Rosewill Ranger: All About Compromising
by Dustin Sklavos on December 14, 2011 12:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- mid-tower
- Rosewill
In and Around the Rosewill Ranger
While the Rosewill Ranger is somewhat stylized, it's nowhere near as blinged out as some of the enclosures in its market can be. With the color blue having had its day in the sun as an accent color, Rosewill once again opts for red, easily visible through the side window and ventilation, as well as the HDD indicator light and the front 120mm LED fan.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure the best first impression is made with the Ranger. We're generally not fans of glossy plastic around here due to its ability to pick up fingerprints (not to mention how cheap it often looks), and using glossy black plastic solely for the front fascia creates a disconnect with the rest of the enclosure while looking less than stylish. It's nowhere near as bad as some other implementations are, and Rosewill has confined it mainly to trim, but it does draw attention to itself. Thankfully the rest of the front of the enclosure is more staid, with plastic grating used to cover the majority of it (including the external drive bays). Rosewill also smartly places the I/O ports and power and reset buttons at the top front of the enclosure, making them easily accessible whether the case is on your desk or the floor.
Circle around to the side panel and you can see a case window that hovers over the CPU area of the motherboard as well as ventilation over the expansion slots; this vent supports two 120mm fans for keeping the video card nice and frosty. Overall this is pretty similar to how Rosewill handled the Thor v2, just in a smaller form factor. Behind the window you can also see the red paint job used for the motherboard tray.
It's when you get to the back of the Ranger that you begin to realize just how small the case really is. There are seven expansion slots, but look at how tightly packed together everything is, suggesting minimal clearance for the top of the case and especially behind the motherboard tray. This is getting perilously close to as small as a standard ATX case can get, and honestly, a bit smaller than I feel like it should get. If you need a tiny computer, at this point Micro-ATX boards have all the functionality of their full-sized kin, and you should be shopping for a Micro-ATX tower accordingly.
The side panels are held in place by thumbscrews; remove those and we can see where the Ranger's problems really lie. The inside of the case is pretty crowded, with the laterally mounted drive cages encroaching on valuable internal real estate and a 140mm top-mounted fan that practically stops at the top edge of where the motherboard will go. Rosewill includes spacious routing holes around the motherboard tray and in front of the power supply mount. That should theoretically allow you to maintain a fairly clean build, but that illusion is lost once you take a peek behind the tray.
There's an illusion of space for routing cables behind the Ranger's tray, but don't you believe it. The back of the motherboard tray is already pretty close to the side panel; there's an indentation behind the series of drive cages that you'd think would be enough space for hiding cabling. As you'll see when we get to assembly, it's nowhere near enough.
It's entirely possible I've been spoiled by case designs from other manufacturers, but the way Rosewill has laid out the interior of the Ranger just seems wrongheaded. A good, well-balanced enclosure should hopefully give you some room to work in, but you can already tell this is going to be a very tight fit.
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Iketh - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
IIIIIIIII find this hard to believe... motherboards have plenty of flexShieTar - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
Sure, but operating them while bent, with maybe some thermal cycling on top, does not sound like a good Idea.Of course, if the routing is this bad, why not just leave it be and live with the cables within the case, like it has been done with any case before 2008 or so. I'd rather have a somewhat uglified interior and a slightly disturbed airflow, rather than turn assembly into a comical "You sit on it, I close it" episode.
piroroadkill - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
Oh, I got a new case, Fractal Design Define R3, now, and made sure to bear this fact in mind.My system is OK now, although I do have a new board.
piroroadkill - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
Well, you can find it hard to believe, but when I was about to fit a new motherboard, I unscrewed my old one, took it out, put my brand new one in, and noticed there was a gap of about 4mm or something silly between the motherboard and the standoffs near the bottom of the case.I had to push the crap out of the tray to get it back to flat, so the motherboard would actually sit flat on all the standoffs.
My old motherboard had clearly been bent by the motherboard tray. I'm not sure why that's unbelievable.
kyuu - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I believe what the poster found hard to believe was that the motherboard flex was the cause of your issues, not that the tray was in fact bent and, therefore, flexing your mobo. Although, usually the side panel of the case will bend outwards rather than pushing the motherboard try in, since it is generally going to be a lot more flexible than the tray.I would have to concur with that poster, unless there was really an extreme amount of flex going on with your mobo.
However, I would concur that case manufacturers really need to provide enough space to actually route cables behind the tray and enable the side panel to go without an overt amount of force and/or bending the side panel out.
IvanChess - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I own the Rosewill Gear X3 and it has lots of plastic and it uses a pass-thru cable instead of a motherboard header for the USB 3.0 (my motherboard doesn't have that so no big loss and you can buy a converter) but it was actually a nice build for under $50 at the time. Lot's of room inside and behind the motherboard tray plus it has a hole for the ATX CPU power cable at the top of the case. The top fans are mounted in plastic outside the case which looks terrible but keeps the inside roomy. In conclusion, the case looks cheap and is cheap but it is very functional especially if you replace the fans and add a fan controller.DanNeely - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I picked one of those up during the sale too to give my 2ndary box a case that wasn't an exercise in frustration/impossible to get a full size GPU in. The Gear x3's plastic has just a hint of gloss but is much more heavily skewed toward matte. Cable space was a bit tight; but as long as you use right angle sata connectors and make sure none of the fat cables are overlapping the panel goes on reasonably easily.IvanChess - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
The plastic is mostly matte but it is a different black from the rest of the case so it looks weird. Also, I should have said the case has plenty of room for cables given the price tag although using right angle SATA connectors I did fit three drives into the case without much problem and zip-ties (with handy tie down points built-in to the case) can really compress the cables so they fit into that channel behind the motherboard.mfenn - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
"The routing holes around the motherboard tray are seeming slightly off center, especially around the side-mounted SATA ports, but your mileage may vary; side-mounted SATA ports on a full-sized ATX board are going to result in serious cable bending."Dustin, here's PROTIP for you: Other motherboards exist in this world besides the P7P55D-E Pro. Many of them even have 90 degree SATA ports in different locations! Interesting concept, I know.
Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
"Your mileage may vary."Stunning, I know.