're talking about. Okay.
How about we move on then? Sure. Okay.
Another merge message, I guess, I don't know. Whatever can fill the awkward silence.
I know, right? Yeah, hit us, hit us, hit us. Hey, Linus. Hey.
I have been using my Steam Deck as a living room console and was wondering if any of y'all have a small list
of great local multiplayer games besides tape-to-tape, LeMau, much love from Texas.
Pummel party. Pummel party? Yep. It's basically Mario Party, but.
Guns. Yeah. Rated like 14A.
There's a lot more board action in Pummel Party. Like you can actually interact on the board a lot more.
And it feels a little less tedious to get through.
Every, yes. Many times you mash A in Mario Party
because you're just like, hurry up with the dialogue, hurry up with the dialogue and yeah.
With that said, Mario Party definitely has some quality of life features that I missed playing through a full round
of Pummel Party for the first time with you guys the other day. Was that your first time playing through a full round?
Yeah. Okay, yeah. I like a partial round before I think,
but I've never actually made it through a full one because I'm usually the host.
Yeah. So I get pulled away to do stuff.
Like in Mario Party, you can practice the minigame,
which is nice when it's your first time playing. You can do it in Pummel Party. It's just, I didn't see it.
We just didn't do it. All I saw was the explanation.
No, there's a way to practice. I think you have to enable it before you start the board.
But there is a way that you can do a practice. Cool. Yeah.
All right, then make of that what you will.
I really like, I really like Mage Quit.
That's a good one too. Yeah, it's like a bomb squad slash poi poi slash,
I don't know what other games to compare it to. Probably most people have never heard of either of those.
Like Arena Brawler type game that supports up to,
is it 10 or 12 players or something like that? It's a lot.
Yeah, it's a lot. In local multiplayer, which is really cool. It might be eight, it might be eight.
Either way, it's a blast and what's nice about it
is it has a really clever built-in rubber banding
that feels kind of, it feels kind of unfair in a fair way.
I'm so sorry, I'm really trying not to have that.
So when you win the first round, you get a later pick for ability upgrades,
for later rounds. So at the start, that acts like I said,
as a really nice kind of rubber band,
providing an advantage in ability upgrades to the lesser skilled players.
And then over time, as everybody gets good, then it becomes like a different meta
where you strategically might throw a particular round in order to get a strategic pick.
So it's got a really high skill ceiling while still managing to be pretty friendly for new players.
I think it's a really cool game.
Do you wanna hit me with the power supply screws or did you put them away again? I don't, I have them here, sorry.
Noice. How about another one? Sure. Sure, hit me, Dan.
Hey, Alinas, would the transparent screwdriver be a limited run or would it stay for a while on the store?
Plus, could we have a price reveal? Would it be the same price as a regular screwdriver?
Ooh, those are good questions. I mean, almost everything's a regular item until,
You know. You discontinue it. Yeah, we discontinue it for some reason or another,
whether there's a costing change that makes it not make sense anymore
or whether a supplier disappears or bones us
or the second order quality doesn't match the first one or demand sucks and we have to blow them away
and we're obviously not gonna bring in more of something that we blew away at cost or below cost.
So is it a forever item?
I don't know. That's kind of up to all of you, isn't it?
Yeah, because there's a lot of demand. As for pricing, that's a good question.
Let me see if I could talk to the person who would know.
Hello, I'm sorry, hold on.
Hello? Do you like excitement?
Do you like suspense? Do you like Nell Carter?
Good, cause you won't find her here. This is the house of horrors.
And for you, it's absolutely free. Step right in.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. You're live on the show.
I'm just gonna go ahead and ask you a quick question that I don't know if you're allowed to answer yet.
Oh geez, okay. Do we know the retail pricing of the clear screwdriver yet?
You don't have to answer. You don't have to answer. This is not an obligation.
Can I call you right back? Sure. All right, bye.
Cool. Taren actually had a gun to his head off camera. I don't know how much higher we can escalate this call.
He's literally calling Taren. I don't know who he's calling.
He's probably in a meeting. I bet you that's why he was asking you to wait.
I have no idea what he was doing. I'm not his mother.
If we get a call back, we'll answer it. Yep, yep. But in the meantime, we might need to move on.
Yeah. You got another question?
Oh, we're not gonna have enough for the next case. We still got one more, right?
Yeah, at least one. You have one hour remaining. Oh, we got this.
What? Oh, we're gonna be fine. Oh yeah. This one has gone really quick, by the way.
Yeah, well, there's not really anything to say. Yeah, it's kind of just a standard case.
It's a good case. I built two in these. They're great, but they're a case.
Yeah, they're not. It's definitely not exciting.
This is the kind of thing that I feel like, you know what, here's what I need to know, Dan.
Can you do a little bit of quick research for us? Absolutely.
Is it possible that this is not a $99 case? Like what's the-
So this is the Meshify-C for DNA? Yeah, what's the price history for it, though, on Amazon?
Like is this one of those cases that's 99 until it's promo'd for 69?
I've seen it on New Egg for, on sale, 110 Canadian.
So that's 70. Normally it's 140. Let me get the thing open. Yeah, let's see if we can get a little bit more context
for it, because if this is one of those things where they're pricing it at 99,
just to make their everyday sale price seem a little bit more attractive,
that's not a sales tactic that I personally love, but it's also not one that might be
fractals fault necessarily. Mx is doing it at 144.
Canadian. So that would be 100 bucks.
Oh, I have an answer for you. One sec.
Hello, you are live on the stream. How much will the transparent screwdriver cost?
Same as regular. So 69, 99 are actually 69 in NUS,
and then the comparable on worldwide.
Wow. I'm actually kind of surprised. I think when we had initially discussed the product,
the plan had been to have a $10 upcharge, but I guess we've managed to make that work
for the people, hey? Okay. Yeah, we mapped the math, and we made it work, so.
Wow, okay, that's outstanding. Okay, great news, thanks, Nick.
All right, I'll give you a quick one. Okay, take care, man.
Goodbye. The math was we just need to sell 200,000 of them.
Yeah. Well, that would be fine. I'd be into, we actually had to make
mold changes for this. Oh, did you? I didn't know I didn't wear that. Yeah, in order to get rid of the flow issues.
Oh, did I not get to that part of the story earlier? No, you talked about the flow issues.
I didn't realize that it was a different mold. I thought you were talking about the type of injection you ended up, like the material.
We didn't need a new mold, but we had to make alterations to like our expensive mold
in order to get this done. Are we still using that mold? That's a really high quality mold.
Okay. Does this one have a glass panel?
Yes. Yes, it does have a glass panel. So there was one without the glass panel for 90 bucks.
And then this one has the- Canadian? No, this is at B&H, so US.
Okay. And this one has the dark tempered glass panel, which is more like a hundred US.
So basically it is- But it seems like it's about $100 across the board.
Okay. Okay. That doesn't bow well for it.
No, it doesn't. It's on the pricier side for cases.
I think so, especially when we compare it back to
even the Corsair, which was $10 more, you got some better features, I feel like,
or the Lee and Lee one, which was $10 cheaper.
To be clear, there's little thoughtful things.
Okay. You've got a nice little cutout that is perfectly sized
for the front panel audio connector down in here. Can we switch camera down?
So it kinda, anytime you're ready to end. Yep. So like you can pass it right through there.
It doesn't interfere with your power supply or anything like that, you know? I love to see stuff like that.
You've got another nice little pass through for your front panel connectors right here.
And one nice thing that I could say about this case
is that if you were following a guide, you know?
Yep. If you're following a guide on the internet, say how to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need.
Or, I mean, more realistically,
I'd say the better of our guides for people to follow
if they really have never built a PC before are the FPV guides.
We've done two of them, and I think we do a really great
job of the kind of camera positioning
and making the point of view so accurate
to how you're actually going to be seeing the system as you're working on it, that we've seen a lot
of feedback from people that they're just hands down. The easiest video is to follow along
if you've never built a PC. Obviously, you're not necessarily gonna be using
exactly the same parts, but what I would say about this case is it is a C-A-S-E case.
Yep. And so if you were following some generic guide
on the internet and you picked up a Meshify C,
boy, would you ever be able to follow that generic guide on the internet?
That POV build was always so interesting to me. I was always wondering who was the type of people
to watch that. I never understood it. And then recently I got into a call with some people
I'd never talked with, and they said that their first and only video that they have ever watched
was when they were trying to build their first PC and they watched the FPV guide.
And I was like, that's crazy to me. I was like, but I guess there's a demand for it.
And I never realized that. Oh, 100%. That's, I mean, it's not the kind of thing
that we can upload every week because the regular viewers,
they just, they tune right out.
Like that's one of those videos that if you're familiar with YouTube metrics, you'll know that every time
you upload a video, you get this number out of 10.
And that's pretty much YouTube telling you how much you should value yourself that day.
Yep. So you can see my value for myself and Elijah too
is number two out of 10, which is pretty okay.
It hit a one out of 10. But it's not quite the dopamine hit of a one. Yeah.
You know, okay. So whenever we do those, like how to build a PC,
you know, POV, whatever types of guides
that realistically a lot of y'all, you know how to build a computer?
Yeah, kind of thought so. The core audience doesn't really get into it.
And so they tend to start out as a 10 out of 10,
which sounds great unless you have the context of what that means from a YouTube analytics standpoint.
So here, I'll show you what that looks like in terms of a view curve.
This gray range here is the typical range
of video performance. Wowee.
So this started at half the bottom of the typical range
and it took a whopping, let me just have a quick look here,
a whopping from, here we go,
May of 2024 to May of 2025.
A whole year. A whopping year to reach escape velocity
from the typical range. But if we leave that for another year,
it would like double again. Like it would be pretty insane.
Because, and again, this is something that's not typical.
The view curve is a straight line. Actually, there's a small inflection point there, right?
That's not typical. Typical view curve goes big burst of regular viewers
and I don't know, maybe you'll find an audience eventually, but it really flattens out in a big way.
So a little bit inside baseball for you guys. Yes, we are aware of the importance of those builds.
Especially for novice builders. But it's not the kind of thing that we can do all the time
because I just can't afford to have my channel die.
Yet. And this is the kind of gamification
that professional YouTubers have to do that we really wish we didn't.
Yeah, whether it's like, we hear you guys every time
we upload a thumbnail or a title that you guys necessarily don't really enjoy
because you think it might be too click-baity or something. But it's one of those cases of like,
we wouldn't do it if we like, didn't have to do it to get the clicks and views.
And we always do our best to make sure it's not click-bait, it's click-e.
And I think there's a very fine line to balance, but you know, we don't want to deceive you
when you click on the video. And I think we're always tuning it, we're always trying to do better.
Yeah. And sometimes we make mistakes
and sometimes we, sometimes we nail it.
We have definitely made mistakes with titles and changed them five minutes after posting.
And what was it? The iPhone for poor people or something like that? No, it was the Mac, it was the...
Finally a Mac for poor people. Yeah, it was like finally a Mac for poor people or something.
That's a banger title. I thought it was a banger title. I personally signed off on the title
and Elijah was like, that's crazy. I said in the, I said in the writing review
or script review, I was like, we should not do this. We kind of chuckled or like, ha, that's funny.
I said, we should not do this. Linus was like, nah. I was like, we're gonna have to change it.
He's like, nah. Good choice. Five minutes after upload, we changed that.
Were people really that upset? Yeah, I think it was also because the thumbnail
wasn't the greatest in line with it. We showed like, basically the equivalent
of East Hastings Street. Yeah, that I didn't see when I approved the title.
I remember that. So that was not good. No, that's bad. And to be fair, that was bad.
Yeah, but to be fair, that was also one of the three thumbnails.
The other two were different faces in front of an Apple store.
And believe it or not, those thumbnails definitely won the ABC test.
But when people got the paired, basically East Hastings Street with,
finally, a Mac for poor people, it was, we're aware it was poor taste.
That's why we changed it and we're always- Okay, part of the issue here though
is that I think people were taking it seriously when-
Linus, how many times have you talked about how people- I know, I know.
To me, I thought it was in such poor taste
that it would be clear that we were being facetious. And that's ultimately why,
after our script review, we were like, fine, people will take it as a joke.
Nope, people did not, so. Oh, people don't understand what East Hastings is.
Oh, sorry. That's our like, that's our like tent city.
Very local in Vancouver. It's where all the homeless people gather.
I think you mean the unhoused? Sure, sorry.
And Mackles. And Mackles, that's crazy.
Yeah, and Mackles. Thank you, Dan. You're really helping with this conversation
about how people didn't think that joke was funny. Yeah, I'm not a writer, it's fine.
Yeah, his reputation's not on the line.
I have that permanently added to my resume.
Okay, let's put this GPU in. Anyways, while he's installing the GPU,
do you wanna do another work? Sure.
Oh, no, no, buddy. Okay, how long of a GPU does it say
this thing's compatible with?
It should be on the card to your left.
Oh, man. Do we have to move the fan? Is that it? Oh, man, yeah.
GPU clearance, 315 millimeters.
Wait, is this even compatible with this GPU?
Elijah. I'm double checking.
In the meantime, let me do a quick double check of my own.
Yeah, I think we might get away with one here if I move this fan down.
We'll just bend the case. No.
I mean, we can, you just don't want to. Yes. Big difference.
Dan, do you wanna have me move one more while I do this?
I, sure.
Hi there, I've been watching since the days of WAN Show in the garage.
You once had the Razer Pro backpack. I have one too.
How does it fare against your own one? And should I consider getting the LDT CompMute one?
CompMute one. Commuter.
CompMute. I mean, oh, man.
Why you guys, it's like you guys want me to have a conflict of interest, you know?
Like, obviously, it is in my best interest
to recommend an LDT backpack of some sort,
be it the OG or the commuter. However, with that said,
I think you have to ask yourself this question. Uno reverse, are you happy
with your Razer tactical backpack or whatever? You certainly paid a lot of money for it.
I can tell you that much if you didn't remember. There were some pain points for me with that bag.
I didn't love the little flap at the top that made it kind of hard to access the pouch of holding.
And I'm trying to think, I think the layout of the storage compartments inside
was not, you know, the greatest thing ever. There were definitely improvements
that I felt that we could make in our own products. Yes, I believe our product is a better product
for me having had experience with that bag and then taking that and using it to design our own.
Or rather to provide feedback on, I can't take credit for designing our backpack.
That I believe was almost entirely on Bridget.
I don't know if Matthew had joined us yet at that point. And then Matthew took the lead on the commuter bag
and did a great job on that. Oh, I might have helped on the OG backpack.
Anyway, the point is I didn't design the bag, but I did provide a lot of feedback
and that was based on my experience with other backpacks, including from like OGO, Averki, Razer.
However, coming back to sort of where
my original train of thought here, I can't answer that question for you.
If you're happy with your bag, like what are you doing?
Don't... Yeah, don't buy another bag. Don't create waste, right?
Like if you have someone in your life who like could really use your backpack
and you think that that would be a really great gift for them and you're like, oh yeah,
and then oh yeah, and I could totally treat myself like, I'm sure I'm totally into that,
I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to have something go to waste
just so that they can buy something from our store. I will say the commuter bag was a lot more popular
with some of my relatives that are smaller than me.
So I guess it would also depend on, oh my gosh, that is depending on size, that GPU barely fits.
Wow, that's, yep, that's right there.
Hey, at least that one intake fan on the bottom dedicated for the GPU.
Yeah. You are actually creating a barrier to cut off air circulation.
It's doing work here. Ah, oh man, that also means that I can't put in
my nice little cover either. Okay, so we don't get to use that.
Ooh. Is this a mark against the case or because we picked this GPU?
I mean, yes. The trend for GPUs is to get bigger and bigger.
And I talked earlier about how, if you're gonna spend $100 on a case,
I think you should be using it for a couple of systems. Yep.
So it's, I hate the F word, you know?
But it's one of those cases that,
or it's one of those situations where I think that there is an argument to be made around
trying to be a little future proof. That F word.
Finally got to it. I was like, oh man, he's gonna drop the F bomb. No, no, I don't have my, I don't have my swear button.
Oh no. Oh. This peel is in multiple pieces?
Oh no. You gotta be kidding me here.
It is. Removing the door might have disturbed it. It is, it's multiple pieces.
The not door. Oh dude, there's two more.
Starting to see the build experience go down slowly in front of my eyes.
Slowly. Every peel is one point.
And it's like, it's like tucked. It's tucked, that's tucked up.
Here, you try. Do the last one. Where is it?
You'll see what I mean. Which one? It's the far one. Oh, okay.
I don't like when you make me do things on camera like this.
Oh yeah, I see what you mean. It's like, it's like tucked back there.
I mean, to be clear, it's a one, you're only gonna do it one time. It's not the end of the world.
It's just like, why though? Have it, half of people, okay.
I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure there's a reason. All right, come up with one.
Cool. It's easier to apply at the factory as four different pieces.
That's, I don't. That's not my problem. I don't like big Corpo.
You don't like big, why do you work for one then? It's funny, you say you hate modern,
capitalistic society and yet you participate in it. I do.
Checkmate liberal. LTTstore.com. Shell!
Bye. I should be wearing boots.
We are always corporate shell. We always respect company,
like sponsor Valkyrie of the stream. Thank you, Valkyrie.
It's a good thing we don't say stuff like this at the beginning of our streams.
They've turned out they're like, they hit their talking points, I'm joking. I mean, yeah, there can't be that many people.
Oh wow, there's still like thousands and thousands of people watching.
Huh, okay, well. It's all bots. You think so?
Yeah, okay. I have it bought on right now, so. Do you? Yeah.
I want that ad revenue. Okay, you do know that, okay, should you know what?
Good job, Elijah. Oh, is that it? I mean, oh.
Okay, I guess we should go over pricing and like all the numbers and everything.
Well. We start with features. I feel like we didn't get anything.
I feel like it was a pretty bare bones case. I mean, it's got this SSD mount across the back here
that you can move out of the way if you need to mount a motherboard back plate.
I'll support for back to front.
I feel like this is like a five right in line of just like it's bare minimum.
Yeah, it's $100. It's like what I would consider to be like
the kind of attainable price for if you're doing like a thousand, $1,300 build.
But it's not gonna like blow me away and it's also not gonna,
I'm not gonna look at it and go, man, you're crazy. You know?
Yeah, sure. Five. Five for price. Building experience.
I think it was better than the Q300L.
Yeah, but that literally has L in the name.
This says C. It's its letter grade. Okay.
So a five. Okay, what did I give the rest for building experience?
You gave. I'd give it a six. I'd give it a C. All right.
Fractal new. Fractal new what they had on their hands.
Cable management out of five. It had some tie down points in the back.
Yeah. And you know what?
I think it would have ended up with a pretty solid score, right?
Like if you look at this, that's pretty clean.
That's a clean looking system. Okay, you know, let's be fair.
It's not all of them had white cables here, right? Like the ones with the black cables
that they'd hide a little bit more, right? So, you know, that is what it is.
But this is all, this is all pretty good. Everything's, you know, this is grommeted
all down the side, which is nice. But then in order to fit our GPU,
we had to open this up. And if you really open it up, Andrew,
like really give her, really give her.
Dead. Yeah. You see what I'm talking about?
And I can hide that, but like not perfectly.
And so I don't want, I'm not getting too hard
on anyone about the backside.
All the other ones. Okay, other than the $40 case, but it's $40.
All the other ones in the hundred-ish dollar price point are way cleaner.
Those got a four out of five. So do you think this is a three then?
I'll dock a point. Okay. Three out of five. Three out of five. And that price, $100.
Oh, five. All right. You know, yeah, like it's,
and the reason that we're going five rather than six. So we're basically saying same as the Corsair frame,
even though it's actually $10 cheaper, is that I just don't feel like the value is there.
And as much as you can try to decouple price from value
by sort of outlining value in all these other ways, I don't think you can ever fully separate them.
Is there any bonuses? What would you give a bonus for?
I feel like I, I feel like I kind of turn this around on you every time. But it's really interesting to hear your perspective
because you've been kind of sitting here watching me build the whole time.
And helping and helping. I think like, but that kind of goes into the building experience, but overall it was just like,
you didn't have really much to say. So maybe that's a bonus because then it didn't,
nothing got in your way other than. Approachable, basic.
Yeah. Like you said, it could be like that YouTube tutorial style.
Yeah. This is the default case. The default case.
So that makes it easy to understand. You're not going to get anything unique
that might confuse you. So maybe a one.
Yeah. I could give it, I could give it one bonus point. Yeah. I think that's a solid argument.
Look at this panel gap. Look at this. Can you see that?
I mean, it kind of makes me feel like it must be upside down, but I think it's symmetrical.
And if it's not symmetrical, that's a crazy design.
But like, are you seeing how big this gap is here? Hold on. Let me get the,
let me get the peel out of your way.
Can you see that? Give her more. Give her, give her even more.
Yeah. There you go. Yeah. You can really see that now. There's just like, there's a gap there. I can like stick a little bit of my finger in there.
Should I flip it around? I'll flip it around. Sure. I'm going to flip it around.
Cost nothing to flip it around. I mean. That got a 20, which now means it's in third.
So it actually beat the Q300L by one point,
but it is four points behind the frame by Corsair
and over 10 points behind the Lee and Lee. You guys got to let me know.
Yeah. No, the panel gap is just as bad this time.
You guys got to let me know. Do you think we're being totally unfair here?
Like if I hadn't, I got to tell you the order, the order of judging matters.
Cause if I hadn't seen those other two, I'd have been like, oh, it was pretty nice case.
Well, that's what I was talking about when we were ranking the Lee and Lee. Like we ranked that right after the Q300.
So it's kind of like, are you just very happy
because the Q300 had none of this? Right?
Yeah, is that a problem? But.
People, law is not merchandise. People are not really, people are saying, yeah, seems fair.
All right. All right. Yep.
Cool. Fair is probably the best word I could use to describe it.
You want to boot it up? It's fair. Fair. We can see all the RGB.
It's all, is that definitely how it's gonna be?
Yeah. That's how it's meant to be. I flipped it around, dude. I promise.
I promise I flipped it around. That's what it looks like.
I'm sorry. Should be good to go? I'm sorry.
Oh, back to wide. Oh, oh, rip.
Rip. Gigi's chat, it's over.
Pretty janky five says stop the count.
It's an old case, it's V1. Yeah, but that doesn't change that they want $100.
And that also doesn't change that this is right now on B&H. And it's still the most popular one
that's B&H. That's rated on B&H. Absolutely. Yeah.
So, it's a cool looking case for $100 and end up with that.
Yeah. You'd be much better off, I think,
buying either the Land Cool or spending $10 more on the Corsair frame.
No question. That CPU cooler looks sick. It does, right?
Shadow of, shadow of, yeah. Do you want to get a little close up on the CPU cooler?
Oh, he's back. And he's gone. Oh, and he's back. Nice.
Nice. Yeah. Did you even notice that the little, like, actual name
lights up, too? Yeah, that's why I had to have the, the daisy change.
Oh, it's a subtle detail. Looks good, though.
I like it. Whoops. All right, last one.
I saw someone in chat suggesting that we do a bit of a roll reversal.
Okay. And I watch while you do it. I don't feel that's fair, though,
because you've been building the other ones to get your experience so you can give it a fair score.
All right, well, let chat decide. I'd love to build it, but I don't want to compromise
the integrity of this test. Okay.
Drop stuff. Someone like me.
All right. I'm also not good at building PCs, so. I gotta admit, guys, if there was anyone
that I kind of went into this going, these guys are gonna blow it away.
It's gotta be Phanteks. They just came out of absolutely nowhere,
innovated like crazy, just at amazing price points.
They really nailed the look with a lot of their earlier cases.
And then over time, it's just especially nailed down
the little quality of life features.
There's a reason that we chose Phanteks for our standardized cases
for our in-house systems back in the day.
Super easy to build in.
Oh, and it didn't even zap me. Nice. That's probably a coincidence, though.
The best packing we've seen, so questionable. So what's good about it
is the additional layer of cardboard to add a little bit more puncture protection
on the corners, and in the areas that are most likely to get hit,
and they are using a softer foam that's more likely to take two hits,
but it's quite thin. So probably better than what we've seen so far,
but not up to a standard where you could build a system in it and then ship that system in the case box
and hope that it's gonna arrive in in peace. Do you wanna see what the pole Dan made was?
No, he doesn't get to read them. What pole did he make? He says,
Humstensst, and Narcissist, or Bruises.
Who's who? That's the type of service that you get
on flipblane.com, you can have Dan Poles, and they're always unhinged.
Right out of the gate. I didn't include Firefox. Right out of the gate,
Phanteks is looking pretty darn good.
They've got the roominess factor that we enjoyed with the Corsair,
maybe not quite as much space back here for cable management,
but certainly quite a lot. They've got the simplicity.
This is a very bog standard looking layout.
So they've got the simplicity of the Fractal Meshify-C,
and they're going after the value of the Land Cool,
because check this out. I'm counting not one, not two, not three,
but four included RGB fans at a price of $89.99.
This is the most popular case on newegg.com
as of the time of us placing our orders.
I think they're off to an extremely good start.
We do give up one of our USB-A 3.0 ports,
but in exchange, it looks like we had a bit of a tooling revision that gave us a USB-C port
in what appears to have used to have been a USB-A port.
So that's clever. That's a clever way to add a lower cost,
provide, I would say, most of the meaningful benefit
of the front USB layout of the,
here we go, the Land Cool case, which has, I believe, two A's and a C.
Yes, and the Corsair case, which also has two A's and a C.
Having the C allows you to use like a hub or a dock or something like that
right on the front of your case, which I think is really convenient. And then the A is just, it's a utility plug, you know?
They voted for Linus. Are they voted for me building? Okay, well, I already started, I guess, so there you go.
It's back-to-front compatible, so you've got all the punch-outs.
And I don't know if you guys saw this in the news, but ASUS just uploaded a thing
where they validated their back-to-front implementation for GPUs that, I think, 1,000 watts,
demonstrating that it is a far better approach
to super high-power GPUs from just a power delivery standpoint
compared to the 12-volt two-by-six connector, which even under its optimistic rated load
manages 600 watts.
What it doesn't manage to achieve is the same kind of tear everything off,
super easy access of the Corsair. That's something that I obviously commented on
when I was building in the Corsair, but maybe didn't fully appreciate how much I liked
until now I'm without it.
89.99, though. That's the same price as the Lee and Lee, right?
Right in line with the Landcool from Lee and Lee, yep.
They haven't put as much work into it for me, though.
You know, these fans are daisy-chained,
which is nice. Hold on, where's this going?
Oh, man, but there, oh yeah, no, there we go. Okay, so these fans are pre-daisy-chained
and they're kinda hooked up here, but this is all just kinda dumped.
And when I compare that to the way that the front audio connector was run for me in the,
I believe that was in the Corsair. Yeah, that was really nice.
And that's what Corsair does. Corsair has the way that they intend for you
to build in their cases and they really make it hard to screw up.
Fan techs, this is a nice bonus. They have an IQ test that they bundle with the case.
Can you get the hardware box out?
This just is a thumbscrew in here, but yeah, it's not immediately apparent. Oh, I thought maybe it was one of those ones
where you have to like go at the ball. Oh, I see the thumbscrew. I went at it from a wrong angle.
I kinda did it on purpose, yeah.
Guys, I'm really good at some things, please. There we go.
So you can pull that out a little. No, I'm still having a hard time getting it out.
Come on, buddy. Come on, fan techs.
Ah, there we go. That's a little disappointing.
Fan techs was like the OG Includer of a nice little parts tray.
And wow, is that ever a lot of cable ties.
Dude. This is wild.
I think fan techs included more cable ties than every other case,
plus the ones that were included with the power supply combined.
That is a substantial amount of cable ties. I will use every single one of them.
Streams go until 7 p.m. guys.
Don't worry, don't worry, I got this place. Everyone's gonna be out of here on time.
Cause we have soft balls tonight.
Do you guys like have to watch? They've been here the whole time.
Is this, oh, is this just like hurry up and wait kind of thing?
Huh? Well, Sven's first sponsor. He got you two pens.
Oh, yeah, nice. I love that shirt.
He said it was $10 at Value Village. Ten bucks?
Wow. That is so cool.
We got like Blaze, Ultros. We've got Mog, and, oh man,
how can I not remember? Oh, no, don't tell me, don't tell me.
Oh, oh no, Tom Berry. Thank you.
Thank you for letting me live. This is so cool.
Ten bucks. Who'd have thought?
Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no, no, we're gonna finish on time.
Everybody's gonna get out of here on time today. We have to go to softball. We have softball tonight?
Yes. Oh, are you guys going to softball? We should go to softball?
Yes, sir. I'm gonna go to five, so I'm gonna jump for it. Oh, all right, that's, okay.
Finally, my first softball, I've missed the first two. No, no, well, okay, he's come in previous years.
Yeah, I missed the first two this year. Yeah. Dude, I love softball tonight.
Heck yeah. Oh, I'm stoked. I'm so excited.
Oh, I'm stoked. I think softball night might be my favorite thing
about working here. You have a frickin' Porsche.
And I drive it to softball night.
Has ample space in the trunk for my baseball gun. I mean, if you want, I could take the $15,000 TV
in your basement. When I was gonna try to take home that 110-1
from the Christmas party, I called my strata, which is basically-
When he was trying to win it. Yeah, when I was trying to win it at our Christmas party. So it was the 110-high sense.
We raffled it at the Christmas party.
I called my strata, which is basically HOA for my apartment building.
And I was like, am I allowed to rent a crane
because it won't fit in the elevator? So I'd have to remove my railing.
You know what the president said? He said, only if I can watch one football game on it.
And I said, done. So I put all my tickets into it and I didn't win.
And I was so mad. Dude, there were so many tickets on that TV.
I still kind of can't believe we gave that away. But the price of renting a crane to move it in there
and then in like three years, if I move out, was still cheaper than buying that TV.
So I was like, I am doing this if I win.
Who ended up winning it again? Ashley from CW?
That's right, that's right. Lucky. Yeah, I was lucky to have-
I was chapped. Oh well.
Hey, who knows? We might have cool stuff this year. I haven't seen anything that big
that's likely to make it to the Christmas party. Well, thankfully we actually have five
Asrock Tai Chi RX9070 XTs now.
And five 9,800 X3Ds. I gotta be honest with you.
The computer hardware stuff is not the stuff that gets the traffic.
Oh yeah, those are like some of the easy ones though to like win if you like want to walk away
with something at the Christmas party. We already all have computers.
That's the other thing too. Yeah, whereas like a lot of the time
if there's like a pixel or an iPhone, you'll get a ton of people putting in for that.
We've had like vacation packages and stuff like that. People go wild for like the vacation packages.
Two years in a row, I've given Jake Bell one of my tickets
and he's won for me both times. This year he won me those like Hot Wheels rally things
that you can control from your phone. Oh yeah, that's cool. And I was like, I don't want it.
So I gave it to some kid who was like going through
some illness and I was like, it's yours now. I don't want it. Like I'm not going to play with it.
You can have fun with it. I want to know how it's prepared.
Oh yeah. Oh, you got that. Yeah. Nice.
I was trying. You won a six sound bar. I was trying.
That was a pretty sick sound bar dude. Like I know, sound bars are for posers.
But it's a $4,000 sound bar. Pretty nice sound bar.
Basically, yeah, Rhys doesn't want to hear it.
He can't hear your elitism over the sound
of his $4,000 sound bar.
Is there any merch messages, Dan? Yeah, there's a few. Why don't we save them for a bit?
Unless you do need a break right now. Sure. Yeah, hit me with one.
Hit me with one. Sure. And just to keep Dan busy, send a few more merch messages.
This is our last PC case, so get your questions in. This is the time to get your merch messages in
if you guys aren't familiar with the concept of merch messages. Merch messages are the way to interact with the show.
We don't believe that you should throw your money at your screen and get nothing in return.
No, you should throw your money at your screen to interact with the stream and get quality merchandise
from LTTstore.com in return.
So all you got to do is head to LTTstore.com, find something you like, throw it in your cart,
and you will see a box pop up when we're live that allows you to leave a merch message.
We'll go to producer Dan, who will throw it
onto the screen or answer it himself.
Sometimes even correctly, that's a bonus when that happens.
And then other times, he will curate it for me and Elijah
to answer for you.
Hit us, Dan. Sure thing. Hey, hottie Linus.
If you decide to keep the bread, what
would be your daily routine to manage the bread and keep it in shape?
PS, would we get any new breaded Linus merch?
A t-shirt or a new pin? And then an emoji of a bread.
See, here's the thing. When we said hit us, how about you don't ask us those ones?
What color is your? OK, yeah, sorry, continue.
You've gone and made it weird. You did that.
You made it weird, and you enabled them. I'm dying at that one, Dan.
That's the face of a man with no regrets whatsoever.
No regrets. I don't know that we'll have any more beard merch.
I just read when it comes out of my screen. You can curate them.
You can move it on. Yeah, you literally screened them. That is literally your job.
I did that. I did my job.
He's just like hottie Linus approved. Hottie Linus.
Weird way to put it. I need to get your stuff ready.
Sorry, I got distracted. It's haite.
H-A-W-I-T-E. Maybe I misread that.
Yeah, I'm sure that was it. Anyway, probably no more merch.
I forget the rest of the question. What was the question, Dan? Something about how you would take care of your beard.
Oh, how I take care of my beard. Not very much.
He said bread. They were talking about the beard. They were talking about the beard.
Not very much, to be honest with you. I just, once a week, it actually is about exactly the amount
of work as being not bearded is,
because I have to shave every day, if I want to be clean shaven, obviously.
I just use like a stupid, like actually,
no, there's nothing stupid about Phillips shavers now.
Do you see they're cool, like right to repair? I did, yep.
Absolutely based Phillips electric shaver.
And so I just do that once a day. And then when I have the beard,
I just have this cheap garbage. I'm gonna buy a Phillips. There, I'm gonna buy a Phillips trimmer.
And then I just hit it once a week with like a number,
whatever, the one that's already on it, that is literally still sitting on it
from last time I had a beard. So I don't even remember.
So just like hit it with that and then kind of clean up the neck a little bit.
And like, I know people get like really into it and they got like these oils and they got like combs
and like, like all this stuff. This is like eight weeks.
Okay, he's joking obviously. Have you ever tried to grow a beard?
Yeah, it just, it grows in patches and it just, it looks terrible.
It's already pretty bad. Can't, don't, I don't know. What, I'm just asking.
Do I have a shadow? Is there beard here?
You know what? It looks like a tiny bit, but that could also be the lighting.
That's from like this morning. Okay. Bruh, that's like seven weeks, literally.
Yeah, this is like from seven hours ago.
So Elijah, how old are you?
27. Okay, when I was your age,
I 100% was probably like, I can't. Yeah, I can't, yeah.
Like it, the reason that I had never grown a beard before COVID was because I 100% couldn't.
Yeah. So I'm just saying, I'm just saying, you might be a late bloomer.
We all knew that already though. I'm just, I'm just saying.
The six concussions have not helped. I'm just saying you might be a late bloomer.
Sorry, what's the theory here that hitting your head like knocked the hair back into the face?
No, late bloomer just being like taking it's time. Oh, that's not, no, no, no.
That's not what it, it doesn't always mean that. Oh. Late bloomer has all kinds of contexts.
Like it could be sexual.
How do we, I don't know how to ask the next question. So I think I'm going to stop asking.
You could ask Ariana. Didn't you go home for the day?
HRQ please, ask it, you're fine.
They went home. That's how it works, right? Oh yeah, once HR leaves the building, there's.
Not that we're recording and streaming this to like four different platforms.
You know what, I say ask it. I say go for it. You only live once Elijah.
I was going to ask how, like how would I find out if I'm a late bloomer sexually?
I mean, I think the answer is yes. In your case you could ask your wife.
She'd probably know. I am married, I forgot.
It's just an idea. It's just an idea.
She might know. All right, I'll text her. Oh my God.
Hey baby, you up?
If she doesn't know what that means,
you might be a late bloomer. My problem is I would probably get divorced immediately
because I would always introduce my wife as my ex-girlfriend.
He's not wrong, you know. I would not be able to help myself.
See for me, I find the funniest term to be the old ball and chain.
Just because I use it so ironically. Yeah, women love that. Yeah, she hates it.
But it's really funny. I've also heard them be the ward apartment.
Go with... Home office. I think William Austin calls his partner like a caretaker.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I call Yvonne COO of my life.
She doesn't love it. She's not even fully in charge of it then?
It's a promotion, honestly. Oh my goodness, anyways.
Look, go with better half. That's the safest one.
Partner. Go with better half. I like better half.
It flatters without kissing up.
And yes, partner is not bad. I see my wife.
So fresh. Having literally done the borat voice
at least twice prior on the stream. This stream we've done like three times.
Are we supposed to be talking about this case at all? You know, you could also plug in cables.
Well no, because I don't know how it impacts like meeting through, because some cases actually are different.
No, you're right, you're right. This one is fine.
So if I put the power supply in, if I don't think to plug in all my modular cables
ahead of time, I can put this in there and I can get at it,
but there's nothing special about it. So it's one of those cases where I'd say,
yeah, you're probably better off plugging everything in before you secure the power supply to the case.
Glad to help. Thanks, Elijah. You know what? You've actually been instrumental.
Well no, not really. With all the talking you do, you're more of a vocalist in this effort.
At least we make the band together. Nice. All right, that's going on the rubric.
I'm writing notes.
Ah, Dan, do you want to hit us with a merge message? Sure.
Let's see if I can find one that's a little less. Oh yeah, the whole topic started by calling you hot.
Let's- Hotty. Paydell.
Lead plus L's ego.
Okay. Okay. Sorry, what? We all just hard-pought.
What was the question? That was the intro. What's the greatest chord ever according to you guys?
Like HDMI chord, USB chord, RCA chord,
X-Lite chord, umbilical chord, Honda chord, G flat,
Honda chord, no, D minor. Honda chord, extension chord,
Ethernet chord, coaxial chord. Micro B.
Those were the examples. Micro B, get the hell out of here.
That's disgusting. That is awful. I wish I had the bleep button for that.
Oh my gosh. No, HDMI has so many negative connotations.
Many, many HDMI is so bad. What about micro-HDMI?
I would take micro-HDMI over, oh wait, oh yeah, no, micro is horrible.
I was thinking mini-DP for a second there. Mini-DP is pretty good. Mini-DP is pretty solid.
Yeah, it just doesn't snap when you look at it wrong.
That one specific as rock chord that has- Sorry, the worst or the best one?
The best. The best. The greatest.
The greatest. Okay, I have my answer, but you go first.
I can't think of a serious one. I'm just like, oh, laptop ribbon display cable.
Like that's what came to my mind. A new boat? One.
I was like, I have no idea. Do you want them all to hate you?
They already do. They don't. Some of them do.
Dude, okay, no, in all seriousness though.
What? Oh, sorry. I'm pointing at you. In all seriousness though,
I'm trying to move this case out of the way. You're like hiding behind it.
Cause I'm scared. He did a great job of that recent video
with the Steam Most Average PC. Was that your first time solo hosting the entire video?
I think so. And technically- I'm trying to remember, yeah.
Technically it wasn't quite the entire video because we put me in the intro
so that we could put me in the thumbnail. Yeah.
With a straight face. I guess that addresses all those comments
that were like, why was Linus in the thumbnail if he's not in the video?
It is called Linus Tech Tips. And I wasn't thinking-
He was in the video. But we were looking at the,
when did we make the call on that one? Were we looking at the script or was it prior to that?
It was just before because it was gonna be shot while you guys were in, for a copy text,
down for a copy text. So we needed a video to shoot and we kind of, I talked to James and he was like,
well, could you do it solo? And I was like, I don't know, can I?
And then it got green lit for me to do it solo. How good of a job did he do with that?
I thought it was really good. I messaged him after I reviewed the video and I was like, dang.
You messaged me. My favorite part was you messaged me at 11.45 p.m. on Steam.
It was like just after we finished playing tape to tape. You like DM'd me and you're just like,
good job on the video. And then you gave me some feedback and then you were like, nice.
I was like, all right, I'm on vacation, but thank you. Are you saying we have an issue with boundaries
in our workplace? Actually, no. We're pretty good in some cases,
but there are some cases where you messaged me on random platforms at like 11 p.m.
My favorite message, which I've talked about before on a video was you messaged me at 11 p.m.
and said, hey, are we playing video games tonight? And I said, I'm down.
Your follow-up message was, are you coming? I said, I'm down.
Your follow-up message was, are you coming over? Or are we doing Steam remote play?
I was like, it is 11 p.m.
I drove over to his house.
In person, so much more fun. It's so good, dude.
And I'm someone who will basically never hesitate if it means like getting to hang out in person
with a friend or whatever, right? So. Dude, dude, we at the writer's hangout,
which is not officially one of our summer pool parties for this year.
So we're still gonna have a couple of those. We got like a 3V3 human tape-to-tape game going.
That was really fun. Other than some of the glitches?
It's still very, very alpha. We were also playing on like a different branch,
build branch, whatever. A very alpha branch.
But dude, it supports 5V5 now.
And I'm like so stoked to try it.
Like that will 100% be one of the stations at Whale Land.
And I will 100% be hanging around there for a lot of the land.
Just like playing 5V5 human tape-to-tape is gonna be sick.
You're gonna play, right? Of course. You coming at Whale Land?
Can I bring my server rack?
I mean. I don't really wanna bring my gaming PC out of my server rack. So if I just roll the whole server rack there.
I'm just taking a minute. Cause then I have my NAS. So I can like watch Plex.
You should have remote access to it anyway. What are you even talking about?
Yeah, but like it's different. He doesn't know how to port forward.
That's my limitation. That better not be the reason.
I don't use Plex anyways. I use Jellyfinn. Okay.
Do you know how to port forward? Yeah, I set up a Minecraft server in my day.
Okay, well then. Yeah, there you go. That's how we all learned.
How am I supposed to take for granted that you know how to port forward if you think you have to take your Jellyfinn server
with you to a LAN? Well, I need to be on the same network.
You're making it seem like I'm the one asking a stupid question here. I take my phone with me everywhere.
What are you, dumb? Yeah, I need all three of my computers, right?
Oh my God. Anyway.
Yes, I will be at the LAN. Whale Land, let's go. It's gonna be awesome.
Which again, if you weren't here earlier in the stream, we have been officially, actually like for sure approved
to do a Whale Land. Three years, baby.
We have a temporary use permit for three years to run LAN events at our facility.
Three years? I didn't realize it was that long. Yeah.
In my humble opinion, it shouldn't be temporary at all
because bingo is a carved out use case.
And from my perspective, LAN gaming is just digital bingo.
What? From an occupancy standpoint,
from like a... You're trying to convince boomers that.
Yeah. Well, they don't know what gaming is. Digital bingo.
I mean... Can we play bingo on Steam so that we can justify it?
With all the Gacha mechanics? Sure. It's all basically gambling anyway.
Yeah, scamba.
This was fine.
There's these holes over here for running cables. I didn't use them because
this would look horrible if I ran the cables through here.
So I think these are just here for if you have like a slightly wider
than standard ATX motherboard. It looks pretty solid from the front.
And they did do a fair amount of the cable management work for you, but like...
Man, this is a...
Yeah, it's pretty basic.
The value's definitely there.
You know what? I think at the end, other than the scores,
I want to revisit some of the cases just a little bit. Just do a quick sanity over it.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, just do a quick once over and kind of talk through a couple of things.
Can I have that GPU? And while you're installing that? We should do one more shout out to our sponsor, Valkyrie.
Thank you very much for sponsoring this stream. They featured both...
There we go. This fine looking air cooler as well as...
Do you want to pull out the AIO for them again? Yeah, I was just grabbing it here.
All right, thanks, Elijah. So the Surge SL125 air cooler
is the one that we've installed in all the systems. And I want to especially shout out Valkyrie
for not forcing us to install AIOs on a live stream
because this already took long enough. And AIOs, you know, they might do a great job
in terms of performance and look awesome and be safer for transport in a lot of ways
and all that good stuff. But boy, are they ever a little bit more work to install
when you first put them in. So thank you, Valkyrie, for being extremely flexible about that.
Couple cool features other than the availability in white and black as well as 240 and 360 millimeter
is this kind of cool... Man, I don't know, how did they describe it again?
A mecca. Yeah, this cool kind of mecca look, you can get even closer
because there's this kind of like, you can see through to the PCB. Or effects on the air.
Yeah, there you go. Which is kind of neat. You can rotate it 90 degrees in any orientation.
So there's no such thing as like an upside down for it,
which is really nice. And did I lose one of the thumb screws?
I don't know. Gosh darn it. Okay, anyway, yeah, thanks Valkyrie. And while we're at it,
I think we should probably shout out,
ah yes, the folks who sent over some of the gear that we used for our builds,
especially Gigabyte who sent over these AORUS motherboards,
ASRock who sent over these Tai Chi Radeon 9070 XTs,
AMD who sent over the 9800 X3Ds.
These could actually really come in handy for the lab.
Coursera sent over the RAM. Is that correct? Yep, awesome.
And that's it. That's it for this build.
It also felt pretty fine. Yeah, I was gonna say uneventful, fine.
Fast. Yeah, I was gonna say. And I mean, I already kind of told you guys
this was coming when I said that was why we picked Phanteks
when we did our, when we chose something for our internal systems
is like, how painless was that?
My first couple of weeks here was just building standardized RAVs and we did Phanteks cases.
I got very, very used to them and I could get building in them done in like 20 minutes.
It was pretty quick. Which one was it? The N2XT? The one with the Hingey doors, I think.
The G something old.
No, I just don't remember. B07 something, I don't know. Now I'm not even sure if there is an N2XT.
So ignore anything I said. It's Phanteks case. Yeah, some Phanteks case.
It was great. I'd say that, yeah, okay.
Well, let's go through. I was gonna say we need to go over the scoring. So features, extra fans, rubber grommet,
fan filter, organized screw box. Just what do you think features?
The highest one we gave was the Lee and Lee for, it was an eight.
The Cooler Master and the Fractal Design Meshify,
both got a five and the Corsair frame got a seven.
Rear accessible PSU fan filter.
No fan filter in the front.
That's a pretty tight mesh. And one of the things that we liked about some of the newer designs,
like the one from Landcool as well, as actually that one from Corsair,
is outstanding airflow. That's not something that we're seeing
on our Phanteks offering here.
Do you think it's on par with Corsair at a seven, I think?
I kind of feel more, I'm kind of feeling more of a six for features.
Like what stands out to you? It doesn't support a vertical mount like the Corsair does.
I believe the Corsair does. Yep. The Corsair supports a vertical mount.
Yeah, I'd say six then I feel like is on. Didn't have the Cooler modular movable rails.
Like it just has a, oh yeah, yeah, I got that. This, there you go.
Like it doesn't have the modular rails. It just has like your standard,
here's a bunch of different holes for mounting stuff. And yeah, you can cover them, but this is old meta, you know?
We'll do six. I don't think it really stands out on the features.
Building experience out of 10. Did anything get in the way or enhance the building?
It felt like you just flew through that. I don't think anything really enhanced it,
but boy is that ever a nice looking build. And my brain was just about completely turned off
while I did it. That's actually a positive, right? Yeah, oh, I mean that in a very positive way.
Effortless build, I'd say nine. Cool.
Yeah, really solid build experience. Cable management out of five.
Tie down points, any other channels.
You had that one gripe about that, where that one cutout was,
but I think that was basically it. Other than just not being quite as good as the LandCool,
what can I really complain about? You know? Yeah.
Lots of tie down points. They included 100 bazillion cable ties.
Literally 100 bazillion. It's just not as good as the LandCool
or the Corsair, I'd give it a three.
Yeah. Okay. Price.
This came in at the same price as the LandCool, $90 US.
And I think it has to have the same score. So a six? Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable price
for even a fairly high end gaming machine.
I think what we've learned today is that there is no obvious reason.
That looks pretty good, huh? It looks good with all the RGB fans, I'd say. There is no obvious reason that I can see
to spend more than $100 on a case. Yeah, I agree.
Like, you can obviously, you can have like,
something could be an aesthetic choice for you, but that's not a reason, right?
That's taste. And something being to your tastes can, okay, come on.
Something being to your tastes can kind of be a reason
for it in a sense, but when I talk about reason, I mean like logical, right?
Like, oh, it has better cooling or it has better support for the parts
that I want to use or whatever, right? But I don't think I can come up with a reason
to spend more than $100 on a case. We have three, I would say, outstanding options
that are anywhere from $89 to $110,
and also the mesh if I see was there.
Do you think there's any bonuses related to it? I think the looks are a bonus.
It's got, with all the RGB fans in there, and then our cooler and the GPU, like it looks good.
I think it's the best. It's got the biggest pane of glass out of all of them.
Both of these have kind of this basement cutoff, kind of new meta thing going on that,
I don't know, yeah, some people might be into. Personally, I like the uninterrupted
just sheet of glass on the side.
I like that they include four RGB fans at $90.
Yep, the LandCool only had two. That's pretty outstanding. Corsair had zero.
They didn't even have that many non-RGB fans included in their case.
And that was $20 more. Do you think this is the highest one then with three bonus points?
Cause you think it beats the LandCool cause it has more RGB fans?
Cause you ended up taking off like half point for a little bit of the no dust filter,
which like you said, this one front doesn't either.
I think I can only really give it two bonus points. Two bonus points?
Yeah, and those are basically for just being able to completely turn my brain off,
like liking that it's like the mesh if I see and that it's like the NPC.
Sure. The case that an NPC could build.
Like just, it's so basic. Everything's exactly where it's supposed to be.
And I don't have to consult the manual. Like we had to look at the manual to figure out what some of the parts were
for some of the earlier cases. Yeah, you're right, you're right.
Where is this? Come on, please. 12 plus nine is 21.
Plus three is 24, 26.
Okay. Wow.
The mark of a good scoring rubric is that when you're done,
it kind of aligns with what you probably would have wanted to rank them anyway.
And I think we've actually kind of nailed this here. So here, Andrew, do you want to hop down carefully?
A lot of cable. There's no question that we started with the best.
Whether it's because this is the top selling at Micro Center, where people really do get to get
hands on and up and close and personal with the product before they buy it.
Or whether it's just because it's a more innovative design.
I think the Landcool 207 from Lee and Lee stood out from the rest and it score reflects that.
It scored 30.5 and while it wasn't necessarily
the simplest to build, so they didn't get
any extra bonus points for that,
what it was was an absolute joy to build. It was full of little things that I was discovering
as I went along that were just so thoughtful
and exciting that it made me happier to build a computer.
I also love what they've done for cooling, bringing the bottom intake right over here
directly over your GPU and moving the power supply
up to the front while also making it easier to plug in modular cables because you don't have
to fish through the basement of your case. This is a really outstanding case and for $90,
I just, I can't recommend it enough.
Absolutely love it. I mean, look at this. Look at this mesh.
She's so cooling centric and yet manages to look so good
and be so easy to build in. Really like it.
Coming in second place then is the one we just finished up with over here.
The Phanteks XT Pro Ultra.
While it's lacking some of the little innovative touches
that we saw with the LAN cool, it has more RGB.
It's a more straightforward build, extremely roomy,
nice and easy to build in and
that's about all you can really say in it. It was probably the fastest build. I agree, but it was also our fifth.
You know, we were getting quicker. We had some extra, like, you know, getting the coolers on and everything, so.
But dude, the cable management took me like 30 seconds. Like it was really fast.
I agree. With 26 points, a very, very close third
with 24 points was the Corsair Frame 4000D.
This one too, extremely airflow optimized.
Like look at this. I could practically put my fist through this front mesh.
Absolutely outstanding. I think Corsair has got a couple of really cool innovations
on their hands here with the ability to switch out
either the blacked out or the kind of translucent cover
on the bottom here. If you wanted to have like some lighting effects behind it or something like that.
I like the adjustable rails that they have for both the front fans as well as the top fans
so that you can have a clear shot of your obviously Corsair would like you to buy.
Corsair RGB fans that you install in there. As always, it's Corsair quality and it's just thoughtful.
They've got two captive thumb screws that are included in the power supply bracket.
So if you don't want to dig through your power supply box for additional screws, you can just throw those on
and you don't even have to get out a screwdriver to put in your power supply. That's something that I've not seen in a lot of years.
There was one power supply maker, XFX. Can't remember who used to include thumb screws
with their power supplies until they realized that there were compatibility issues with cases
and then that stopped being a thing. But Corsair, Corsair's bringing it back.
I thought they did a great job. And then Fractal with the Meshify C.
Honestly, sorry, there it is.
Top seller at B&H. I don't know what that tells us about photography, videography people
and their taste in cases.
It's fine. We gave it a C, 20 points out of 35.
Fractal makes a lot of really great products and there's nothing wrong with this one.
We just don't really like the price compared to the other ones that were comparing it against it smaller.
It was more cramped to work in. Cable management was fine, I guess.
And the build experience was NPC simple, just like we saw with the Phanteks.
But what it lacked was anything to set it apart.
It doesn't have front USB-C. It doesn't have a cool power supply mount.
It doesn't have like a whole bunch of included RGB fans.
It doesn't even have an easy to clean front filter. Like it just falls short on the features
where it actually scored dead last
alongside our last place finisher, the Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L,
which is a $40 case. So all the other negative things I could say about it,
I'm gonna crumple up in a ball
and say this is a $40 case. If all you want is MATX and you don't mind some warts,
some challenges in the build process, it's got filters on all side
and it holds your computer.
And it's $40. Sometimes that's all you need though.
Is there anything else that you feel like we should round off? I mean, again, thanks Valkyrie.
Really? You're gonna thank a Twitch streamer?
You talk. Thanks Pokeymane. Thanks for providing all of the coolers for us.
If we weren't broke boys, we'd have bought them ourselves. That's crazy.
If you're broke boys, just say so. I don't think there's anything else to say.
I think you should just cut it down. We're digging ourselves into a hole faster than we can dig ourselves out of it.
Quick, please, please, please, please. What about holes?