12 Fans, 0 Airflow: One of the Worst Cases We've Reviewed | Abkoncore Ramesses 780

we need to start this case review off on the right foot so this case is bad and the reason everyone wanted us to review it is because everyone knew we would say that so this case it's it's sort of hard to know where to begin we're going to treat it like a normal case review and go through all the features of course but this was sent to us by our friend brian from bps customs who discovered the case back in mid-2019 he then dubbed it the most interesting case he'll never build in and with encouragement from our benevolent community he then decided to dump it on us because he couldn't find somewhere better to dispose of it at first glance in some ways it looks visually inspired by inwin's 303 cases from a while ago but it deviates in significant ways like having 12 pre-installed 120 ml arg fans that in many cases lead to nowhere so that's the quality of case we're working with today this is the abconcor ramses 780. before that this video is brought to you by arctic cooling and its liquid freezer 2 line arctic is actively restocking its liquid freezer 2 coolers that rank among the top performers for cpu coolers right now including on ryzen cpus the liquid freezer 2 series is focused on high throttle performance and value featuring a blackout design and including a vrm fan mounted on top of the pump block to help provide airflow over neighboring vrm heatsinks arctic has also started selling its p-12 120 case fans learn more at the links in the description below so the ramsey 780 is a full tower case it's one of the few cases this large that we've gotten in and for the most part it's a large empty box to build in but it does have several shortcomings that we're going to be going through today as for the pricing on this huge case obviously this amount of fans isn't going to be cheap we don't know the exact retail pricing because we couldn't seem to find it available at least in the u.s and it is a korean brand so maybe you could find it on korean retailers but it's listed for about 260 to 70 euros in the one place we could find it and it should be sold for a lot less the most interesting aspect of this entire thing is clearly the fans if you look at this thing it's one two three four along the top row there's an additional three under the top right for the bottom row which are side mounted typically that air would come through a a vent cut into the steel side panel on the opposite side but don't worry it's glass on the other side and then there's one two in the back for rear exhaust there's three fans that have an interesting design we'll be talking about later in the bottom acting as sort of intake sometimes and then also very limited ventilation the case as a whole so despite having the most fans in a case pre-installed that we've ever worked with it doesn't end up at the top of the charts as you'll see today so this is a great exercise and more fans is not in fact more better for a case a standard pc case in 2020 has six sides of those typically three maybe four of them will have ventilation punched into them the 780 that we're reviewing today has ventilation on two sides and those sides are simply the bottom and the rear of the case with no vents present on either side on the top or on the front of the case if we look at the new egg listing for the 780 it leans heavily on airflow and in fact the listing says quote open the wind way the space between the side tempered glass and chassis draws cooled air directly to the case spelled uh in context there so this actually isn't true really the glass panels the marketing is saying that if you don't tighten the panels all the way then technically there's maybe a fraction of a millimeter gap on all sides where the air can come in this is kind of like when bitfenix said that it's enso had airflow in the front panel and it pointed in its marketing materials to some not actually existing hole in the case that was more of a matter of a manufacturing issue where they couldn't quite get the two pieces of plastic to stick together flushly and so instead they said let's call that airflow so this is kind of going back in that direction in terms of marketing the case the glass panels can be tightened down to be flush so you can actually completely eliminate even the small mostly insignificant air gap that would otherwise be in there and that air gap depends entirely on compressible rubber washers that are on the panel and obviously these just get pushed down as you screw the panel in so they don't really do a whole lot these are less than a millimeter thick at the base even before the panels are tightened down and it's it's really hard to articulate here how just absolutely mind-numbingly stupid the airflow configuration is on this case it is genuinely the biggest monstrosity of a cooling solution i've ever personally seen deployed in a computer case we've seen plenty of cases where the cooling is just bad mostly for standard reasons like wanting glass everywhere or just not really putting fans in to begin with but this one the sort of sad or frustrating thing here is that this company was actually trying they said let's make this thing good at airflow but then trying in this instance made one of the worst possible fan configurations you could do at least when corsair says ah screw airflow it's stupid and we want rgb memes at least they're not trying to make it good like it's it's fine if you're okay you're accepting that you're making the case bad at this particular thing airflow performance but when you say we're gonna try and make this good and open the wind way there's a new problem emerging where there's a disconnect between engineering and what the goal is of engineering and the solution appears to be add more fans the last thing that tried this hard to achieve cooling this disproportionately bad to the amount of effort invested was probably either the gtx 480 series or maybe something like the fury x or the rx 5700 xc reference cooler but this goes a step beyond because they they really marketed the cooling side of things so then where does the air go with this configuration well there's a glass panel on both sides and most of the time you're going to tighten it down enough where there's not really much of an exit at the borders and that's also not going to be the easiest path to exit anyway so it's not going to exit there what's happening is this top row is pushing air straight back the only place for it to go is the power supply and only one of these fans really lines up with that the other ones go straight into a glass wall and will probably work their way in through the cable holes in the top and just re-circulate back into the case until it eventually maybe finds its way out through a crack somewhere so you're just pushing all of the heat from the case into the power supply for the most part the uh fans on the front side go nowhere they go only into the glass the fans on the bottom have a very very small amount of space to try and pull air through against very poorly elevated bottom of the case where the spacing's just not enough to get the air it needs so the three oddly shaped fans at the bottom of the case are the only intake fans in the entire case and the stubby case legs lift them just two centimeters off the ground the three fans at the front of the case are utterly pointless they're just mounted to a metal bar that can optionally be repurposed for ssds or hard drives and using them for drives would make much more sense remember that the front and both sides of the case are sealed so all these fans can do is recirculate that hot air the two rear exhaust fans are the only ones that make any sense and they shoulder alone most of the burden of case cooling all 12 of the 120 millimeter fans in the case are the spider spectrum model fans and the three on the bottom of the case are specifically the reverse spider spectrum fans because that's the only way to get the rgb side up so if they're not completely throwing away the aesthetics here the spider fan nomenclature is one we've had experience with before mostly relating to the biomimetic legs that were found on the xalman cnps20x and you all know likely what we thought of that when we talked about last time we have many problems with the fans in this case though first they're an artistically cut down design with gaps in the frame and smaller than normal fan blades that are meant to avoid damage on the unprotected edges the blades are 10 centimeters in diameter compared to 11.4 on one of the noctua fans we use for standardized testing the result is a fragile product that's only meant to be mounted in one direction and has less blade surface area than a normal 120mm fan many of these fans were screwed so tightly into the case that the metal brackets bent and the rubber noise damping bumpers at the corners of the fans were squeezed through the holes the reverse model spider spectrum has a point molded into the fan hub that projects upwards and makes it impossible to mount it face down so if you wanted to use it for something else you can't at least not in half of the directions the fan grille at the rear of the case has a lot of metal and relatively few holes the hole to metal ratio is not favorable the holes that are present are wide enough to fully insert a finger so it's the worst of both worlds where it's not protecting you from injuring yourself or at least injuring the fan as more likely in the case of the quality of these fans but it's also still inhibiting airflow they've somehow managed to make ventilation both dangerous and ineffective all of the fans come with six pin combined rgb fan cables that we've come to absolutely loathe with the entirety of our beans and they can only be connected to the included fan hub marketing images and the manual for the case depicts this hub as a nice plastic enclosed unit but those are evidently from the past as the hub that came with our case was just an open pcb the hub is powered by two molex connectors which are daisy chained together out of the box now one might wonder why appkincor included two molex connectors if they're both going to be plugged into the same cable and as many electricians can tell you it's because more points of failure means more better it's more resilient to failure if it has more individual points of it because then you're just spreading out the failure potential across multiple points and that reduces the failure potential we think we're not really sure but that seems like why they would do it the hub can optionally be connected to the reset button of the case to cycle through baked in led modes the baked in led modes as we've seen in other cases in the past are well unpleasantly jerky even with the speed turned up that's unfortunate since the glass tint is very dark so the only things visible inside the case are the leds other than the reset button the hub can be controlled by three on-board buttons for fan speed led mode and led speed or by an infrared remote brian in his review noted that the remote didn't come with a battery and he was kind enough to remove his before mailing it to us so we could get the true customer experience thanks brian notice that we didn't mention a way to connect the fans to the motherboard to control the leds via a motherboard header there's no way to do this you can't connect the fans to the motherboard to control the leds you can't connect the fans to a motherboard to control the rpm or the pwm signal the fans can only be connected to the hub and nothing else thanks to the proprietary six pin connectors or at least proprietary enough that you're not going to find a better solution than the one included there are also 24 buttons on the remote and 22 of those are to control the colors while the other two are to control the fan speed which again you can't control via your motherboard so that's what you get one of the two options is off so they either go or they don't go and those are the two options for your fans the only way to control fan speed at all from outside the case is to point the remote at the ir receiver and hit the fan plus or minus button which toggles between the two fan speeds the upper speed is approximately 1300 rpm and the lower speed is approximately 640 rpm that's it the only way we could measure this is with an external sensor because you can't plug it into the motherboard the ir receiver is a small box on the end of a cable but even with that extra flexibility we had problems using the remote through the steel walls and dark tempered glass of the case which again is the only possible way to control the fan speeds without taking the sides of the case off and hitting a button on the pcb itself claimed radiator support goes up to 480 mil for the upper mount and installing max size radiators in the ramsey 780 doesn't conflict with eeb motherboard compatibility or necessitate mounting any radiators tubes up the 780 can also fit up to a 280 mil radiator at the rear which is highly unusual cases rarely have enough vertical room above expansion slots for more than one fan the counterpoint to all these maybe positive features is that the bottom 240 mil mount is the only one directly exposed to cool air and it barely has any clearance and if the stock fans are used with a bottom mounted radiator then they can only be installed in a pole configuration because the pointy fan hubs won't fit underneath the radiator mounting a clc's radiator below the level of the pump is a bad idea for longevity and noise so it's unfortunate that this is the best location there are plenty of mounts in this case that can physically contain a radiator but none of them are good the top mount overlaps the power supply and has no access to cool air the rear mount pulls the entirety of the system's hot exhaust and the front mount is decorative even the physically contained part comes with a caveat since radiators installed in the top and rear mounts are mutually exclusive front i o closely resembles in-winds with a similar vertical arrangement and acrylic logo batch abconcors is led illuminated and syncs up with the case lighting which might be nice but it does also make it impossible to distinguish between the blue usb 3.0 and black usb 2.0 ports when the system is on we're happy with the four usb type-a ports and two separate audio jacks but the lack of a usb-c port or more usb 3.0 which is what we'd really prefer is something of a letdown in a case that's expensive and large the biggest failure of the front panel is that it has no labeling whatsoever so we still don't know which audio jack is a line in and which is a line out inwin didn't label theirs either so abconcor continues to successfully imitate the worst possible aspects of the 303 there was minor damage to the case when we received it as well one small chip taken out of the edge of a glass panel and a more serious warp in the surface of the power supply chamber where it appears that a rivet was driven in the wrong location since the case was first shipped to brian unpacked repacked and then shipped to us there's a chance that at least the chip didn't happen at the factory but given that brian didn't appear to take even the plastic wrap off of the fin because he liked the case so much that he wanted to preserve it forever it probably did happen at the factory the tempered glass panels on the 780 are some of the largest we've ever seen only slightly smaller than the anides ai crystals and that's a case we haven't formally reviewed but we use out of pure necessity to house a larger production system a noteworthy difference is that the ai crystal uses eight evenly spaced thumb screws per panel compared to four on the 780 and the ai crystals panels are 4.85 millimeters thick compared to 3.9 on the 780. the ramsey 780s panels feel disconcertingly thin in comparison especially since one of them has to withstand pressure from cables at the center with only four screws at the corners abkencore also makes a point of advertising to quote exceptional thickness of 1t in regards to the steel case components we measured the panels to be 1.15 millimeters thick the easiest way to fix this case to the extent possible would be to first off use a steel panel for the right side cut some holes in it so the front fans actually do something an exhaust and then probably raise the feet further to get it more off of the ground cut better holes for the bottom set them as intake and then you've got something that can at least cycle air through the case somewhat reasonably at this point though we're describing features of the in-win 303 and the lienly 011 cases so you should probably just by those instead they're also both conveniently much cheaper than this one is clearance around the edges of the motherboard it's fine overall but not nearly as good as the size of the case might suggest the fact that the motherboard is bordered on three sides by fan mounts limits the margin available for cables and cutouts to just under two centimeters at the top edge of the board and six below the bottom edge the cutouts at the bottom edge also have to contend with exposed fan blades the front edge is the best option then for routing cables as there are two rows of cutouts one of which is intended for full-width ssi eev boards that's perhaps the most positive thing we can say about this case that it will fit a 13-inch wide motherboard without compromises and that the front fan mounts can be removed for even more room if desired we mentioned the top bottom and front edges of the board but not the back edge that one's tricky abkencore has shifted the motherboard placement away from the back edge of the case by approximately four and a half centimeters presumably this is to keep the rear exhaust fans and radiator if there is one from overhanging the motherboard and getting in the way it's common for boards to be offset by about one centimeter so that expansion cards can be fully contained within the interior of the case for example the anthu pro 2 rather than partially sticking out of the back an example there the p400 but by moving the board so far forward into the case interior abconcor has made it nearly impossible to access rear i o reaching past this giant case and rooting around for a flash drive buried in the rear panel is pointlessly difficult and telling audio jacks apart is downright impossible now in the build notes patrick actually wrote an entire additional paragraph about chao management complaints but we're going to leave that one for the written review which is linked below just for time let's get into the thermals and see how this thing does we opted to treat this like a normal case review so our original plan was to do our entire case testing suite thermally for the case but we ran into some obstacles with our two usual tests first the noise normalized test is impractical since the case fans only have two speeds at the higher speed the fans run about 1300 rpm and case noise is 40.7 dba at the lower speed the fans are reduced to about 640 rpm and case noise is 31.7 dba there's an off button for the fans too so the case can also be silent in a sense be quiet we hope you're taking notes on this genius feature this just in no fans is the best it's the quietest our noise normalized threshold is 36 dba so we'd have to either jury rig a method of tuning fan speed or remove the fans to match that number we also had concerns about the safety of our test components with the amount of heat that was getting pushed through them so we end up just not running the standardized fan test in this case either we'll cover the numbers in a moment but it should be obvious that if we have thermal concerns with 12 fans in a case swapping them for the three standardized fans is probably not better the fact that every fan mount is already populated limits our ability to try and find more ideal configurations but we tried a couple first we tried simply placing the case on its side so that the bottom intake fans would have more room to breathe and then we tried removing the entire right side panel as another test with the case upright again that was to allow upper fans to exhaust out of the case and then finally we tried flipping the rear exhaust van to an intake configuration we didn't flip the cpu coolers fan to match for this one which normally would merit an additional test still but the numbers we got are already pretty conclusive and again running this several times with test components that are important for our operation we just didn't want to continue risking damage to them with the temperatures that we were getting with the stock arrangement of 12 fans cpu temperature averaged 64 degrees celsius over ambient flipping the case on its side raised that average to 67 degrees as the bottom intake fans pushed more hot air around the gpu and into the upper section of the case while removing the side panel for a more effective exhaust in the upper section lowered the average to 62 degrees over ambient reversing the rear fans raised the average to 68 degrees celsius as we mentioned the cpu cooler's fan orientation wasn't flipped for this test but more importantly flipping the rear fan removes the only point of exhaust in the case the rear fan mounts are the only unobstructed path to fresh air this was the best chance for the 780 to improve and it wasn't showing signs of that there's no more logical way to get cool air in and hot air out of the case than the stock fan arrangement comparatively 64 degrees ties the ramsey 780 with the notoriously hot bitfenix enso for the cpu thermals in this test which is the most pathetically impressive thing we've seen since we tested the inwen 805 i infinity 64 degrees is in the range of stock performance for the pharah r1 and the p300a when they ship with one 120 millimeter case fan and our sub 80 dollars we were worried when we first saw this case that the 12 stock fans would make up for the poor design and we'd have to spend the whole time explaining that the 780 was just brute forcing airflow luckily abconcor made our lives easy by creating a case that won't cool well under any circumstances the gpu is the only component in the entire case that's directly cooled with air from outside the case and it averaged 55 degrees celsius above ambient in the torture test laying the case on its side didn't change that average because the bottom intake fans have more pressing problems than clearance like being able to pull any air through the bottom filter combined with the undersized vents that they're mounted over removing the right side panel did cool it off by a couple degrees for an average of 52 degrees celsius the whole system is a trap for hot air and even though removing the entire right side panel only opens up the path for the three fans that's enough to improve thermals of the whole system reversing the direction of the rear fans predictably worse into the thermals for the gpu with an average of 61. we never expected this test to help in general though since the rear fans placed above it are again the only real exhaust option unlike the cpu results stock gpu thermals for the 780 are just mediocre instead of awful 55 degrees is on par with the original cooler master h500p or the leann lee landquel 2 non-mesh which is just embarrassing for a case with this many fans three of those fans are pointed directly into the gpu cooler thermally it's hard to imagine a worse end result for a premise that starts with build a box that 12 fans and a computer will fit inside of the next one is fire strike extreme on loop which is a gaming stand and test the average gpu temperature was 54 degrees celsius over ambience in this test nearly the same as in the torture test and therefore in roughly the same spot in the product stack the more interesting number here is the cpu temperature we rarely see the cpu break 30 degrees above ambient for this test since it's designed to be a gpu workload the ramsey 780 managed to get the cpu up to an almost unprecedented 38 degrees in this test the reigning champion for terribleness here is the walmart dtw case which pushed the cpu up to 43 degrees with our test system while doing the cpu-only blender render test the cpu temperature averaged 42 degrees over ambient again one of the worst results we've seen cpu cooling is a major weak point for this case and the bit phoenix enso tied it again at 42 degrees only joke cases like the walmart dtw and the cool man 3 body managed to do things worse oh and the q500l which was supposed to be a real case even removing the gpu as a heat source the 780 can't keep up and that's with 12 fans accelerating the render using the gpu raised gp temperature to 25 degrees above ambient still fairly average but in better company here than in the torture results it's tied with the silverstone rv-02 and the be quiet 500 dx both of which are actually good cases overall then this case really surpassed our expectations it blew by them we were expecting it to be bad but it's really bad this is genuinely one of the worst designed enclosures we've worked with in the last several years if not like the history of doing case reviews so it's supposed to be a high-end expensive tower with 12 fans and its performance is sometimes equivalent to 60 dollar mid tower cases with a single fan and sometimes ones that don't even have good airflow panels to begin with this is not a case we could recommend fortunately it doesn't seem like that really matters because the top google results for this case right now returns an error 404 not found page if you wanted to buy it anyway it looks like it was selling in the 260 euro 300 us range originally but we didn't check the pricing when it was available because we knew it would be bad and then now it seems like it's mostly gone even though it's only been out for a little while maybe maybe over a bit over a year or something like that so anyway you've dodged a bullet by not being able to buy this one so there are a couple of listings out there most of them are inactive at this point brian had a review of it as well and again his title was something all on the lines of the most interesting case i'll never build in or something like that so he had the right idea uh and then we appreciate him dumping the case on us not really sure what we're gonna do with it at this point either way though if you're shopping for a full tower and you want something actually good to look at we'd recommend checking out our review of the fantax m2 pro 2. you could look at the lienly 011xl both of these are large-ish or larger cases that might suit your needs in a way that's more competently designed you could also look at some of the higher end be quiet cases like the dark base 900 series where it's a bit more closed off but can be made to perform pretty well overall and it's a huge box to work in so those would be the ones we'd say to maybe go look into if you were seriously looking for a large case to buy but either way this one is impressive for other reasons so that's it for this one go check out brian's channel if you haven't seen him bps customs on youtube we'll link him and his review below if you want more of this stuff we previously built one of our production systems with someone we have a mini series on the channel working with bps customs if you want to see a previous collab with him so thanks again to brian and uh and to our viewers who asked him to send it to us as well if you want to help us out directly you can go to store.camerasnexus.net the mouse mats and the modmats at least that time of filming have just arrived and are in stock and shipping now so they're not on back order anymore if you place an order it'll ship immediately uh and then we're also donating 10 of the store revenue for the next eight 10 days or so depending on when this goes up to eden reforestation project and you can find the information for that on the store page otherwise subscribe for more we'll see you all next time i

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,478,711

Rating: 4.915628 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, abkoncore ramesses 780, worst pc case ever, worst cases, best pc cases, best and worst pc cases, abkoncore ramesses case review, abkoncore case review, abkoncore any good, case reviews, cases, case review

Id: OupiPZybyBE

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/riklaunim]

It's a space grade case. It can only exchange heat by radiation.

[u/lovely_sombrero]

I love GN reviewing disappointing products.

[u/far0nAlmost40]

Looks like they need to package some hole saws , Dremel or an ice pick with this microwave.

[u/ryandtw]

Written article version

[u/WinterCharm]

Holy fuck, this is appalling.

Also, if people are interested, should I post some of my airflow studies for a case design in /r/hardware?

Edit: Looks like people want it. Link to post

[u/kaustix2]

Conspiracy: This is all about selling more fans that you dont need.

[u/VasDrafts]

They need to bring back the IN WIN 707. I built my server in it, and it is hands down my favorite case. It's ENORMOUS, but absolutely exceeded all expectations I had for it. It actually sandwiches all your 3.5" drives, or 2.5" with adapters, between 4 fans. It even has a fan on the side of the case facing the back of the motherboard.

[u/MumrikDK]

The very existence of that case feels like commentary on current trends.

[u/Jam-Master-Jay]

Would be good to see GN or someone else fix the case with some power tools.