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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
33 Comments
View All Comments
Aphelion02 - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
God that red and black color theme hurts my eyes. Chea plastic isn't helping either. These case manufacturers really need to hire designers with some modicum of taste.Death666Angel - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I haven't finished reading this piece, but I still feel like I have to comment on this:"A smarter plan might have been to kill one of the 5.25" bays to add one more 3.5" bay, which would feel at least a little more balanced."
Why? A 3.5" internal bay is about the most useless thing once you have enough room to install the HDDs you want. A 5.25" bay on the other hand offers up a world of customization and usability, with room for fan controllers, displays, a whole bunch of 2.5" bays (1-to-6 converters are available), decoupled HDDs to dampen noise, reservoirs for water cooling, card readers....
Holler - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
agreed 5.25 much more useful.Zoomer - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
3 5.25" = 1 120mm fan mount.AssBall - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I also agree? What the hell are you going to do with more 3.5"s? The only things I can think of you'd want to jam in there are maybe a card reader and a rheostat/fan/temp monitor. That's 2.JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
5.25" can be used for 3.5" and other devices, sure, but four of them is overkill for an already cramped case. I'd rather they just dropped the fourth (and even third) 5.25" bay altogether. There's obviously personal opinion and intended use as factors to consider, but I have four mid-tower desktops right now and not a single one uses more than two 5.25" bays...and only one uses two bays. YMMV, naturally.AssBall - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Fair enough. Maybe my "keep my old shit" stuff is killing my in builds, but I generally end up with two optical drives and 3-4 hard drives that those extra slots are nice for. You are right though, the case is a little too cramped to shove all that in there and expect decent thermals and avoid cable cluster.Onus - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
I am using three 5.25" external bays; one DVD burner, one 5.25" storage drawer (for thumbdrives, O/S, and recovery CDs), and a memory card reader. If I wanted a fan controller, I'd need the fourth and last one available on my case (Enermax Hoplite). The memory card reader could also be installed in a 3.5" bay, but this case does not have one. The two listed for it in Newegg's description are actually a 2-drive 3.5" backplane with drive drawers; they aren't usable for other things.Onus - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
I think this review was good, but I suspect the cable-routing issues would not have come up with a more "typical" build; 1155 or AM3 mobo (possibly a mATX), 1x optical, 2x 3.5" (or make one a 2.5"), HD6770 or other GPU with a single power connector, and a 350W-450W PSU like an Antec Earthwatts or Corsair Builder. With a lot less cables to route, the shortcomings described should essentially vanish; and such builds, once created, are indeed typically left alone.Whether or not I personally like the style, this case does nothing to knock Rosewill off the short list of cases I consider at just about any price point, and where they typically win, often on features like an extra included fan (or two).
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - link
If we take the approach you're suggesting, there are several difficulties.1) We would need to get Dustin additional hardware for testing (and he'd need to store it when it's not in use). We can certainly do this, but it's inconvenient at best.
2) More importantly, we would either need to test each case with several sets of hardware (one more set of hardware would double the testing time, two additional points of reference would triple it).
3) Alternately, we would only test a case with hardware that "makes sense" -- according to us, which naturally others would disagree with our choices, whatever they might be. Then we would have a database of test results where we can only compare cases tested with the same configuration. So, Define R3 works fine with our current setup; do we test it with that or with a more "sensible" HD 6770 card and a smaller PSU? What about [insert a case]?
This gets very messy very fast, and ultimately results in either substantially more work for Dustin (with no additional pay), or substantially less useful comparisons. This is why we ended up with the current test beds -- and we do have more than one, but it's either Mini-ITX or full ATX testing.