Welcome to my Cooler Master Elite 110 video. This is a tiny tiny little PC
case that holds a tiny tiny little well
piece. I mean, I guess you could put anything in it, but it it's specifically
designed to hold a PC.
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fairly straightforward, fairly thin, fairly lightweight hard foam. But
because it is such a small case and you can't really build a computer that's
heavy enough for it to be a problem, I'm okay with that this time around. We'll
go with an external tour for the start here. At the front you find mesh. On the
side you find mesh. On the top you find mesh. On the other side you find mesh.
And at the back you find well mesh on the power supply, I guess. And then more
ventilation. When you're trying to cram an entire PC with discrete graphics and
up to a 4770K CPU into something this
small, you'll need all the ventilation you can get, and the Elite 110 delivers
here. In terms of front IO, it's pretty standard fair. We've got two USB 3.0
ports, headphone and microphone jacks, a hard drive activity LED, a reset switch,
and then the front Cooler Master logo is actually a power switch. There's no five
and a quarter inch bay, but most people aren't using those these days, so I'm
not too worried about it. And uh there wouldn't really be room for it anyway,
which you'll see once we open it up. At the back, you can see that even though
the Elite 110 is a small package, that doesn't prevent it from having a pretty
decent sized bulge on it. Sorry, it's a the power supply does stick out the back
a little bit. What this does is it gives you about an extra um 20 mm of clearance
internally so that you can fit a fairly normalsiz power supply on the inside.
Again, even though the case is so small, the top casing comes off with four thumb
screws that I'm just going to go ahead and remove here.
We'll pull this baby off so you can see it fits on a little something like that.
And then once we get on the inside, we can see it supports two 80 mm fans here
on the side. However, that's only if you
don't need a dual slot graphics card, which we opted to install. This is
Lionus tech tips, guys, not Lionus and Nambi Pami tips. We're hardcore. We
won't settle for onboard or single slot graphics cards if we don't absolutely
have to. Now, with that said, on Cooler Master's site, they don't really show it
being used the way that we're using it. And the case seems optimized for onboard
graphics or a smaller graphics card with more storage as opposed to being
designed for people who are trying to put a full-on gaming rig inside. But I
guess the only way to find out if this works is to check our temperatures at
the end and see how it went. In the front, it supports either a 140 mm or
120 mm fan that takes advantage of that mesh. And you have the option to install
a 120 mm radiator. The manual and
product page don't specify the thickness that's supported, but I went with a
Siden 120 XL. So, given that that went
in there just fine with actual actually a fair bit more clearance to go, I would
say pretty much anything should fit. Okay. In terms of CPU cooler support, it
can handle a 76 mm or 3in CPU cooler.
Not much space between the socket and the power supply up here. So, using a
stock cooler is an option, but not many aftermarket CPU air coolers will fit in
there, which to me made that liquid cooler in the front a no-brainer for our
Core i7 processor. I was easily able to cram the tubing in here between the
power supply and the motherboard, even though there wouldn't have been much space for air flow otherwise. You can it
can handle up to a 180 mm power supply.
That's in terms of length. Other than that, it's a standard PS2 form factor,
but shorter is much better. I used a 160
mm power supply and this is a modular one which gives me a little bit more
flexibility in terms of using less cables and not having to cable manage as
much and this was about right for me. I think trying to do a 180 mm power supply
in there would be quite a bit more challenging in terms of cable
management. Now it's a miniITX case which means that even though there are
two expansion slots back here, there's only one internally. So, this is just
for if you have something like a dual slot card. Cooler Master does support
dual slot graphics cards than as you know, but not as long as you might
normally see in a case that's a little bit bigger. So, it supports up to a 210
mm graphics card, but there are a couple of things that you'll have to consider
if you want to get a 21 cm card in there. Number one is that you're going
to want a card that has a top-mounted PCI Express connector or you're going to
have to factor that in when you're taking your measurements because if it
has a rear one, you're going to need a little bit of extra space for that cable
at the back of the card. Number two is you're going to want to make sure you have a strategy for what to do with all
of the cables and wires that you're going to have to hide in the front from
the front panel connectors like the front USB 3. So, what I did was I kind
of crammed them into this corner, but I found that that ate up a little bit of the space that I would have had for a
graphics card that took up the entire length inside. And a big part of the
reason for that is because I'm using a radiator. If it wasn't for the radiator,
I could put a fan grill on that front fan and then not have to worry as much
about the uh the space available in the front. So, I squeezed the graphics card
in at the end. I didn't have too much trouble with it. I mean, it all it all worked just fine. Just make sure as
you're building you're managing your cables correctly to ensure that you're
able to get everything in there. Um either way, what whatever you're doing,
I recommend leaving the front bezel actually detached. You can just pull it
off at the front right here until the very end because that'll give you a
little bit more room to work with and install all those cards as you're
building the system. Now, in terms of hard drive support, I wanted a challenge
when it came to hard drive installation. So, I well, okay. I I guess I actually
just kind of did it wrong. And to go back and do it over, I might turn the
drives around. So, you can see I have the mounted connectors towards the back,
and they're supposed to be mounted connectors towards the front. So, I
would I would turn the drives around and put the cables on the other side. And I
would definitely install drives in the top slots before populating the side,
especially if I have a mid-range graphics card in here. It's a 260x in
there. the way that I do because that's putting a lot of that graphics card heat
next to my drives which is going to be bad for them in the longer term. In the
end, it worked. And the fact that this case supports up to two 3 and 1/2 in
drives and two 2 and 1/2 in drives or three 3 and 1/2 in drives or four 2 and
1/2 in drives is pretty darn impressive given the size. And when we see our
temperature tests, you're going to see that even with the hard drives in sort of their worstc case scenario locations,
it actually performs all right. After finishing my build, I did have one piece
of criticism. I wish the manual was a little bit better. I've already brought
this up with Cooler Master, but step-by-step build instructions and some
useful guidance in terms of part selection would go a long way towards
making the build process more enjoyable. The manual is well written and
professionally made, but I would just like to see it go a little bit deeper.
But to be frank, if that's what I have to complain about rather than things
like, you know, what was the overall build quality like? Then I guess they're
doing pretty well. There were no rough edges, no things that could have cut me,
no things that that really bothered me or I looked at and I went, really, what
were they thinking when they did that? But I've come to expect this from Cooler
Master, so it's hard to remember to mention that kind of stuff. And in fact,
it's not even in my script. So there you go. I just remembered now. So, with all
that out of the way, let's talk results. Playing Far Cry 3 with the GPU usage
pinned at 100% yielded 90 degree temps
on the R seven260X that I have tucked away in that little corner in there.
That might sound high, but remember guys, these modern GPUs are actually
designed to ramp their fan speeds to target a specific temperature. And that
card was reaching about 72% fan speed to
maintain that 90°. Yeah, it's a little bit on the loudish side, but it's not
unreasonable by any means. And when you consider the stupid way my drives were
installed, such that my graphics card really doesn't have much access to fresh
air, it's obvious it could do a little bit better with more forethought. CPU
temperatures of course were much better at an impressive 55 degrees max, but
that makes sense because it's liquid cooled and access to fresh outside air
for the radiator does wonders here. It's drawing that fresh air right in from the
outside. So overall, the system is extremely small, extremely compact, runs
quiet at idle, but of course gets a little bit louder under gaming load. And
I'd say the Elite 110 if you're trying to build a tiny little system with good
ventilation gets a definite thumbs up from me. Guys, thank you for watching
this video. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a
comment and let me know. Do you prefer small cases like this or would you
rather we do more coverage of things like the half stacker for example? Like
large, more maybe more versatile, but certainly less uh spaceconscious
solutions. I guess there's a couple more things to mention, guys. Uh, we do have
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Heat.