After using it for a couple of weeks, and much procrastination, I finally got around to putting my thoughts and tests down to words for Revoccase's MIT1-XL.
Many thanks to Revoccase who has very kindly and speedily made the changes to accommodate a bigger cooler, more vents and then sending extras together with the case.
If you want to check out the process, click here for the concept and start of the case post; and full album of my build is here.
Appearance, Finishing ,Build & Fabrication Quality
Solid, aluminum panels, with a powder coated space grey finish. All around no issues with the quality of the panels and finishing. The straight vents give off an industrial look, and it looks great to myself.
Vented panels on all sides, so airflow wouldn't be an issue. Stability of the whole build is only at the end, when the side panel is screwed on, so one has to be slightly careful while in the building process, as the panels can and will flex outwards a little.
Size and Components compatibility
Specifications:
- Dimension: 234mm (H) x 191mm (L) x 116mm (W)
- Volume: 8.38L
- GPU Card Max Length: 185mm(L) x 141mm(W) x 43mm(H)
- Motherboard: Mini ITX only
- CPU Cooler Max Height: 136mm height
- Power supply compatible: SFX, SFX-L
- Fan Support: 2x Rear mounted 80mm fans
Measuring in at 8.38L, the MIT1-XL is a (mini) tower style SFF case, with a traditional layout, and supports a fair sized air cooler like Noctua's NH-C14S (with the fan on top), BeQuiet Dark Rock TF2, Thermalright's new Silver Soul 135 or the Thermalright Silver Arrow.
However, while this means there wouldn't be a need for any riser cable, the drawback is that one's choices for GPUs are limited to ITX sized GPUs.
The case doesn't officially support following:
- 2x Top mounted 40mm fans (Not really needed, airflow is from front to back, while just adding additional cables to manage and taking up the space for cable management.)
- 1x Front mounted 90mm fan (Will cause turbulence due to being too close to the front panels, can be mitigated by using rubber spacers, plastic spacers, rubber anti-vibration mounts)
- Any HDD/SSD
Building in the case
It wasn't too hard, as the case is closing in on the 10L mark at 8.38L. No major hiccups when building in the case, although I did encounter some user errors while building in it.
One, MSI's B550I has a higher CPU socket position, so there is very little space left in between the top of the SS135 and the PSU, and that made clipping on the CPU way harder than it needs to be. Two, cable management after my first build (before custom cables) wasn't the best I could do, because of the different steps I took.
The front fan mounting would be one of the last steps, and it involves mounting the screws and spacers to the case first, plugging in your fan cable, then aligning and screwing the fans together. It would also entail some mashing of the 24 pin cables down.
In my rebuild after the custom cables arrived, lessons were learnt. CPU Cooler and fan should be plugged in first, then the rear 2 case fans before the PSU and cables.
Once everything is close to completion, it looks super packed and compact. Very satisfying. And yes, I decided to mount an ARGB strip to the back of the case before starting on anything. I tried two, but gave up on the one closer to the side panel.
Build/Cooling Options that I tested:
- Thermalright Silver Soul 135 (aftermarket graphene coated); 2x Rear mounted AVC 8025mm, 1x Front mounted Thermalright TL-C9B 9025mm with Vented Side Panel in Vertical mode
- Thermalright Silver Soul 135 (aftermarket graphene coated); 2x Rear mounted AVC 8025mm, 1x Front mounted Thermalright TL-C9B 9025mm with Solid Side Panel in Vertical mode
- Thermalright Silver Soul 135 (aftermarket graphene coated); 2x Rear mounted AVC 8025mm, 1x Front mounted Thermalright TL-C9B 9025mm with Vented Side Panel in Horizontal mode
No, I don’t have a NH-C14S or the Dark Rock TF2 for testing and comparison. They are just too expensive (and might cause turbulence as they would be seated very near the side panel), and I already have too many coolers than I have computers, although the new Chromax NH-U12A is so tempting. Sigh.
Thing to note, the Thermalright SS135 uses a non-standard 120mm fan, with rounded out corners. Standard sized fans might fit onto the cooler, but the stock fan clips might be stretched and pressured too much. Thread here was the original first post of thermal results for the SS135.
Also, I changed from my previous MSI RTX 3060 Aero ITX to an ASRock 6600 XT Challenger ITX recently, and the Aero ITX fan blade rising while spinning might have cause some issues with it hitting the bottom of the case, but thankfully I don't have to face that issue.
Thermals
It's good! Although it might be due to the MIT1-XL being able to fit a bigger CPU cooler, more fans and better ventilation as compared to my previous build in the Smol X1. CPU temps are where you expect it to be as the 5600X at stock isn't particularly tough to cool, but with the Thermalright Silver Soul 135, the 5600X at synthetic load with PBO on (PPT 112W, TDC 69A, EDC 113A) was kept at a maximum of 80C, boosting to around 4450 MHz for all cores.
GPU temperatures are average, also due to the fact that ITX GPUs don't have the best cooling solution for themselves compared to the triple fan chonkers. GPU's are just becoming too large.
That being said, the ASRock 6600XT ITX card performs well for its size. The GPU has a zero RPM mode, and it's up to 62C, and the max fan speed off the shelf is capped at only 69% (?!) even when the card reaches 90C. It is very quiet, for sure, but the temperatures are relatively surprisingly, with stock mode going up to 82C in Heaven4.0, and 79C in TimeSpy benchmarks. The cards was undervolted via Radeon software; to the settings of 1050 mV, 2500 - 2600 MHz. Temperatures are better and performance is also increased. The stock fan curve is just too gentle.
Similarly to the Smol X1, the GPU is at best while the case is laid down horizontally, as it reduces load temperatures by 3C to 4C, as compared to the case standing tall in the vertical format. CPU temperatures while in horizontal mode, weren't very much different.
Edit: As a follow up regarding GPU temperatures, I think it's more ASRock's cooling solution/design being designed weirdly. The default fan curve is pretty non-existent, and it just emphasizes too much on silence, in my opinion. I ain't an engineer and I can't presume to know anything about cooling designs, and it's probably not at throttling levels yet, but still, I don't know why they think that running fan speeds of maximum of 69% even when the card hits 90C is acceptable.
While gaming with a more reasonable fan curve, and undervolted, the GPU temps are around 65C to 70C after a couple of hours. Granted my ambient temperature is usually around 30C to 33C though. (End of Edit)
I got lazy to test the case without the front mounted fan (as it is the irritating portion of the build), but while blasting the front mounted fan on full, low loads CPU temps are helped by 1C to 2C, so I would reckon that the removal of the fan would at worse hinder temperatures by a similar amount.
Mounting the solid panel, thermals for both CPU and GPU are roughly the same as the vented in my limited tests.
Details of my Cinebench R23, Heaven, TimeSpy benchmark scores and thermals can be found in my spreadsheet here.
Noise
The main contributor of noise is from the front mounted fan initially, as it was too close to the panels, and that caused a droning turbulence noise that can get irritating. Steps I took was to mount rubber spacers (provided kindly by Revoccases), although it isn't the best as the distance is still relatively near to the panel. Ultimately, I decided on mounting one rubber space, one plastic spacer (Noctua gave it to me for mounting their L9a on my MSI B550I), held in place by an anti-vibration rubber o-ring. Noise from the front fan turbulence is essentially gone.
In isolation, the rear mounted fans and the CPU cooler can operate at near silent levels. At full loads, the rear AVC fans can run at 4800 RPM, which is pretty much a jet engine can cover over any noise. It is capped at 3000 RPM for my use case.
Using the solid side panel, it does provide some form of sound insulation, it is slightly quieter when I put my ears right next to the case in both situations.
Some thoughts
- Maybe the front panel vents can be made to officially support front fans, with a design change to cause less turbulence?
- Wishful thinking, but maybe some form of 2.5inch drive support would have been nice. Nothing stopping users from using double sided tape to mount the drive on the side of the PSU, like what I did though.
- So many screws to take the panel out! 12, twelve! Very minor gripe, hah.
Conclusion
In summary, I like the case and it performs great thermally.
Yes, some people will question that the case can only take an ITX GPU, it is on the larger size (floating towards the 10L size)It was something I was looking for in a case, traditional (no riser cable woes) layout, SFX PSU and able to use a small CPU tower cooler. Other cases that I was looking at were the Colin Raey Mk2 (which is unfortunately OOP), Smol X1 (Prototype stages), which weren't able to suit my needs. The case looks fully packed to the gills and to me, doesn't seem like there is much wasted space.
While the MIT1 -XL was just in the concept stages and projected to be a built-to-order case, Revoccase was also very receptive and responsive to the suggestions, made the whole process of seeing the case from concept to my desk very satisfying. There were also constant updates and the case arrived way earlier than expected as well.
Hope it's helpful for anyone looking for reviews, happy to answer questions and cheers!
