Cheaper & Better? Montech Air 1000 Lite ATX Case Review

Cases, Reviews

Performance Evaluation

Contents

We loaded up the Air 1000 Lite with an overclocked 3700X on a 2x120mm closed loop liquid cooler, and an RTX 2070 graphics card, for full-load stress testing.

System Configuration

CPU

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X: 8 cores/ 16 threads, 32MB L3 Cache
O/C to 4.20 GHz (42x 100 MHz) at 1.3625 V Core

CPU Cooler

Fractal Design Celsius S24 2x 120mm Closed-Loop Liquid Cooler

Motherboard

MSI X570 Ace: AMD X570, Socket AM4

RAM

PNY XLR8 MD32GK2D4320016XR: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200
T-Force Vulcan Z TLZGD416G3200HC16CDC0 DDR4-3200

Graphics

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming OC 8G: GeForce RTX 2070
1815 MHz GPU, GDDR6-14000, Maximum Fan When Listed

Hard Drives

Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB NVMe SSD

Sound

Integrated HD Audio

Network

Integrated Gigabit Networking

Power

Corsair AX860i: ATX12V v2.3, EPS12V, 80 PLUS Platinum

Test Configuration

Load Software

AIDA 64 Engineer Version 6.00.5100, Stress CPU, FPU, Cache, GPU

H/W Monitoring

HWiNFO64 v6.28-4200

SPL Monitoring

Galaxy CM-140 SPL Meter: Tested at 1/4 m, corrected to 1 m (-12 dB)

The Air 1000 Lite offers excellent mounting space for our full ATX configuration, but the cable connectors of our modular power supply simply could get past the folded-back lip on the lower drive cage. Given the choice of moving it forward or omitting it, we chose the later.

Our components look great even without any additional case lighting, though lighted DRAM might have also fit in nicely.

The Air 1000 Lite’s relatively open front and dual intakes make its temperatures look particularly good at full fans, though the old Air X ARGB had a lower GPU temperature.

That open front does terrible things to noise levels at 100% fans, though we recall that cooling performance wasn’t so bad at the automatic fan setting where it shines.

The Air 100 Lite has the best cooling to noise ratio at auto fans, and the second worst cooling to noise ratio at full fans. We’d say pick your poison, but we always let our systems manage fan speed, and we’d have a hard time tolerating a machine that produced this much max RPM ruckus if we had to use it that way.

Pros:

Cons:

  • Superior dust filter access.
  • Provides excellent airflow.
  • Great cooling to noise ratio in auto fan mode.
  • Includes full set of screwed-in slot covers.
  • Only seven expansion slots (Air 900 ARGB has eight).
  • High noise at max fans.
  • Cramped quarter surround lower drive cage.

The Verdict:

Great airflow and easy dust filter access make the Air 1000 Lite an excellent value to buyers who despite case lighting.

One thing we should note is that while the Air X ARGB is currently $80 and the Air 900 ARGB $74, the Air 1000 Lite is only $70. The Air 1000 Lite provides superior dust filter access when compared to either of those models, and buyers who don’t like RGB won’t care that it’s missing the $10 to $20 in lighting features that Montech’s other models have. We’ll reiterate its superior dust filter access to those who don’t want RGB as we give it our stamp of approval.

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