Best PC Cases of 2022: $60 to $300 Airflow, Silence, & Budget Cases

[Music] the year's not over yet but we've looked at enough cases now to do a best cases Roundup for 2022 and help you figure out what to build in the fractal pop was really interesting this year the fractal torrent was interesting last year and remains interesting this year we've also looked at things in the past like the td500 on the cheaper end of things but now it's time to look at the best cases you can buy today all across the stack so from 60 bucks all the way up into the hundreds and that includes looking at the best thermal performer the best for mechanical design and in the case of the height y60 the best overall so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace we'll start with the best overall case that we've looked at this year the winner is chosen based on overall performance and a strong mix of build quality unique Innovations and good execution of standard features this time we're assigning it to the height y60 with a heavy emphasis that we still think the fractal torrent last year's winner in this category is a Fierce and tied Contender for the category the two hundred dollar height wise 60 pulls ahead for breathing new life into a design that has dominated the market for years the y60 clearly took the lien Li 011 Dynamic design and tweaked it doing more than the copycats out there from Asus and phantax to provide something new and interesting to the style the y60 primarily gets accolades for its extreme attention to detail where everything in the case was re-analyzed at an attempt to set it apart from the pack the fans even have a molded H logo in them rather than a sticker they're also cable tie points for basically every cable path we could find the rubber grommets are molded and open at all times as a pass-through rather than a deformable type the pcie Riser cable is customized for color matching and height is stamping its name into the motherboard tray the rear of the case and other places in ways that aren't oppressive but are pretty interesting all the glass on the case is removable making it relatively easy to manipulate tubes rate radiators and cables during a build the case is meant for water cooling first and foremost but it does well overall with the air Cooling and the right configuration it's not the most competitive case for air cooling but it's close enough and other features outweigh the couple of degrees of inefficiency that you find with the y60 the large intake at the side and bottom are what allow cooling to remain acceptable even in spite of the glass extra depth in the side mount allows for thicker radiators that offer better performance and a lower chamber in the floor gives a hidden compartment for cable management although it does use a little bit too much plastic for The Grille which limits some of the airflow there are downsides of course other than this the top mount for example can't fit radiators as easily as it probably should be able to and the side gives you a lot more room to work with Additionally the case can't support horizontal video cards at all this is a problem if you're going to stick with an air cooler on your GPU because modern cards of the three plus slot design variety will struggle with thermal given the proximity of the glass water cooling won't be a problem but air on these large gpus it will be related to this pcie access becomes restricted to basically just the GPU because the Riser cable runs over the rest of the slots there are other downsides too and you can check our full review for that we'll link that below but even with its shortcomings we found the y63 Innovative and to be risk taking and those risks they largely paid off the next category is for best mechanical design we created this category years ago for cases that are well built and designed and unique and creative ways but don't necessarily get best thermals or any of the other bests in the list in previous years we've given this to the silent base 802 for its swappable panels the dark Base Pro 900 for its invertible motherboard installation as an option and the o11 air mini for its mixed use this time we're giving the award to the Lian Lee Land cool 3 with an MSRP of 160 dollars the land cool 3 is one of the most mechanically complex cases we've ever worked with but not to the level of impressive uselessness found in some others like the Odyssey acts that we only also previously worked on although that one was a waste of effort instead the landcool 3 carries forward the multi-paneled approach found on the land called two mesh previously but in a more sophisticated way the case is compartmentalized into an upper and a lower chamber it has two larger side panels and two smaller side panels for a lower compartment to open the main panels rather than the old method of first opening the lower mesh mini panels Lian Lee has now designed it so that the entire front quarter panel we'll call it Flank In the front mesh is a door handle pull in anywhere on the aluminum handle deploys a simple lever to pop the glass open there's no way to permanently secure these panels for Transit which is one of the downsides we mentioned in the review but it's still a sophisticated and unique solution to something that honestly probably didn't really need a solution but at least there are trying to do something new the right side panel opens to reveal doors upon doors of cable management and concealment options and opening these doors reveals pre-installed lawn velcro straps for helping secure larger cables the doors are magnetically sealed so they'll pop open if cables aren't secure also behind the doors SSD mounts with spring-loaded tool-less retention mechanisms are available and you can lock those in place with a screw if you'd rather than be permanently sealed this is where we see that Lian Lee went crazy with Sprints it's like they just discovered them and want to use them everywhere the front of the case has a spring-loaded release lever for the front fan tray which can be removed and even reversed for easier radiator and fan installation the depth from the front fans to the front mesh gives a wider intake area allowing better thermals than when smashed against the mesh because there's less impedance other features include three two and a half inch Drive mounts in the lower right panel as an option a fan or radiator mount on top of the power supply shroud and a movable Cable Management bar that allows for GPU clearance to be more easily accommodated or for water cooling tube management there's more than this but we'll point you to the review linked below for full details we had a few fit and finish complaints about the case like the loose hinge out of the box though easily fixed unsophisticated front panel removal and sometimes needlessly complex mechanisms that leave us uncertain about how long all of these Springs and levers will work well but as far as Innovative industry-leading mechanical design in a computer case Lian Lee is the king for the year the next one is for best budget case there aren't many options this year and ideally we'd like to choose something closer to sixty dollars budget is always a loaded phrase since everyone has a different idea for that but by our definition it's a 50 to 60 dollar case we want something that's not so cheap that it's falling apart like the Zonda o but not high priced enough to force a build outside of the 500 600 price class it's a year old now but we're dialing it back to the montec X3 mesh for this one it's 65 currently it's loaded with fans six of them actually but quantity isn't everything and it takes an airflow first design with basically everything I was taking a back seat we reviewed this case and found that it unsurprisingly made use of extremely cheap materials like the side panels audibly thin Steel but it's clear that the cost of six fans on a 65 case comes from somewhere and that somewhere is the entire rest of the case also the cost comes from the fans because they're only powered by Molex connectors and one giant Molex centipede still it's okay for a simple budget build the chassis itself uses old tooling and the interior is plain and without many ease of installation features the motherboard tray is a simple sheet of painted steel and there aren't any grommets or Advanced Cable Management features but again it'll fit an ATX computer and it'll be acceptable while doing it that's about the best you get here although it's one of the better budget cases right now it mostly passes for acceptable Against The Wider market and realistically we'd prefer to choose something a little bit cheaper than this or best budget but the quality really falls off a cliff right now if you go much lower the next one is a new category as prices have gone up across all Industries we've added a tier for best mid-range case this one goes to the fractal pop air which is a 120 enclosure that came out this year and aligned with the trend of bringing more colors to PC cases the fractal pop comes in airflow and Silent options but we have a public bias towards performance so we'll skip the silent option facto's biggest Innovation with this case was moving away from this triangular geometry by inventing a new never-before-seen geometry like this in the pop the shape has six sides and is almost circular but it's also kind of square because there isn't a name for a six-sided polyhedral shape we'll coin a new one squircle the squircle pattern on the front mesh illuminates well if lit fortuitously and also allows excellent airflow through the circular mesh holes within the square killer six-sided unnamed shapes most notably however is the Pop's Revival of the optical drive this case has a magnetic bottom front panel that's easily removed able to be popped out for easy access access to the lower chamber and also falls off if you pick it up the wrong way the new frackle pop the chamber houses the power supply at the back and has options for either hard drives or Optical drives at the front and given the limited selection of five and a quarter inch supporting cases in the modern Market that puts the pop in the de facto best case category for five and a quarter baits but that's not why we have it in the lineup the case also does excellently for thermals given the overall simple nature of it at least and it would be fine for out of the box use with a standard Tower cooler color is applied well and offers another reason to select the case with its black variants an orange green purple teal and full black for the secondary colors and other options include full white this is one of the top cases in the price class right now but if you'd rather buy something else or something larger we have a strong runner-up recommendation for the NZXT H7 flow and dxt finally got back into more modern design and the H7 flow provides a relatively standard building experience in a good way that is with average thermal performance for 100 30 dollars at the price for Alternatives check out the courts here 4000d and 5000d airflow variants next up is best out of the box thermals fraxel returns with the torrents for this one the 190 fractal torrent came out last year but cases don't age like Silicon dust it's still usable it remains one of the most impressive cases on the market now and it's managed to land as best thermals for two years running now on our benchmarks and last year we also gave it best overall the Torrance average CPU temperature under a full system load was just 41 degrees Celsius above ambient keeping it at the top of the chart all year and that's the stock configuration for GPU thermals it's not a technical best but it's the best balanced of the options nearby the torrent is within a few degrees of the top and it manages better CPU thermals with a more significant weighting than its competitors here the Torrance is able to excel in thermals this way because of its fan layout two large and unencumbered 180 mil front fans allow the system to perform as well as it does although while offering a look that differs the torrent from the pack of now common mesh front panels one 40 millimeter fans also Aid in performance and customization even for water cooling builds makes the torrent seriously worth considering for anyone who can fit it in the budget we used it for our recent editing system build and we even found one 80 millimeter radiators to put on the front this is the type of case that can last for multiple builds and on the current market it's without equal in terms of thermals while maintaining High build quality for those interested in the torrent but trying to spend less consider the torrent compact as an alternative for many ITX they also have a torrent Nano but we haven't reviewed that one best noise normalized thermals is up next for this one we're looking at the top performers when the total system noise level is matched at 36 DBA at 20 inches distance and a 26 DBA environment the land cool 3 the fractal torrent compact the torrent and the land cool 215 are all at the top of this chart mostly it's between the fraxels horn Compact and the land cool 3. the compact has the benefit of being smaller meaning the distance from the intake to the CPU coolers less and the air hitting it is cooler and higher velocity the lanco 3 mostly benefits from just having perforations everywhere both do well here if you wanted to go for an air cooled build with as low noise as possible any of these top five cases would set you up well even The Cooler Master half 500 isn't a bad starting point but the price has been entirely untenable speaking of worst trend for the year so far there's always time we'll go to rebranding old cases as new this is something normally reserved for GPU makers but this past year Cooler Master showed us that even case manufacturers can take something that was previously launched give it a new name and change basically one small thing and then ship it for fifty dollars more and they did that with a half 500 coming out of the h500 previously the base tooling is the same as previous cases the features are largely unchanged and the price has increased significantly in fact they've even removed a few things we liked there was a time when the base tooling and the original model of this case was a hundred dollars but as we enter Rebrand territory we're long past that so that finishes up the best cases for 2022 at least that you could buy right now we're going to keep reviewing cases through the end of the year of course more will come out but we're mostly through the bulk of it things like the focus too we're interested in looking at we just haven't gotten to yet there's at least one case that hasn't released yet that we're aware of so check back for more as always but for now at least as you look at building an RTX 40 or an am5 or whatever system coming up we've given you a good set of options and then of course there's also more unique cases like the cute pet one or this so that's it for this one as always subscribe for more if you want to learn more about each of the cases we looked at including all the downsides for each one check out the reviews we've linked those and the playlist to 14 interviews below and as always you can help us out directly by going to store.gamersaccess.net thank you for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,361,335

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, best cases, best pc cases 2022, best gaming cases 2022, best pc build cases 2022, best airflow cases gaming pc, best cases for airflow 2022, best cases for rtx 4090, best cases for amd ryzen 7000, best budget pc case, best quiet pc case

Id: pL5uttjPWZE

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022