Building in a DIRT CHEAP PC Case...

this here is the Ares game at M1 and I paid about 60 bucks for it which I think is a pretty compelling price in 2023 now this brand has had its fair share of shall we say issues in the past and admittedly this isn't a quote-unquote household name in the PC industry at least here in the states so I'm fairly new to this brand the case

however looked appealing enough and again for the price it was difficult to pass up for a budget build it does have what looks like a very airy front panel which is nice it does have enough room for the hardware I intend to put in it and it doesn't look like it's about to fall apart because it's made out of I don't know butter so in this

video we're going to give the Aries game ATM one a walk through we're going to build in the ATM one and then we're going to talk about whether or not it's actually worth sixty dollars it used to be 60 bucks to get you a really awesome case and now that just it really doesn't exist much anymore so uh those that do remain in this price category

often have issues are you ready stay with me if you're looking for a way to rid yourself of that pesky window is activation Watermark head on over to VIP SCD key their mid-year super sale has Windows 10 Pro OEM keys at a special discount meaning you'll pay only around 15 bucks to fully activate that OS this will give you access to Windows 11 upgrades as well

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packaged well this is kind of like that soft styrofoam whatever this is called and that's wrapped in a cheap plastic bag now First Impressions this case is not very deep from front to back so if you're building with a modern super large graphics card for whatever reason you'll put that in like a cheap case like this you're going to have issues just don't do it now

there are already a few things right out of the gate that you're probably not going to like I'll show them to you now for starters these thumb screws are not captive this left side panel is not made of tempered glass it's made of acrylic most of these PCI slot covers are only removable via the little wiggly jiggly method here once you remove one it's pretty much

impossible to get back on because well yeah you just have to buy some extra slot covers if it drives you crazy I think this is super annoying one of the biggest pet peeves of mine when it comes to cheap cases it is what it is here and the only fan included in this case can only be powered via Molex this this sucks I've got to say

though elsewhere this case does seem to impress I think the most impressive thing is this Airy front panel like you can just see straight through the entire thing so that's good to see thanks Eric's game for at least uh thinking about that not a lot of case manufacturers do in this price range you can see you've got your front i o up top here two USB

2.0 type A's that's not impressive only a single 3.0 and no type c not that I'd expect that in a 60 case at least from a manufacturer like this we've got a cutout here for our power supply if you're into that sort of thing you don't again have a ton of space left to right there's you're not going to be able to fit big graphics cards

in here especially if you have front intake fans it does look like you can fit those in front of this mesh though so that's cool to give you a little extra space if you want it I'm probably going to remove this extra exhaust fan because this is Molex just I mean this is probably the grossest thing about this case if I'm being honest with you and

then behind the motherboard tray um there's not a lot here again no rubber grommets you get a single three and a half inch Drive Bay underneath beneath and then you get a two and a half inch little Drive holder thing here that is locked in by a single thumb screw you're not going to be able to fit big power supplies in here if you're also fitting

a three and a half inch drive down below keep that in mind and you don't have a ton of cable management room maybe a third of an inch that's about all you're going to get here what a lot of companies in the cheaper PC case game tend to do is reuse the same tooling over and over and multiple Brands will share this same tool in the

same chassis footprint what they'll do is spice up you know the the modular parts let's say the front panel so this is probably an Aries game front panel maybe it's shared with others but you'll see you know different kinds of front panels on different uh brands of the same case and that's just because it's cheaper to change just this aspect of it versus the entire frame

if for example Aries game wanted to widen the area behind the motherboard tray to accommodate for more cable management Headroom that would require an entirely new tooling and that means that they're gonna have to Fork up for it that'll raise the cost per unit for the end consumer and then it won't be as attractive of a case from a price perspective any longer especially if their

target is as cheap a case as functionally possible so just a bit of backstory there it might look cheap to just barely widen a case but that often involves tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in new tooling to pull off now it's time to assemble a build into the ATM one this is going to involve just a Bare Bones kind of strip

down am4 platform we've got a ryzen 5 3600 going into a b550 Asus Prime motherboard we're going to pair that with 16 gigs of silicon power ddr4 this stuff's Dirt Cheap I think I got this for 30 on Amazon just ridiculous how cheap ddr4 is nowadays and how cheap ddr5 is quickly becoming we're going to use the stock race stealth cooler and we've got pre-applied thermal

paste and with the rear IO Shield installed we're going to gently slide the platform into position I notice that we don't have additional standoffs at the right side of this motherboard so the area closest to the camera here that means our board's going to Sag just a tad a bit disappointed with that we've gotten all basic wiring taken care of and I've got looking pretty clean

back here as well looks like power supply is sliding from the right side I've got a nice compact BP 550 here from EVGA if you're interested all this by the way will be linked below if you want to build something similar it's a bit difficult to wedge it in here when we've got cables already pre-run but see come on something like that right there oh yeah

we've still got plenty of space closer to the front for a three and a half inch Drive although we're not going to use it for this particular build I'm going to tighten it down and wire it all up I've got three 120 mil silent Wings four fans installed I think it's just going to add a bit of spice make sure things stay nice and cool obviously

it's going to cost quite a bit to add premium fans to a case like this so say like a cheap pack of I don't know three fans for this case about 15 20 bucks you're going to want to add that on to the price of the case because otherwise it's gonna run a tad hot the rig is now looking fairly clean just gonna cut some zip

ties back a bit and then I think the only thing we have left to do is install the graphics card we could also install storage I totally forgot about that but we're not going to be running the system for any decent amount of time we don't need an operating system on it I just want to see what it looks like I'm not going to bother running

extreme temperature test it's very clear to me that this case is going to have great air flow so the last piece of the puzzle then this is an RX 7600 it didn't receive the best reviews it's very difficult for any graphics store nowadays to receive good reviews I suppose but uh we've had this one sitting around for a bit I figured we'd throw it into this

rig I think it's going to fit from a wattage perspective we only have a 550 down here and also from a depth perspective right a sheer size constraint that this case presents means that this card actually is going to fit nice and snug in here there's a little cover here beside the PCI slots with a thumb screw and the thumb screw is just no actually I

actually managed to do it just there I couldn't do it before that's interesting I always hit it when they over torque thumb screws what's the point of it being a thumb screw if you can't untighten it or re-tighten it with your thumb I don't know I don't know anyway there is the car hard she's looking nice and pretty and then we'll tighten it back down at

the rear phew all right I think we are finished so are you happy with the way your PC build turned out round things out by activating your newly installed OS swing down to the Windows start tab type activation and then click enter select change your add product key and paste your activation code if you're entering it manually triple check that you've typed it correctly then click

activate from here windows will work its magic and you should notice your watermark disappear you'll then have a fully activated copy of Windows 10 that you can even upgrade to 11 if you'd like just keep in mind that OEM Keys like these lock to the hardware in question so any major platform changes may require a new code for Activation then again I don't know too many

folks swapping motherboards on a daily or weekly basis and even if you did it's what 10 15 bucks to reactivate not a big deal you'd have to do this several times to break even on a retail key VIP STD Keys mid-year super sale is going on for a limited time so be sure to snag your key before it's too late you can even find other use

software at solid discounts for productivity and the like just click the links Below in the video description in order to use our offer code gsvip again gsvip for a huge discount now I know this might not be the most exciting looking PC build out there but I think for the price I mean if you tallied all of this up and this is a pretty sweet budget

rig that you could definitely cut some corners and and definitely save in the graphics card department if you wanted to buy something that was a bit better value especially used maybe on eBay but uh elsewhere I think it turned out really nice I'm a little annoyed about the fact that this power supply doesn't actually like extend all the way across this cut out in the basement

that looks a tad tacky although that's more a product of like what I chose as a power supply you've got your fans up front of course you could go with cheaper options there but I recommend populating at least one or two of those slots there you're going to have passive heat dissipation up top through the grill here and then also at the rear I'm not really

too worried about putting an exhaust fan in this setup because well you've got relatively low tdps for both the CPU and the graphics card now my biggest concern is this right side panel going on because as you can see we don't have a ton of wiggle room here and I've done my best to just you know flatten these cables as much as possible we don't even

have like a two and a half inch drive back here or three and a half inch drive that's only going to add more clutter I don't is that is that enough I guess it is so as long as you get it slotted in toward the front you can just kind of hinge it at the rear and then use these thumb screws that actually wasn't as bad

as I thought it was going to be it looked like it was going to be a tighter fit but uh yeah there you go no real bulging or bending of any kind I mean considering what we're working with I think this went on pretty easy so let's go ahead and power it on then there won't be much in the way of uh Lighting in here it's

like that that was intentional and typically when you go the budget route the RGB is either just a very like static Thing You Can't customize it too much or you don't get any at all so this was intentional of course the fans I chose I could have chosen some RGB fans but I didn't really want to illuminate this I think that it looks really good as

is pretty much black all throughout if you've got some silver accents and a tad bit of red Accents in the graphics card and that's all the system seems to have posted it's calmed down a bit there's no need to jump into the operating system like I said I'm not going to run extensive uh temperature tests here this will fare just fine for the price in the

thermal department so I think areas getting nailed it there there are other things though that I'm not super fond of in this case for starters I'm not a fan of having a single fan that is this cheap in a case of this price it it's like 60 bucks is now considered like dirt cheap which is crazy because 60 bucks used to get you a ton like

two years ago I understand why Builder sentiment is down nowadays but it's almost like Aries game just said you know what we need a fan in here let's put a fan in here and let's keep the cost as low as possible and they put the cheapest thing they could find in here only being able to run it via Molex is just absolutely ridiculous and it probably

runs quite loud at that so that's why I removed it I think to be fair you're gonna have to add another 10 or 15 to the price of this to make up for the Lawson fans you're gonna need maybe a two or three pack to really take advantage of the airflow in this case you're gonna have to watch your again graphics card size constraints especially if

you're mounting a 360 mil up front you can mount a 360 mil there you can mount a 240 it looks like up top you can mount a 120 at the rear so cooling support is actually quite nice your Tower clearance for a larger Tower CPU Cooler isn't very great and of course you've got the acrylic side panel which I suppose I'll go ahead and install for

you just so you can see what it looks like I won't bother tightening it down this is just for demonstration purposes Let's uh you can see I mean it definitely looks cheaper than tempered glass and you don't have anything covering the edges of this side of the chassis there's no like black frame or anything to cover up all the holes and rivets and things so yeah

it looks cheap but it's a cheap case so I can't complain too much there I will say however that sixty dollars a year or two ago used to get you a case like this with tempered glass so just a sign of the times my friends so in all fairness this is more like a 70 or 75 dollar case when you account for those extra fans you're

probably going to need if you're willing to forego those at 60 bucks it's a compelling choice I didn't see too many issues with build quality I think the cable management space could be a bit you know roomier but what can you do with the tooling at hand it's just it's just crazy that this is what 60 bucks gets you nowadays I mean I I tried to

find the cheapest mid tower on Amazon and this was right up there with among the cheapest I think there was maybe a Zalman t7 that was slightly cheaper we've already built in that and actually gave away a rig with that case there's not much that's cheaper that supports full-size ATX motherboards and that was what I was really aiming for here that's my by far the most

popular form factor and this is what we have to work with in the 60 Department maybe you buy second hand maybe buy used on eBay you can find a better deal but if you want brand new it's tough to beat this price point and honestly I can't imagine you're gonna find much better at this price point in today's day and age it's just I hate to

say it but it's just it is how it is with that if you'd like to build something similar to what you see here I'm gonna have all these parts like I said Linked In the video description if you want to join our public Discord server that's totally free to do you can contribute happy like they're just a way for us to engage outside of solely YouTube

or Twitter if you want to support us on patreon that link is in the description and of course consider subscribing if you haven't already give this video a thumbs up you thought it was cool and leave a comment let me know what you think about this case maybe I'm not being critical enough that's totally possible I think I've just kind of succumbed to the fact that

cases are just more expensive across the board so this is what we have to work with am I disappointed of course I am but it's not really the fault of Aries games specifically it's just the costs across the board manufacturing constraints the just what we've been through the past two or three years it's kind of all culminated to this point where just paying more for certain

things including cases unfortunately so I'll leave you there if you guys enjoyed it again thumbs up subscribe leave a comment I'll catch you in the next one my name is Greg thanks for learning with me foreign