Well-Built Mini-ITX Case: Cooler Master NCORE 100 MAX Review & Benchmarks

[Music] this is The Cooler Master Encore 100 Max it's an ITX case we're reviewing today and it comes with a swappable top panel which is kind of interesting we actually have one of the alternative configuration set up right here where the swappable top allows it to become either smaller or larger this one's larger and going larger allows it to fit this video card uh in an ITX case and the card itself sort of becomes structural once you put it in in there we'll show you that later so the swappable top panel allows you to fit larger gpus or you can go with the smaller variant and then the panels side panels are made out of aluminum they pop out like that there's an interesting Central spine uh up here on the front of the case depending on your orientation and we'll pop that out in a second but that comes out to allow better access to the system and also allow that reconfigurable component so top panel comes off off like that reveals the next feature which is actually a thick radiator that's a 38mm thick radiator they pre-install and then this spine pops out like this where now it's out of the way but also allows the reconfiguration so this case is really interesting we're going to be reviewing it today we're doing thermals Acoustics and of course looking at the build quality and the actual building process for it and uh the price seems higher than Maybe it is in reality because it comes with a cooler and a power supply total cost $400 making it the most expensive ITX case we've reviewed but case here is an air quotes cuz once you take out the cost of the power supply and the cooler it comes down a little bit so we'll talk about that as well before that this video is brought to you by the deepcool AK 620 digital air cooler we previously reviewed the Baseline AK 620 as a strong strong performer and extremely price competitive now the new digital variant includes to screen with a display for some extra flare including CPU temperature and high temperature warnings on the display if you like the AK 620's Performance but wanted more visual pop without going liquid consider the AK 620 digital at the link in the description below so the encor 100 Max has a relatively small footprint just in terms of the actual square area but it's tall it's a pretty large Tower it's a mini ITX Tower basically and it's more similar in some ways to the nzx H1 for layout and for the general form factor of it although cooler Masters is taller still uh and hopefully cooler Masters also doesn't catch on fire like NZXT is did originally one of the traditional downsides with doing a tower layout for an ITX case is if they invert or rotate the motherboard at all can end up with the io really inaccessible uh like at the bottom of the case for example and what Cooler Master did for layout was basically a vertical sandwich so they've got the motherboard on one side the video cards on the back of this and power supply it's above it it exhausts its air up and out through the shared radiator and then the motherboard ends up in a normal orientation so we've got the pcie slot at the bottom just with a riser and that means that the I/O ends up at effectively the same back of the case as you would normally have so that remains accessible but the GPU ends up with its display out at the bottom so that's routed underneath in this channel which you can see they've got a channel kind of grooved out here and we've got the front panel connectors routed up and in and then the um the display out would come out here and Route out the side the max part of the name here is because it comes with other parts so there's not a non-max version of this case right now Cooler Master had the nr200p max previously which also came with uh additional components and so the parts that comes with the 120 mm liquid cooler normally a 120 CLC would be concerning because it's just not that powerful F and we typically would recommend that you instead use an air cooler cuz almost all air coolers we would we would recommend in the $30 plus range will outperform a 120 mil CLC these days the reason this one gets by is because they have a thicker radiator at the 38 mm thickness we mentioned earlier and that's why it can still handle it it's got the extra uh surface area and ability to deal with the heat so you can see as far as radiators go this is relatively large I'm going to go grab a more standard one for comparison radiator so this uh extremely healthy looking radiator smells of propylene glycol first of all so either it was leaked on or it is leak in but this is a more standard th thickness at least by older uh definitions of radiator thickness and that difference is exactly why this 120 is there's more hope for it in our thermal testing than a standard thickness it's a big impact for the cooling performance it's actually the same approach that Arctic took with the liquid freezer 2 as well is part of the reason that series was so competitive when it came out power suppli is an 850 W power supply it has a native 12vt high power cable we'll talk more about this cable later in the video but one of the things that we really didn't like was just how bent it ends up being to get uh the GPU installed in this position you can see that is a a massive bend a little bit more risk of of pulling this thing and uh we already know how sensitive 12vt high power connectors are to be as socketed as possible and the cable quality is also a higher concern due to how close it is to the spec so but we'll be going over that in a little bit and those are the two parts that they include with the case the included CLC and power supply Drive the price up to that $400 Mark $380 at the time of writing and removing the typical price of a cooler at a power supply from the total cost the price of the case itself is more like $170 to $180 for the consumer that's on par with the fractal Terra and just above the lean Le Dan Case A4 H2O it's less expensive than Boutique cases like the N case M1 Evo or the form dt1 the obvious downside is that you're forced into using the two-part they provide so for some reason they're not desirable there's really no great compromise with this or you just end up wasting a lot of money on Parts you won't use the case also comes with a single 120 mm exhaust fan high on the rear panel this helps get some of the hot air from the GPU out before it makes it to the radiator up top and theoretically it helps on the motherboard side as well but it's heavily blocked by the power supply The Encore 100 Max also has a focus on toolless mechanisms only requiring use of a screwdriver for the motherboard and the GPU and standard config configuration the expanded configuration makes the case wider to allow for those thicker gpus those include the likes of the sapphire Nitro plus rx700 XTX or even the gigantic gigabyte orus Master RTX 480 with a little more tweaking we tested each of these gpus and they do tactically fit although you'll become increasingly thermally constrained as the space inside of the enclosure continues to get filled by larger cards The Encore 100 Max is the kind of case that makes proponents of the footprint metric really excited as compared to more traditionally oriented cases like the fractal Tera the encor 100 Max doesn't take up very much desk surface area at all but it's a relatively imposing monolith it measures 212 mm long by 155 mm wide and normal mode the case is 481 mm tall though meaning it's taller than the other ITX cases we've reviewed are long this brings the volume to 15.7 L in standard mode we measured the case ourselves as we we always do and got actually the exact same numbers as advertised that holds true when the case is set up in expanded mode as well where the width increases to 172 mm and the volume goes to 172 L The Cooler Master earns the distinction here of being the first ITX case we've looked that that doesn't screw around with protrusions on the case and whether or not they should be excluded from volumetric measurements so part of that maybe because there aren't many protrusions on this case but nonetheless Cooler Master gets congratulations here for not lying on the spec sheet that's going to be our new award we give the not lying on the spec sheet award although maybe they're just atoning for the whole h500p thing today we are looking at The Cooler Master uh h500p okay okay we're not going to overall The Encore 100 Max is easy to build in and the manual is pretty good the exterior panels are removed just by polling and are attached to the case with push pins which give a stable hold they're made of 2mm thick aluminum that's perforated with holes and bent into shape and there's a metal mesh attached to the interior side of the panels with plastic pieces that just pull off to allow for the fine mesh to be removed for cleaning the top panel is made of plastic for the actual panel structure and it's covered in a rigid metal mesh so it looks like one of those fine mesh panels you would get on the front of say a fantex ATX case where they use that really fine mesh material works great cuz it eliminates the need for a dust filter but it's super breathable uh despite having just a ton of tiny holes in it now the problem with those fine mesh panels is that they're normally relatively flimsy on the front of a big ATX case doesn't matter cuz it's not like it's really a structural component this case it's very important that the top panel is pretty rigid because it is holding everything structurally together so you don't get a bunch of uh wobbling if you were to torque the opposing sides so the down side of this is that it's going to be less breathable this rigid material where the paracity is a little bit lower uh despite being still a fine mesh and then the upside is that structural strength it comes off in a similar fashion to the side panels definitely shouldn't be used as a handle or to lift the case and that mesh top has to be removed prior to removing the Locking front pillar as there's a nub of plastic on the top panel that interfaces with the pillar and that's this pillar that we removed earlier so this pillar has the same two toolless latches we were talking about they work great very easy to use and it's a sturdy mechanism it ends up being again a structural component when it's installed and getting it out of the way is primarily just for access to the motherboard during the build process so you can see with all this stuff removed we have uh fairly full access to everything especially if installing the video card last so you get the motherboard in you have good access to the back of the board when the video card is not in there it's pretty easy to build in this case the motherboard drops into place below the power supply pretty easily and it leaves a plenty of room to connect the various cables required around the motherboard the pre-installed power cables are flexible and the CPU 8 Pin is extremely short which is mostly a good thing here they know roughly where EPS 12vt connectors will land they provide the power supply so they can reduce the cabling slack to clean up the interior moving to Cable Management we thought the Encore 100 Max gave us enough room to tuck the cables out out of the way and it has tie down points everywhere so we appreciated these features given the small space and thought that they were well thought out by Cooler Master they did a good job with the cable routing options CPU Cooler installation is standard for a CLC and includes a tube of thermal paste that looks generous but isn't there's only a tiny amount of paste actually in it once you peel the deceptive sticker back it's not like it's less than what you get in small 1 G tubes but it definitely feels a lot worse given the misleading size of the the syringe moving on to fitment and GPU installation installing GPU is up to 337 mm long 180 mm tall and 62 mm or about three slots thick is supported out of the box the case gives a good deal of access to the GPU side and we don't have any real complaints about the process but just be aware that the more you fill the actual GPU space the more challenging it'll be from a thermal standpoint because it's starting to fill more volume internally of course uh but then also the the proximity of the fans to the side panel is going to impact the pressure where it'll need more pressure to overcome that panel if it's pushed right up against it uh and additionally there's really nowhere for flow through to go so in this cooler which is a Founders Edition style there's that fan back there as many of you know it's pulling air through and it's going straight into this wall so unfortunately we're not really able to leverage the benefits of the modern flow through design for for uh video card cooler because just blowing straight into a wall where the power supply is on the opposite side or the motherboard is down here and so what's going to end up happening is this fan for the most part will be responsible for pulling that air out uh but there's going to be a little bit of a a power struggle for cooling for where all the air is going to go uh coming into the side panel between straight into the exhaust fan versus through the flow through another reason that back f is important is because even though the pump and the block for the closed of liquid cooler are obviously mounted to the CPU because it's at the top of the case it's sort of sharing the uh total cooling capacity of the the radiator with the power supply which is exhausting up and out so you can see the holes there indicating where that air is going and also with the GPU for whatever isn't taken away by this rear fan uh so in this case this fan does not blow all the way through it's going to sort of spread in a spiral around and we've shown that in some of our slen Photography in the past so that'll just sort of spread around inside the case it'll find its way out the panels a little bit uh some of it will get sucked out here and then some of it will circulate around the flow through is going to split most likely through the top and the back so it's it's going to contribute a little bit to the processor temperature Just Because the actual radiator temperature and liquid temperature will be a little bit elevated by the fact that they're sharing a cooling solution indirectly gpus thicker than 62 mm require converting the case to expanded mode so that's done first by removing the rear corner pillar by taking out two screws there's no latches on that one and then one set of case feet are repositioned to a wider stance before reattaching the rear pillar into an outer position after that the top panel is replaced with the wider alternative included in the accessory box this is we think a clever design because it mostly relies on on reconfiguration rather than extra parts and it doesn't disturb the Aesthetics of the case really at all to accommodate graphics cards longer than 337 mm the pcie bracket and the Riser have to be relocated to a lower position we assume the only reason this isn't the standard configuration is because it reduces the space available for display cables underneath the case having the case set up in expanded mode plus the lower bracket position allows for gpus 357 mm long 180 mil tall and 79 mm thick which cool Master calls 3.9 slots and the enormous gigabyte orus Master RTX 480 is barely able to squeeze inside in advertently becoming a structural beam in the process The Encore 100 Max comes with a 90° 12volt high power cable pre-installed which is marked as only being capable of 450 Watts meaning no raising the power limit on the 490 uh or technically using one with the vbios that boosts higher than default the 450 wat spec is concerning regarding cable quality and we don't like that it presses against the central spine when used in our 47d Fe card plus the bend and contortion that we get routing it for gpus that don't use 12vt high power Cooler Master includes three pcie 8 Pin cables in the accessory box one thing we spotted was a hidden feature that's not documented in the manual at all and that is this thin removable panel to the left of the motherboard IO and we were speculating that this is probably a consideration Cooler Master had to make it possible to shift the spine slightly to allow for more space in some configuration so uh we sent an email over to Cooler Master with the question they confirmed they said yes the removable plate near motherboard iio is for making it adjustable at first we wanted to keep air cooling mode for non-max versions since it can extend 17 mm for 3.9 slots gpus Shifting the motherboard tray one slot can make ncore 100 support up to 67.3 Mill mm air cooling height with 2.9 slot GPU support the reason Cooler Master doesn't call out that capability is because there's currently no non-max version of this case uh and there's no plan for one that we're aware of at this time so uh in other words the spine can be adjusted but there's not really a point to doing it right now okay so that's kind of the build section now we're going to get into The Thermals and Acoustics for the case we'll be testing this case primarily against itself in various alternative configurations and uh especially since it includes its own cooling solution we will mostly be tweaking the panels that are on the case and the configuration of the video card for testing we've locked the 13600 K to fix frequencies and power levels for all these tests and we set the fan on the 4070 Founders Edition to a static 44% as usual these temperatures are represented as delta T over ambient remember that all of this is comparative the component temperature will change based on your fan speeds and your components the voltage of those parts what set to Auto versus controlled and so on our testing is highly controlled it's designed to evaluate how much various layouts of the case and its panels affect airf flow CPU thermals are first here's the chart the GPU fan speed is unchanged in all tests so references to fan speed are for the included fans with the case and the cooler with the fans at 100% speed and in the stock smaller configuration the peor is averaged 50° C Delta over ambient at steady state or 45 for all cores averaged removing the top panel was an experiment to look into just how much impudence that panel was causing similar to our front panel removal tests on ATX cases that dropped the temperature to about 47 degrees over ambient illustrating that the panel does get in the way but not enough to ruin performance moving the GPU to the outer position had no meaningful impact on CPU thermals here and was within variance we also ran a test with the cooler closer to 27 DBA for the total configuration that's as evaluated in our Hemi an aoic chamber with a noise floor of about 13.6 DBA during the testing that have us running in the 80s after factoring in ambient so there's still some room for quieter configurations if running a mid-range CPU like an i5 but again you'd struggle with the 14900 K when it's at 300 watts this test helps show there's some scaling room in the cooler despite being a 120 mil solution but it's still ultimately going to be limited by size this chart is for the GPU temperature and the same test in this one the stock configuration had the GPU at 51° C over ambient when tested with our fixed fan speeds we didn't change the GPU fan speed when dropping the case and cooler fan speeds but as they're the only fans circulating externally they of course affected GPU thermals and led to a 3° increase removing the top panel posted marginal Improvement while shifting the GPU to the outer position was the most beneficial this isn't nearly as much change as we saw on the A4 H2O though we're moving the GPU shaved to nearly 7° C off the core load temperature what this tells us is that the ncore 100 Max is better at removing the warm exhaust air behind the G GPU by default than the A4 H2O is without moving the card all that said this move is only possible with gpus thin enough to sit in that outer position with or without the case expansion so wrapping it up it's very easy to build in we thought the ease of installation was a good factor for this case the tooless focus outside of the motherboard and GPU mounting was good we thought some of the solutions like this in particular uh to enable the expansion of the case into the larger configuration we thought those were put together in a clever way that minimizes the amount of additional Parts they put in an accessories box that you'll inevitably put on a shelf and never use again after you first build it so having a lower count of useless accessories in one of two configurations is a good thing because they're able to make use of the same two side panels despite expanding things Without Really creating any big gaps or holes in the case and the process so we thought it was cleverly mechanically designed for the looks that's totally up to you how you feel about it uh it is a small footprint physically on the desk surface it's just tall GPU iio at the bottom is not convenient but because you're probably only plugging in monitors maybe once or whenever you upgrade it seems fine as far as trade-offs go it's definitely better than having the motherboard USB less accessible so uh that's maybe a criticism but one that you're not going to run into too often for the CLC so the 120 mil liquid cooler was able to keep up with a 13600 k um at our fixed clocks and and voltages it's just not something we would recommend for say a 14900 K or anything higher power like that it's going to struggle to keep up and especially as you increase the GPU capability and the GPU heat inside of the case with an increase in the CPU heat it's going to overwhelm this cooler so you will need to spec the CPU more in the mid-range side of things AMD CPUs consume a lot less power right now for similar gaming performance so if you're building a gaming PC you do something like a 7800x 3D uh you're going to be fine it's just those hotter configurations that are problematic so like a 750x or anything from Intel's 14700 k 14 900k stuff like that the GPU compatibility we thought was great it fits pretty much anything the uh cabling the 12vt high power cable we really didn't like just in general how it bends um or that it's it's one of the lower rated C CBL and you wouldn't want to raise the power limit on a 490 given the spec of the cable the pricing is a little tricky because it's $400 but you get two of the other components uh from one ITX perspective that's kind of taken away part of the fun we don't get to configure the power supply or the cooler and you don't really get to install them in the same way so uh whether that matters to you is maybe dependent on how much you enjoy the process of specking every single part and building the entire thing from a scratch uh but from a pure pricing perspective again you could kind of think of the case cost as been more equivalent to maybe about 180 bucks once you look at the price of a comparable power supply and cooler overall we liked working with the case this is better than the old fantex shift was it the Evolve or whatever it was but they had that tower case um which could position liquid coolers in uh not not great layouts but this one does get the pump below the r Ator so that's good that's a healthy position for the pump to be in uh we don't have any concerns about longevity Beyond whatever this particular cooler might be rated for anyway and so the biggest considerations for you ultimately are just going to be the CPU choice and making sure it's something that'll fit within your constrained options for cooling and then again they have an a small panel that you can remove that maybe indicates a future non-max option that could be done with air cooling instead so that's it for this review thanks for watching as always subscribe for more check out the other ITX reviews on the channel we have the Tera the Dan Case A4 H2O and we're working on a couple more right now so a lot more coming for ITX and as always you can support us directly by going to store. 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Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 220,113

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cooler master ncore 100 max, cooler master ncore, cooler master ncore 100 max review, best mini itx cases, mini itx case round up, cooler master mini itx ncore 100 max

Id: xR1JIzdcVV4

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024