Benchmarks & Final Analysis
These are delta temperatures, and getting the test room cold enough to validate the CASE-V08 came at high inconvenience. Adding the panel spacers takes it from last place to second place, though it’s still too hot to run AVX-enabled Prime95 small-FFTs in this system at normal room temperatures.
The spacers let more air in, but they also let more noise out. The CASE-V08 takes fourth place in either configuration, while the only case with a mesh face is the noisiest.
The cooling benefit was larger than the noise deficit in the comparison of both, giving the high-airflow kit-equipped CASE-V08 second place in the overall performance “Acoustic Efficiency” metric behind the even-noisier Meshify C.
The plastic-faced Nova TG comes at a $10 discount, which is enough to put the CASE-V08 in second place performance-per-dollar. It falls to third place without the benefit of its front-glass spacers.
None of these value-priced cases have enough airflow to completely deal with the inadequacies of our single-fan CPU cooler placed on a mildly-overclocked six-core CPU, yet that configuration was designed to stress better cases. That’s why we let our other case editor start with cheap cases and a lower-heat configuration. Since our test hardware is designed to stress the thermals of high-end cases, we’re not going to dismiss the CASE-V08 out of hand.
On the other hand, we’re also not going to recommend that builders whose motherboards have shells surrounding the USB 2.0 ports get out the pocket knife and pry those off. This is the most convenient way for most people to install an oversized plug such as the one included in our CASE-V08 sample. People who recognized our award logo and bought the case without reading that caveat could be in for a shock, thus, while I’d love to give it our approval, it can’t get the associated award.
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