Cheapest High Airflow Case: 6 Fans for $70 Montech X3 Mesh

[Music] today we're looking at a case that has the highest amount of fans per dollar if that's a metric we can use and it's higher flow this is a budget case it's about 70 the montec x3 that follows up the montec x1 and x2 we've had no previous dealings with the company when we first spoke to montak actually it was one of the former cryorig founders who reached out and our only question was is montec game dias because look at the logos and the answer is no it's not the different companies so the x3 is the first thing we're going to review from that montage sent this over and uh it's got six fans about 70 bucks it uses some really cheap materials in some places you got that nice 0.6 millimeter steel wobble going on the side panel but other than that it's a budget case before that this video is brought to you by evga's new keyboard evga's new z20 and z15 rgb optical mechanical gaming keyboards have abundant rgb leds and programmable macro keys on the left side of the keyboard they also have a sensor to detect and turn on the leds when you're in front of the keyboard and turn them off when distant offering a unique feature for keywords the keyboard claims a 0.5 millisecond response time and 100 million keystroke lifespan learn more at the link in the description below most of montec's cases right now are in the 50 to 80 us range and this one again around 70. it has six fans included and the front panel very clearly takes some inspiration from the fractal meshfy series cooler masters td 500 also took some inspiration for the master by series but both the td 500 and the match by series in general have been good performers now the original meshfi's didn't come with enough fans to be good out of the box but they could certainly be made to be good performers if you bought a couple in this instance you're probably not going to be buying fans and it doesn't make any sense to buy fans to replace the ones that are in here every fan slot is filled except for the two most pointless ones that we'll talk about later and uh given that this is the reason you're buying the case if you wanted better fans then you should just buy a different case so hopefully that kind of sets the tone for what this is meant to be montec hasn't been as shameless as some companies with taking inspiration from fractal because it's not using literally the exact same geometric pattern like some of the companies do but it's still inspired the front is a relatively fine mesh there is ventilation on the sides and there's a hole in the bottom but the side ventilation's functionally useless because the fans are attached to the front of the chassis and therefore they are sticking out past the majority of this side gap so it doesn't really do a whole lot we'll talk about that more later as well so like the match if i see in the mesh y2 compact the x3 is almost as small as it can possibly be while still maintaining atx compatibility so in this case as you can see if we rotate it we've lost all front to end clearance for excessive drive cages obviously water cooling doesn't make any sense in this case but isn't supported really anyway and so the end result is they've shortened it so it's not just reusing tooling from old cases that used to have five and a quarter bays it's actually shorter and this is the trend that we saw really starting with the corsair 220 series 220t and it seems to be continuing because of this component clearance does need to be checked a little more carefully than in most cases absolutely check the clearance on the tower cooler we're close it fits but it's about the tallest thing you can fit and you'll also want to check the clearance on video cart atx fit we didn't have any issues installing it you might want to consider micro atx just for a little more working space or an sff power supply to have some more space for the cables especially if you're going to put hard drives down there in the bottom we'll talk about that too all right let's get started with the build notes then we'll go through thermals it's going to be the most important section for this one and we'll talk about value those six stock case fans the 3120s and 314s required some obvious compromises to land at this price point every case fan is powered by a 4-pin molex connector only and exclusively it's not uncommon to see case fans that can either be powered by molex or by a standard fan connector but it's pretty rare these days that we see fans that only have a molex connector unless they're the cheapest possible fans which seems likely here all six fans are daisy chained together out of the box in true molex centipede fashion just like cyberpower with an additional three plugs stuck on the end that we'll explain in a moment plugging in even a one molex connector is painful so being on the assembly line for a case that has six of them seems like some form of cruel and unusual punishment we measured one of the 140mm fans at about a thousand rpm and one of the 120mm fans at 1180 rpm with no way to control the fan speeds these are approximate speeds that the fans will spin at all times we ended up using an external tachometer for the measurement because there's no way to do it obviously through software the front fans are attached to the outside of the chassis which is an interesting choice this does reduce the chance of dust entering through the unfiltered holes on the sides on the bottom of the front panel but it also calls into question why those holes are present in the first place if not for ventilation fan screws must be accessed from the interior of the case which is difficult in an assembled system especially with the bottom mount crowded by the power supply shroud the power cables and the hard drive cage there are three distinct fan mounting locations at the front so the fans aren't freely positionable as with the other budget airflow cases like the fanta xp 400a or budget ish anyway the x3 has no filter at the front of the case instead relying on the mesh front panel itself this improves airflow and it lowers the cost at the expense of a little bit more increased vulnerability to dust but this is an approach that we've praised overall with cases like the p400a because you get most of the dust coverage but all of the airflow we're very close to it the case fans are all rgb but the lighting is fixed and not addressable montec is open about this and its product listings but rainbow colored thumbnails are visual shorthand for this case has addressable rgb lighting so there may be some disappointing customers if you're just going on the photos of the case alone to be completely clear each fan contains red green and blue leds which do not change color and are not animated in any way in a four pin molex header one pin is 12 volts one pin is five volts and the other two pins are ground molex also can do more current than sata so it does have uses of course if you'd like a quick reference for the pinout for molex and other cables you can always grab one of our modmats on store.cameratexas.net where we've got a lot of different pin outs on the map for quick reference material while you're building systems if you ever need to do any work with the pin outs most of the devices that still use molex so pumps and fans make use of the 12 volt line and all the fans in the montec case do indeed run on 12 volts montec has also made use of the 5 volt line though dedicating it to the fan leds in an extremely creative way the extra three plugs at the end of the daisy chain have two wires running out of them extending the five volt circuit up to a toggle switch on the front io pressing the switch opens or closes the circuit disabling or enabling the leds it's a simple and efficient solution but that could also be rephrased as extremely cheap the the other adjectives also apply a big part of montex x3 value is in its six stock fans and therefore it makes very little sense to remove or replace those fans upon purchase if you replace the fans you should have spent the extra money on a better case instead like a mesh phi 2 compact this leads us to some related conclusions first the top filter should be removed in most instances the stock top exhaust layout is here to stay and the filter if it does anything will trap dust inside of the case not out of it secondly this is not a good case for liquid coolant the stock fans aren't powerful enough that we'd recommend pairing them with a radiator and we've already said that replacing the fans defeats the purpose of the case anyway this enclosure is geared towards budget air quote builds and that's completely fine as long as you're aware of what it's trying to be perhaps to its credit montec doesn't mention liquid cooling anywhere in its marketing materials or specs if a radiator absolutely must be installed in the case we'd suggest a maximum length of 280 ml at the front of the case in order to avoid the power supply shroud including the tanks or 240 ml at the top to avoid the motherboard and the other fan mounts but they don't officially talk about support for this so measure it out first the top mount has approximately five and a half centimeters of clearance from the top of the motherboard so a 240 would fit without clearance issues with regard to the board as should be expected the budget nature of the case is reflected in multiple areas not just the lighting that doesn't make it bad but there are aspects that set a 70 case apart from a 100 case especially a 70 case which spends so much of its bill of materials and the cost on fans the rear expansion slot covers in the x3 are disposable not the reusable slot covers with thumb screws that have become common the steel components are thin and flexible so the motherboard tray has to be supported from behind when pushing the 12-pin power connector into place it's a clear mark of where the cost is being saved the power supply filter is a square of mesh clipped into the bottom of the chassis and that'll be more of a pain than it needs to be to remove and clean as for the panels the glass side panel is hinged and held shut with magnets there's no option for screws here the panel's edges are surrounded on all sides by a metal rim which makes for some fairly tight manufacturing tolerances compared to the rest of the case but the door on our unit slips into place perfectly the panel can be opened by pulling on a small fabric loop at the front edge which avoids the necessity for a handle while also keeping fingerprints to a minimum the door has to be opened to a 45 degree angle before it can be lifted off and the narrow hinge pins are somewhat difficult to align when replacing the door but we're still impressed by a feature like this in such an inexpensive case it's good attention to detail the steel side panel hooks into the chassis easily even with the wads of cables tied to the motherboard tray which is something that ultra budget cases tend to not bother with seventy dollars still isn't cheap as far as cases go it's not true budget territory like the zonda oh and there are lots of 70 cases that do have good build quality better than this but again that's just it's not where the x3 allocated its funds it's bill of materials cost has probably a higher cost for fans than most cases would although these aren't particularly expensive ones the case does come with a hard drive cage that can mount one three and a half inch drive inside and one on top but it really shouldn't be relied on the case is so small that the cage ends up occupying space that's necessary for power supply cables and it gets in the way of the front mount fans too there are two two and a half inch mounts behind the motherboard tray and those are probably your main candidates for system storage other than m.2 obviously the motherboard tray is entirely flat with two centimeters of clearance from the side panel across its entire surface this was adequate for our test system but bulkier cables may present the problem there are plenty of tie points on the rear of the motherboard tray but montag doesn't include any velcro straps or even any spare zip ties so we had to use our own not a big deal the tie points on either side of the cable cutouts along the motherboard edge are positioned so that velcro straps can be wrapped through two at a time and some zip ties were pre-installed to montag's credit but they weren't trimmed and one was already broken and losing the case when we received it as for the psu shroud it's so close to the surface of any atx psu installed that the cutouts in the shroud at the bottom edge of the motherboard don't really have sufficient clearance to fit most connectors so it would be easier to work with a smaller psu there are two 120mm mounts on the surface of the powerslide shroud so that the fans can be attached to the top this is a cool feature and we like to call attention to it in cases that have it but these mounts are of limited usefulness one is entirely blocked by the power supply and the other has no path to draw in cool air since the bottom of the case is sealed it's useless also even if it weren't useless you'd need to use long radiator style screws to attach a fan anyway and also the screws aren't included with the case but it doesn't matter these mounts are completely useless in the x3 they're pointless don't bother with them front i o could use a redesign the reset and the led buttons in particular are small and recessed into the case so it's difficult to press them at all that's arguably a good thing for reset but the led button is harmless probably i mean the molex thing but it's probably harmless there are three usb type a ports but two of them are usb 2.0 split from a single motherboard header and one is usb 3.0 normally we see the opposite with two 3.0 ports from one header three and a half millimeter mic and headphone jacks are separate here so that's a good thing before we move on to thermal results and our conclusion a couple things to point out we don't dislike this case there's a lot of criticisms obviously but that's just all of our case reviews the x3 is a budget case that's an intentional choice that there are shortcomings here every shortcoming we've mentioned so far should be considered in the context that the whole package is 70 bucks and it includes six fans this is one of the better cheap-ish cases we've looked at lately and as materials prices and shipping container prices have skyrocketed finding even 70 cases has become a challenge containers are two to three times the normal pricing that gets expensive you still pay for it time to get into thermals because almost every fan mount in this case is already populated there's really not any purpose to testing other fan configurations so our testing today is limited to the normal suite in addition there's no easy way to do noise normalized testing with these fans since their speed can't really reasonably be controlled running the fans at a lower voltage would lower their speed yes but the molex connections would have to be adapted into either standard fan headers or you'd have to plug them into a voltage controller so that's outside of the scope of this review the x3 gets a did not finish for noise normalized testing because it's very unlikely a user would reasonably reduce the speeds in this case in cpu torture testing the cpu averaged 47 degrees celsius above ambient removing the front panel brought this down to just 43 degrees above ambient so a four degree difference is typical of mesh fronted cases with and without the panel even the most open front panel design obstructs airflow to some degree the majority of the stock case fans are positioned directly to benefit the cpu so even with the front panel in place airflow is overall excellent the cpu average of 47 degrees positions the x3 strongly alongside the stock meshfy 2 compact and slightly cooler than the p400as 48 degree average but it's warmer than the 7000d airflow at 46 degrees it's also a couple hundred dollars cheaper this isn't the incredible game-changing chart topper that some people might expect just based on the number of fans but that's not really the point it's 70 and it's performing pretty well and also these fans aren't that high-end so they're doing their job but they they really can't move a whole lot of air per fan it's just there's a lot of them average gpu temperature was 52 degrees celsius above ambient during testing which was unchanged with the removal of the front panel a 52 degree average ties the x3 with the be quiet 500 dx and the land cool 215 both of which are airflow cases that we've reviewed positively and recently although it doesn't place the x3 high on the chart overall we are ahead of the mashfi2 compact and it's 56 degree average with the x3 while the p400a digital remains in the lead with a 49 degree average the x3 hasn't broken any records in testing so far but it's shown some balance for cooling performance average gpu temperature was slightly higher in the fire strike extreme stress test up to 55 degrees average this is a gaming stand and benchmark positioning relative to the mesh by two compact and the p400a remains the same here with the p400a averaging an excellent 49 degrees and the massify averaging 57 degrees sometimes we see stock fan arrangements that are heavily biased towards either the cpu or the gpu but by coding the entire case with fans montec has made the x3 a decent all-around performer blender is an easier workload in our case testing suite only one components loaded at a time when rendering the monkey head testing on the cpu average cpu temperature was 35 degrees celsius above ambient with no hot exhaust from the gpu to be pulled in through the cpu cooler the x3's average ends up among the best in this test tied with the rv-02 and the 7000d airflow the mesh52 compact at 36 degrees and the p400a at 37 degrees were both warmer cpu cooling and the x3 is strong but the exhaust fans placed at the top and rear of the case do pull some hot gpu exhaust into the cpu cooler using the gpu for rendering instead gpu temperature averaged 24 degrees above ambient this is still strong performance but the p400a has the x3 beaten technically at 23 average although we're basically with an error or very close to it for the standardized fan test we installed the single 120mm noctua exhaust fan in the same location as the stock exhaust fan for the two 140mm intake fans we were limited to the three distinct mounting locations on the front panel so we chose the two lower mounts this time since we typically have more difficulty with gpu coiling than with cpu coiling in cases like this cpu temperature increased over baseline up to 51 degrees which isn't surprising in the stock layout two of the intake fans and all three exhaust fans are oriented around the cpu cooler that puts the x3 around the silent base 802 and the td 500 mesh for performance with the meshfight ii compact and the p-400a digital beating it at 47 degrees and 44 degrees respectively gpu temperature didn't worsen any versus baseline thanks to our chosen fan arrangement but 51 degrees is still middle of the road on this chart the meshfy 2 compact still wins at 50 degrees average while the p400a ties the x3 last one our noise testing procedure for cases is to take a measurement with all the case fans at 100 speed and then we decrease fan speeds until we hit 36 dba for a threshold for noise normalized testing which we're not doing here the x3 registered 44 dba with all the fans running at max except for the cpu and the gpu which follow our standards and because the x3 fans can't be adjusted that's it it's the constant noise level at least at uh the 20 inch distance measurement we do in a 26 db noise floor the quantity of stock fans makes this one of the noisier cases we've tested landing between the 220t airflow and the p500a digital 44 dba isn't intolerably loud at 20 inches distance especially with headphones but the x3 is absolutely not the right case for silent build we also noticed some occasional strange turbulent noise that sounded as if the case fans were fluctuating in speed but the fan speeds were constant when we measured it with a tachometer so the montek x3 is competitively priced it's about the lowest you can get with this kind of fan airflow configuration right now back to the build section part of that is because of container prices part of it's because of price of metal and other components and just global logistics in general so the container price is going up so much when you're shipping something that's a large empty box a thing that stores things inside of another thing inside of another thing that would be the container the container containing the boxes containing the container on the pallet containing the cases when you're you're zooming out that far the dimensional weight gets to be really high for not a whole lot of actual weight you're using a lot of a container for not a lot of product and because the container space prices either rent the whole container or you're paying for part of it are so high right now compared to normally the end result is that it's hard to get cases that are cheap without either chewing away so much for the margin that the companies have to raise the price or the companies just eat some of the loss of margin if they had enough to begin with to still profit a little bit so that's part of the explanation for why there's been a bit of a dearth of cheap cases lately now this one we think some of the best competitors to consider and most of these are going to be at least a little bit more expensive it's me 10 to 30 more on average would be something like uh the 500 dx by be quiet the landcool 215 was the closest price to this one it's fluctuated a bit lately but the landqual 215 is another class of build quality compared to this and it comes with overall better quality components but it is a little bit more expensive that's probably the closest consideration we give you though if you want to step up a little bit in spending the td 500 is another one to look at it does get into the expensive territory relatively and the p400a digital used to be relatively close to this in price as well within 20 bucks or so uh but lately has been fluctuating so those are the ones to look at p 400 a 215 td 500 uh and things of that nature the meshfly compact is a good case as well but ultimately the x3's advantage over all of these cases is that it's available for its msrp of 70 while it's difficult to even find the land cool 215 for less than 85 at the time of writing there are downsides to low price the fans have only one speed the leds aren't addressable there's a centipede inside of it and the case isn't exactly built like a tank at 5.4 kilograms total so compare that to the nearly 20 kilograms 7000 d we reviewed recently you start to see where some of that cost difference adds up price is a compromise that montaq has handled well with the x3 but you do get what you pay for liquid cooling isn't something you should be doing with this case for a lot of reasons one of them is these fans really shouldn't be paired with a radiator they don't have enough static pressure to push through efficiently and most closed loop liquid cool every closed loop liquid cooler that's relevant right now comes with its own fans and all those are going to be better than the fans in this case so once you're in that area you're buying a clc like an aio type of cooler and putting it in a case and you're taking fans out of here to do that you might as well buy a better case like the mesh by two compact or something and put it in there instead oh and the 4000 d airflow actually by course there's another great one that you should look at it's in the 80 to 90 range on average so the case on the x3 overall it's good for the price it's a good budget case at 70 we're fine with it and if you want a higher airflow higher performing relatively case that's cheaper then this is a good option just be aware that it has downsides and the build quality is not that high so if you really care about the actual feel of the case and you care about the mechanical elements and how much effort has gone into the mechanical elements of the case as in the the physical assembly the quality of assembly the rigidity or the structural quality of it and even small stuff like grommets rubber grommets which this doesn't really matter to us but if you care they're missing here because it's too cheap to uh to add everything so if you care about all that stuff physical quality and the feel of the product then don't buy this case you're not gonna be that happy with it but if you're just looking for affordable airflow and good for performance uh gets the job done then this is one of the better ones we've looked at lately and we're fine with recommending it for that type of user just be aware of which of those you are and buy appropriately so that's it for this one it's a good start for montec on our channel we're pretty tough critics with cases and uh we're looking forward to seeing where montec goes but that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net to help us out directly and get something good and return like one of our mouse mats mouse pads mod mats or other items or you can go to patreon.com gamers and access to get behind the scenes videos and we just posted a big behind the scenes uh blog post over there too thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 317,332

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cases, case reviews, montech x3 mesh review, montech x3 air review, montech x3 review, best budget pc cases, best cheap pc cases, best pc cases 2021, best airflow cases, best pc airflow cases, best airflow cases 2021

Id: e1-d_n7CC7M

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021