Best PC Cases of 2021 So Far: $60 to $200 Airflow, Silence, & Budget Cases

there's been an absolute flurry of case releases already for 2021 and at the end of 2020 so we're revisiting our best cases list this is best cases for 2021 so far in parentheses there we'll revisit this again as the year progresses we only do two to three of these a year at different points because the case market changes so rapidly and one of the reasons is that the prices move around a little bit depending on things like tariffs and so in the last few months alone the prices have fluctuated in a way that has changed some of our recommendations from our end-of-year 2020 best cases list and we also have a bunch of new cases to consider so this will have various categories best airflow for example or best overall thermals we have a best in general category best mechanical design and a couple of others with the gold beans to help you select a case for your pc build based on our many hundreds and hundreds of rows now of data and tests for cases that have come out over the last probably seven or eight years that's how much data we've collected before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzlies conductor not liquid metal conductive knot is what we've used in all of our liquid metal and delid thermal tests capable of dropping cb thermals significantly when replacing the stock thermal interface lower cpu thermals don't just allow better overclocks but also lower noise levels because the transfer efficiency is increased the mix of gallium and indium makes for a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter kelvin outclassing traditional pastes significantly learn more at the link in the description below although cases are mostly just a box with various amounts of tempered glass and rgb thrown into a blender and ground up to create a case there are actual advancements in case technology in general but specifically in bringing down higher quality features to lower cost cases so this is where the mechanical design category is my personal favorite category because it gives us a look at what's happening in the case market and what's going to come to more cases as time moves forward and they all rip each other off as they often do so now that the industry has gotten over its initial obsession with tempered glass and blocking every single intake spot on the cases we've gotten to a point where airflow has gotten good while still having tempered glass somewhere rgb is is there as ever but isn't quite as stupid as it was in some of its earliest implementations and we genuinely have a really good offering of cases on the market now so this is a pretty strong lineup today if we look back in time four years just to give an idea for how much the case market changes we were criticizing the corsair bargain bin spec-04 for a lot of things and now they're actually in a position where corsair has come back and is deserving of spots in these best cases listings so the case manufacturers change their ways each year and that changes the lineup for example ndxt has also has also submitted an entry to let's move on let's get into the best cases for 2021. the first award is for the best overall case category awarded to the case that we consider to be the best combination of impressive design thermal performance build quality acoustics and usefulness we named the landcall 215 as the best overall case for 2020 at the end of the year and at just about three months into 2021 our minds haven't been changed yet despite the huge amount of cases we've already looked at the 215 isn't the fanciest case or the most dust proof or the absolute best at cooling but it's a jack of all trades that's impressively cheap post tariffs at about 80 the 215 launched to a review that was neutral to positive from us also known as glowing praise from other reviewers and we've become generally more positive towards the case as time has moved on this case manages to combine powerful thermal performance with a price that's reasonable for most mid-range and better system builds but it also offers modern ease of installation features and kill management features the case like most cases isn't without its flaws the large intake fans for example are partially blocked by the chassis which is silly and kind of an oversight but it's a combination of that design oversight and frankly repurposing existing tooling from a third-party supplier to keep the costs down the 200 millimeter fans were selected over better fitting 140 millimeter fans for appearance reasons rather than for performance but in spite of that the thermal results are excellent thanks to the relatively open front panel design we liked this case for the same reason that we liked silverstone's redline zero six which was a chart topper for us for many years this case is stripped down it's not expensive it's not particularly cheap either but it includes enough stock fans to provide chart topping cooling without any extra purchases we can easily recommend the 215 for budget or mid-range air-cooled builds but less so for other setups liquid-cooled builds with front-mounted radiators definitely shouldn't use the 200 millimeter fans alone to cool the radiator it's just unless it's a 200 millimeter radiator but those are rare and using the normal radiator fans in a push-pull config alongside the 200s makes it redundant and you might end up in a worse situation anyway because of the low static pressure of 200. the point at which the stock fans are being used purely for decoration is the point at which it makes sense to just buy a different case in air-cooled systems this case makes a lot of sense but it fades with water also for true budget machines the 80 price tag might push it out of reason but we have other cases for your consideration and lower price classes later our next category is for best mechanical design where we judge cases based on things like materials and the execution of interesting features particularly ones that are mechanical this is a fun category and a lot of the time we'll see future features that will become common show up in the winners of this category these cases are high quality in ways that aren't necessarily directly reflected in performance benchmarks we have two entries for this one the corsair 5000d airflow and the be quiet silent base 802. we are ultimately going to give this award to the be quiet silent base 802 but we'll talk about the 5000d airflow first the corsair 5000d and the 5000d airflow and the 5000x to a certain degree are collectively a follow-up to the 4000d that we considered for best mechanical design last year but which didn't ultimately win to be clear the 5000s are not replacements the 4 000 and 5000 families exist side by side with the 4000 d cases running cheaper and slightly smaller the 5000d airflow wasn't a chart topper for thermal performance but it held its own and the non-airflow model wasn't an unbreathable gpu fish tank either easy to use tool-less snaps captive thumb screws well-placed velcro straps and a removable front radiator make for a mostly pleasant building experience and corsair went so far as putting protective stickers around all the snaps to prevent paint scuffing as they slide against each other we do have some issues with the design notably the metal plate in the case interior that covers the cable grommets next to the motherboard is restrictive as well as being mutually exclusive with the side radiator mount neither are super convenient to remove but users should remove one or the other in nearly every situation that said we still think the issues are an indirect result of what is ultimately a set of good mechanical design choices the case has a removable cable cover and it has a side rated amount which is usable thanks to the shortened psu shroud which itself has two optional plastic extensions shipped with the case the side mount has a removable mesh filter which locks into place on the side panel and lines up precisely with patterning punched into the steel side panel the front mount is improved over the 4000d as well as it's both sturdier and has wider fan cutouts which line up better with 140mm fans together all these physical improvements put corsair in the running the silent base 802 though is where we're going to assign the award the swappable front and top panels are a huge step forward for be quiet specifically which has mostly been resistant to any kind of change over the last several years but be quiet is moving forward with new design ideas and it's executing them in ways that are unique to be quiet and don't just look like it's a general copy or piling on of a trend spring-loaded side panel latches that actually work unlike some of the other ones we've seen in the past are another cool mechanical feature and there's also a general feeling of quality in the case as you work with the individual components for example the top tray is particularly well built and we'll come back to that and the way that the front panel slides and sockets into place very securely is another good feeling mechanical feature in fact the be quiet silent base 802 had our review titled extremely good mechanical designs very straightforward in that way be quiet routinely impresses us with the amount of small details in its cases especially in the mid-range and high-end pure bass and dark-based families to pick one example the top fan tray coming back to it in the 802 slides out like a drawer on plastic runners requiring multiple parts and also extra labor to assemble those parts where another company would cut corners and just screw the tray into the top of the chassis or maybe not even include a removable tray at all this is also an invertible chassis which means that mechanically it's unique and it gives you a way to differentiate your build and if you keep your build on the left side of your desk you can orient it so that you can still see the components on the right side or vice versa inverting the motherboard tray isn't a particularly quick process but be quiet has made it a lot easier than it was for the dark base pro 900 and it's something that one person can actually achieve now both of these cases are very good in mechanical design but just barely be quiet silent base 802 gets the award the next one is for best budget case we generally aim for cases around 50 for the budget cases category and we've received many suggestions from viewers about their favorite budget brands some of which we may review later this year the definition of the word budget changes for everyone but ours is set at 50 to 60 dollars plus or minus a bit because most cases below the 50 mark either have temporary rebates or drop far enough in quality that they become disposable flimsy junk rather than something that can get a few uses out of it we'd rather encourage spending an extra 10 on this particular category to be able to reuse the case again later rather than just throwing it out and creating more e-waste because you spent say 35 or 40 bucks on something that wasn't very good for now we have our eye on a case that's a little more expensive than the usual candidates for this category that case is the fantax we haven't fully reviewed the p360a and as of this writing we're still in the process of reviewing it but the p300a the p400a and the p500a have given us a lot of experience with the series and the p300a isn't too different in a way that would make it hard to make this determination part of the reason we like the p400a so much is that the digital rgb variant ships with three fans for ninety dollars the p360a ships with only two one 20 mil fans but fantax sells it for about 65. again that has it higher than we typically like for this category but it's worth considering stretching the budget for comparison the p300a is currently 60 at time of writing with one non-rgb 120 ml fan once you add a fan to that case it costs the same or more the p360a fits into a very narrow niche between the p300a and the 70 non-digital p408 but it does actually fit the p360a seems similar to the p300a outside of the stock fans but will reserve judgment on just how similar until we do a separate piece for now check out the broad strokes of our p300a review to get an idea of what to expect the most important takeaway is that the p360a will probably need at least one additional fan installed to truly excel at thermal performance but so does the non-digital p400a and if you're using a cheaper system overall it's probably lower power consumption which means that the p360a for those lower tdp systems will be fine this is a volatile case category due to the price changes and the sales that frequently happen so we expect plenty of challengers to the p360a to pop up before the end of the year our next one is for best out of the box thermals and is one of the simplest and longest standing categories that we judge since well it's one of the main things we test in the thermal sections of the review and the eternal balancing act between selling more expensive cases with more fans versus selling less expensive cases with fewer fans we typically prefer more fans except for in special scenarios users may end up swapping them out but case manufacturers can get better bulk deals on case fans than individual consumers can which helps out a lot when pricing out more budget focused builds we haven't seen a case this year that can definitively take down leon lee's reigning lancol 2 mesh which is still an extremely strong contender alongside the lanco 215 it's still a chart topper and is definitely one that's in our list and you should be considering if however you are interested in only something that's brand new and a few months old is too old for a metal box with some fans in it for you then fractal's successor to the much loved mesh if i see the mesh y2 compact is reviewed on our channel is new brand new that is and it has the best shot so far of challenging the lancol 2 mesh the mesh by 2 compact ships with 3 case bands 2 140mm intakes and 1 120mm exhaust which puts it far ahead of the original mesh of ic in stock thermal tests gpu thermals weren't as good as we had hoped but this can be at least partially addressed by shifting the intake fans slightly below their original position the limited size of the meshfy 2 compact means that system compatibility is also limited but not more so than the original mesh of ic which newegg currently has flagged as its top selling case ultimately we're going to give this one to the magify2 compact but the lan coil 2 mesh gets an honorable mention the brand new compact has made big strides forward for fractal and it's a case worthy of consideration for best out of the box thermals however if you don't need your steel box to be fresh out of the factory the lancoil 2 mesh is still our primary choice it's just that it technically came out in 2020. our next category is for best noise levels counterintuitively best noise levels is one of our most opinion based categories we do take numbers and measurements for it but if we judge based on raw numbers the case with the fewest slowest fans would win instead we award it to the quietest case that still achieves reasonable levels of performance our noise normalized testing is helpful here but it's in a separate category this one is just about noise overall this year one of the best cases in this respect is corsair's non-airflow 5000d test results skewed this case hot especially for gpu thermals but not completely out of control standardized fantasting suggested that with some carefully arranged aftermarket fans the 5000d could hold its own it has wide gaps between the front and top panel plates and the chassis fan mounts allowing some airflow even when using solid steel or glass plates that ship with the 5000d or x given a choice we do generally prefer the airflow model especially because you can tune the fans down in speed and achieve better overall performance noise or thermal but the solid panels do undeniably reduce the noise levels a little bit you're just going to be sacrificing some of that thermal performance and it's more useful if you're not going to manually tune it with the airflow panels we measured 38 dba and with the solid panels we measured 36.7 dba be quiet is also obviously always a contender in this category but their science focused configurations with the 802 for example tend to score very poorly in our thermal tests the sealed 802 scored 36.2 dba which is good but it had worse cpu temperatures than the torture test interestingly the be quiet sound base 802 and the corsair 5000d are in contention once again for the second category it's a matter of opinion patrick who wrote this script prefers the 5000d for the best noise levels combined with the best thermals while i prefer the be quiet silent base 802 for other qualities combined with the acoustics but if i were choosing purely on noise levels and didn't want to manually tune anything i would side with patrick's choice and go for the 5000d it just depends on how you're building best to noise normalized thermals is a category defined by a test that we added to our usual suite a couple of years ago for our baseline torture test we always run all case fans at 100 speed for the noise normalized benchmarks we lower the speed of the case fans until we hit a 36 dba threshold the point of this test isn't to see whether cases are silent 36 is easily audible but to see which cases can still provide good thermal performance without sounding like a hurricane last year we named the fantax p500a the best case in this category and gave the best mechanical design award to the meshfy2 the p500a still has arguably the best balance of cpu and gpu thermals at a low noise level but after adding more cases to our noise normalized charge we think the mass of i2 deserves some additional credit for keeping noise levels low while still having a true front filter some of our favorite budget airflow cases do extremely well in this category also like the lancole 215 and the p400a if you look at the chart this is because they have open fronts without filters blocking airflow and their fans can move a lot of air quietly the meshfi 2 manages to achieve almost the same level of performance with a filter it's a good alternative for users who want the low noise levels of a case like the lancole 215 or the p500a but want a higher degree of dust filtration fractal like be quiet has a reputation for releasing noise-damped cases as we've stated before these noise-damped cases tend to be hotter at a normalized noise level than comparable airflow cases in our testing since open case design allows fans to move more air even though they're slower without sacrificing much performance for example the meshfy 2 is a variant of the silence focused to find 7 which scored significantly worse than the mesh by two in noise normalized testing although the defined seven was actually below our noise threshold even at one hundred percent fan speed this varies between systems but with proper fan speed control open cases like the mesh by two can be capable of better cooling and lower noise than closed cases like the defined seven finally the winner of the best worst case category is a shoein for inclusion in our yearly disappointment built there's still time we have many more months to have a worse case yet but for now it's the msi sakira 500x these aren't necessarily the worst cases in thermal performance for this category at least not by numbers alone but frequently they are this category is for poor thermals but also let downs disappointments and general incompetence in that category msi gets high marks in all three categories for its secura 500x the msi secura is bizarre aside from paying for its awards since it apparently couldn't win them on merit alone it also seems like msi invested real money into its design and production the company created a flagship case that showcases a total of five fans four of them 200 millimeters and expensive without giving any of those fans room to breathe testing with and without the front panel gave us one of the widest deltas we've ever seen which is indicative of bad design we have some other issues with the design of the 500x as well all of which are detailed in the full review but for the most part it's an overbuilt case with a few interesting ideas that are drowned out by an abundance of inept design and hubris we understand that we have a reputation for preferring high airflow cases but it's one thing to have sub-optimal airflow and another to use tempered glass to completely suffocate what would otherwise be overkill case cooling maybe it's awesome great big conspiracy if msi kills video cards with a choked case it can sell more video cards we're being facetious if that wasn't clear msi used 200 mil fans as decorative elements much like cooler master did with the h500p that we tore apart back in 2017. even the h500p though performed significantly better than the secure it our main sticking point with the case was that cooler master was using the half or high airflow name to market it cooler master learned from its mistakes and followed up with the h500p mesh and a host of other high performance cases so maybe there's hope for msi too so that'll wrap it up then there's still a lot more of 2021 to go but because people are building computers all the time throughout the year we like to do these lists as we go and as we add huge amounts of cases to the charts at once so just beginning 2021 we've already done two corsair cases we've done two versions of the be quiet 802. we are looking at the p360a but have basically already reviewed it it's just in the pipeline still because we looked at p300a previously and then we have a couple of others on the bench too we also looked at the msi secure 500x i'm not sure if that counts but there's been a lot of movement and we'll come back with more soon for now though links are in the description below if you're interested in any of these and uh the individual reviews would be a great place to look if you see any that are interesting to you and you'd like the full details on that particular case but thank you for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net if you'd like to pick up one of our crystal teardown awards that we give to the case manufacturers for these when when conventions resume again anyway and you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like to sign up for behind the scenes videos or sign up for one of the teardown crystals that way thanks for watching we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,213,839

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, best cases, best pc cases, best gaming pc cases 2021, best cases 2021, best airflow cases, best airflow cases 2021, best computer cases now, quiet computer cases 2021, pc case benchmarks

Id: ffuAnwGivO8

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021