MonsterLabo Announces The Beast

[Valantar]

Yeah, it may fit but that's about it.

Given that this case requires removing any stock cooler from your GPU, it should fit easily as long as you stick to a reasonable length PCB.

Haha, I've seen it all now!

The tempered glass blight has now infected radiators.

Glass is one of the best insulators there is, and it's now being used for passive cooling LOL.

Solid side panels are required to create a chimney effect for passive or low-rpm fan assisted cooling. The material of these panels is essentially irrelevant as long as it's reasonably smooth.

Might be a good case with a few fans thrown in

As the news post states:

When two 140 mm fans, running at 500 rpm, are added the case can cool more than 500 W of TDP.

So yes, there are definitely provisions for fans. Though knowing the target audience for products like this, a lot of them will prefer lower end components and entirely fanless operation.

It’s only 36l and that is pretty much as small as it gets for ATX cases, so even though it is pretty heavy, I would definitely not call it large.
Aesthetics aside this is an interesting case. The location of processor sockets and graphics chips tend to change from board to board - I wonder how MonsterLabo dealt with that. A full review with lots of pictures would be nice.

If you look at the case, there's no standard rear I/O. All components are mounted "floating" inside of the case, with extensions used for all I/O. This renders socket placement more or less irrelevant, as you mount the motherboard where ever it ends up fitting onto the cold plate. I would guess there are some sort of adjustable support brackets to keep the boards in place (like the Streacom DA2?).

This is such a strange coincidence, yesterday at work I was thinking about the prototype they made a little while back and wondered what they were up to.... Guess I have psychic powers.

They did launch an ITX case previously.

I don’t understand. For heatsinks composed of heatpipes to work, they have to be drawing heat from one end. What are they going to attach to? That isn’t clear and is the one picture they should have supplied.

EDIT: I went to their site and the situation wasn’t any clearer.

Yes, and? There are clearly cold plates attached to both halves of the heatsinks. One fits onto your CPU, the other on the GPU (attached with a flexible riser cable). Nothing particularly special about this beyond the fact that both heatsinks are integrated into the case. Heck, even bog-standard boring ATX box cases use riser cables now for their (mostly stupid and poorly ventilated) vertical GPU mounts. This might be easier to grasp for those of us into dense SFF builds, but it really isn't an advanced concept.

Oh yeah, it actually looks nice, with the glass to see the radiator, I'm just mocking how they advertise it specifically as cooling 30-series Nvidia cards, and leave an additional 150-200W of cooling potential on the table by going with glass vanity panels instead of additional finned alu side panels.

Maybe I'm not understanding the product here, but the 400W passive rating seems split equally between two separate fin stacks that connect via pipes to a plate - one for the CPU and one for the GPU. That means that this can handle a 200W CPU and a 200W GPU, passively, or "over 500W" which translates to "over 250W" for a GPU using a fan. How exactly is it going to cool a 3090, or even a 3080 for that matter, with only a 200W passive or 250W+ heatsink for the 375W card? They're short on cooling for the cards they claim, and they've hobbled the amount of heat the case can dissipate because of the glass.

If there's an asterisk next to the 30-series support that means it can fit a 3090 card in it, but can't cool a 3090 card using the case's own GPU heatpipes - then that's false advertising by my reckoning, and how they plan to passively cool the VRMs of a 3090 is something I'm looking forward to seeing tested. Additionally, if the card is permanently throttled by temperatures to, say, 300W instead of the 375W that the 3090 is tested as drawing, what's the point of even buying a 3090 in the first place, it's being crippled by the lack of cooling.

Don't get me wrong, I like MonsterLabo and think they make some of the nicest passive cases ever put to market, period. This, in my estimate, is pushing things a bit too far and glass is 100% not helping their cause here.

You're significantly overestimating the efficacy of finned panels. After all, for those to cool more than a few watts of heat, they would need heat pipes connected to the cold plate contacting them. Otherwise you'd be relying on the hot air inside of the case heating up the panels and then the panels dissipating that heat, which is a horrendously inefficient process. Exhausting said hot air is much more efficient, and the additional cooling you would get "for free" with non-connected finned alu panels just replacing the glass here would make no difference whatsoever to component temperatures (and could hurt airflow in a fully passive configuration - hotter air rises faster, after all).

Now, let's think of the physical design of this. The case is clearly designed to have both the CPU and GPU oriented inwards, towards the inner heatsink, as both cold plates face outwards, one on each side. Any finned side panels would then need to connect around the component they're cooling (either GPU or motherboard) which would a) make for some really long heatpipes in the case of the motherboard (and long heatpipes aren't cheap!) b) limit motherboard support due to varying socket placements and VRM heatsinks inevitably making some motherboards foul the heatpipes, and c) making mounting the side panels entirely impossible. If the CPU and GPU both screw onto the inner heatsink from the back of the PCB, how would you get any sort of contact between any wraparound heatpipes and the side panel? You'd at the very least need several sets of notches on the inside of the side panels for the heatpipes to slot into, with visible screws on the outside to clamp things down, and even then you'd have an absolute nightmare in terms of actually getting the side panels on without applying significant force to your components. The chances of something breaking or a poor mount, if you could get the panels on at all, would be enormous.

Of course you could argue for designing a case without the internal heatsink and with finned panels instead, but ... that would be a completely different case. And one that already exists (well, it certainly looks like vaporware).

As for the cooling capacity, their site says 300W passively "per chip" (i.e. CPU and GPU, I guess), with more cooling capacity if you add the two optional 140mm top fans. So you won't be cooling a 3090 (and likely not a 3080 without throttling) passively, but pretty damn close. They have different, lower numbers for "recommended" passive cooling power, at 150W for the CPU and 250W for the GPU, which sounds like it would make more sense if you're looking for silence and decent temperatures. "Recommended" for active cooling (that's a <500rpm 140mm fan for each fin stack) is 250+320, though I'm guessing you can go higher if you speed up those fans some. As with any cooling solution of this nature, YMMV. As with all heatsinks, there's no magical "maximum cooling capacity" spec, it's all down to how you can and are willing to balance component thermals, airflow and noise. (There is of course a practical drop-off point where component thermals hit unsustainable levels no matter the airflow thrown at it, but that's likely high enough to not matter much here unless you're naïve enough to think you can overclock a 3080 or 3090 passively.)

 

[rtwjunkie]

Yes, and? There are clearly cold plates attached to both halves of the heatsinks. One fits onto your CPU, the other on the GPU (attached with a flexible riser cable). Nothing particularly special about this beyond the fact that both heatsinks are integrated into the case. Heck, even bog-standard boring ATX box cases use riser cables now for their (mostly stupid and poorly ventilated) vertical GPU mounts. This might be easier to grasp for those of us into dense SFF builds, but it really isn't an advanced concept

Hey stop being a condescending smarta$$. I KNOW what a frickin riser cable is. I’ve been around computers a long time. What I effing said was NOTHING was clear how this case would integrate and use thise heatsinks!!!!!!

Their descriptions are obscure, and their pics are dog doodoo.

 

[Valantar]

Hey stop being a condescending smarta$$. I KNOW what a frickin riser cable is. I’ve been around computers a long time. What I effing said was NOTHING was clear how this case would integrate and use thise heatsinks!!!!!!

Their descriptions are obscure, and their pics are dog doodoo.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound condescending, I just didn't see how this layout was that confusing. It's reasonably clear to me just by seeing the two cold plates that one must be for the CPU and the other for the GPU, given that they explicitly speak of cooling both. I agree that both their press copy and photos could be better though - they seem more interested in making it look slick than achieving any kind of clarity.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound condescending, I just didn't see how this layout was that confusing. It's reasonably clear to me just by seeing the two cold plates that one must be for the CPU and the other for the GPU, given that they explicitly speak of cooling both. I agree that both their press copy and photos could be better though - they seem more interested in making it look slick than achieving any kind of clarity.

OK, no problem. I apologize for getting out of sorts.

Now that you've explained it, It seems to me that unless the case is perfectly made, that there could be an issue with ensuring perfect, constant pressure on at least the CPU. Even knocking a case could flex the contact enough to loosen it, right?

 

[Valantar]

OK, no problem. I apologize for getting out of sorts.

Now that you've explained it, It seems to me that unless the case is perfectly made, that there could be an issue with ensuring perfect, constant pressure on at least the CPU. Even knocking a case could flex the contact enough to loosen it, right?

Yeah, there would need to be some sort of bracket doing the job of a motherboard tray to ensure consistent contact - if the board dangles off the CPU socket alone that sounds dangerous, even if the mounting hardware behind the socket is chunky. I mean, knocking the case could cause trouble with any big air cooler (so in a way there's an advantage here in the cooler being supported by the case), but those tend to have very beefy mounting too, and the board being strapped down to a structural part of the case gives a lot of rigidity even with a hunk of metal hanging off it, so reversing that layout seems less than ideal. Guess we'll see how they've solved this once review samples start going around.

 

[Chrispy_]

You're significantly overestimating the efficacy of finned panels. After all, for those to cool more than a few watts of heat, they would need heat pipes connected to the cold plate contacting them.

That's exactly how all the finned side panel cases in past and present production work. To suggest that they'd use air circulation to conduct heat is ridiculous and ignorant of all prior designs. Why even bring it up as a point of contention?

 

[Valantar]

That's exactly how all the finned side panel cases in past and present production work. To suggest that they'd use air circulation to conduct heat is ridiculous and ignorant of all prior designs. Why even bring it up as a point of contention?

Because this case - which is what we're discussing, after all - is explicitly designed around a chimney effect with an inner heatsink that is a fundamentally different cooling layout than what a finned outer shell necessitates. If you're arguing that they should ditch the entire design and instead make a tall HDPlex clone, why not say as much directly? There are definitely reasons to believe that an internal flow chimney design passive cooling setup can be more effective at dissipating heat than an external cooling design with finned sides, such as the heatsink not needing to account for physical durability as a case (allowing for more and thinner fins, so more surface area) nor external aesthetics, plus the likely increased airflow from the chimney effect. Unless you have a suggestion as to how to combine directly connected finned side panels with an internal chimney cooler, what you're saying amounts to not a critique of their design but merely stating your preference for another style of passive cooling design. Which is of course fine, but then you shouldn't disguise it as a critique of a shortcoming of the design.

 

[Chrispy_]

Unless you have a suggestion as to how to combine directly connected finned side panels with an internal chimney cooler

That's the easy part
They already have heatpipes from the coldplates to each of the fin stacks, repeat by adding additional heatpipes from the fin-stacks to the side panels. No need to go around motherboard edge or anything like that, and they'd be short, cheap heatpipes as the side panels are almost in contact with the fin stacks anyway.

They also seem to have three very large >1cm heatpipes running front to back, I presume that's how they justify imbalanced load (250W + 150W) from two otherwise identical fin stacks. What's to stop them from bending those around the edge of the finstack to make contact with the side panels? That may be an even cheaper and easier solution, though it's possible the case needs those to contact the front and back panels for additional structural support.

 

[Valantar]

That's the easy part
They already have heatpipes from the coldplates to each of the fin stacks, repeat by adding additional heatpipes from the fin-stacks to the side panels. No need to go around motherboard edge or anything like that, and they'd be short, cheap heatpipes as the side panels are almost in contact with the fin stacks anyway.

They also seem to have three very large >1cm heatpipes running front to back, I presume that's how they justify imbalanced load (250W + 150W) from two otherwise identical fin stacks. What's to stop them from bending those around the edge of the finstack to make contact with the side panels? That may be an even cheaper and easier solution, though it's possible the case needs those to contact the front and back panels for additional structural support.

I think those are just mounting/support posts, likely in copper-anodized aluminium, or I guess copper if they want to add a lot of weight and cost with little real benefit. If heatpipes that big exist, they would cost a fortune, and adding mounting screws to their ends sounds like a very risky endeavor.

As to the "easy part": as I tried to say in my first post addressing you, it's not easy at all. Going from the fin stack to the short front/back panels would be relatively easy, but those are easily half the surface area of the actual side panels (ignoring the necessary cutouts in the rear panel). Adding fins to the front would also be a rather ... bold aesthetic choice, definitely not one that fits MonsterLabo's choice of style (at least as demonstrated in their current two products). That of course ignores the inefficiency of thermal transfer from heat source -> heatpipe -> cooler fins -> heatpipe -> side panels, and the likely loss in air velocity inside of the chimney as some thermal energy is transferred outside. I don't doubt that this would increase the overall cooling capacity somewhat, I just don't think it would be worth it at all. That addition would likely be well past the point of diminishing returns for cooling, while significantly increasing cost and manufacturing complexity.

If you want to use the large side panels, given that these must be removable to enable component mounting, you're still left with the issue of how to attach heatpipes to a removable panel in a manner that is conducive to efficient thermal transfer. HDPlex and their peers solve this by having relatively flat cases with top panel access. That obviously isn't feasible here. Making one of the panels finned would likely be doable, but that would make assembly for the end user extremely complex as they would then need to remove the massive inner heatsink to mount the components (either CPU or GPU) between it and the finned panel, or you'd need to redesign the inner cooling system entirely. Access from the front/back panels or top would make connecting cables and connectors impossible, and leave no method for fastening components except for mounting screws on the outside of the panels.

What is likely stopping them from bending around the edge of the fin stack to make contact with the side panels is that this contact would be really, really poor. Heatpipes are very flexible, and mounting a removable panel like this without external screws would mean just pushing the side panel up against the pipes and hoping for the best. This ... wouldn't work. You don't get any kind of effective thermal transfer by just pushing a metal plate against a heatpipe. This would either necessitate smearing the side panel with tons of thermal paste (making disassembly a disgusting mess) or using thermal pads (which aren't very good, even the expensive ones). And contact pressure would still be really bad, further lowering thermal transfer. Unless the heatpipes are bent perfectly there would also be significant risk of only a small portion of the pipe actually touching the panel at all. This is of course ignoring the issue of aligning the loose end of a self-supporting heatpipe with a mounting point on a removable panel that you only have access to the opposite side of (I'm assuming the inside of the panel would have some sort of grooves for the pipes to sit in, like on the HDPlex cases).

So: what you are arguing for might improve cooling, whether marginally or noticeably, but it would also massively increase manufacturing and assembly complexity, and the increase in cooling capacity would never be that big. It would make this case a nightmare to build in - and that's starting from a case that already requires you to disassemble your GPU, so it's not like the barrier to entry here is low to begin with.

As for the unbalanced load ratings, I'm putting that down to the simple fact that GPUs are much easier to cool than CPUs, both due to their lower thermal density and their lack of an IHS. Cooling 250W more or less evenly spread across a 3-400mm2 bare die is a lot easier than if the same heat output came from 8-10 tiny hot spots (Intel's current 14nm cores are ~10mm2 each) on a 206mm² CPU die beneath a heatspreader.

 

[claes]

That of course ignores the inefficiency of thermal transfer from heat source -> heatpipe -> cooler fins -> heatpipe -> side panels, and the likely loss in air velocity inside of the chimney as some thermal energy is transferred outside. I don't doubt that this would increase the overall cooling capacity somewhat, I just don't think it would be worth it at all. That addition would likely be well past the point of diminishing returns for cooling, while significantly increasing cost and manufacturing complexity.

My friend, I appreciate your posts here, but the walls of text are alienating when this is all you really needed to say!

I doubt that MonsterLabo would be getting more than 10w of cooling with a heatpipe from the fins to a side panel. Heat pipes lose their efficiency after 8” or so (on earth/under atmospheric pressure), and if they’re not actually making firm, level contact with the heat source, they are pretty much useless (for PC components).