Installation and Performance

Before getting started I did get the Revolt 3 back on the scale. The top carrying handle has a weight limit of 30 pounds and with the flight case, I was curious how much everything would be together so I wanted to get a starting point. The Revolt 3 with the included 700-watt power supply came in at 14lbs and just over 1 oz. The PSU is some of that but overall given its size it isn’t a very lightweight case like some of the all-aluminum designs out there.

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The accessory box inside of the case came with a few things. You get a power supply cable of course for the included power supply. There is a microphone/headphone adapter cable for anyone who wants to use a traditional split plug design on the front I/O connection with its single plug. You get black zip ties and then a small baggie of black screws and rubber mounts for the hard drive/SSD installations.

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Rather than just build a temporary system in the Revolt 3, I am hoping to eventually make it out to LAN events so I wanted something that would be able to handle anything. I went with the Gigabyte Aorus Z490I Ultra combined with the Intel i5-10600K. It isn’t an i9 with a crazy over 5GHz boost clock and 12 cores. But it has 6 cores and is close to 5GHz with its 4.8 GHz boost clock and has a solid 4.1 GHz base clock. A good mix of performance while not having to worry about thermals too much as well. For memory, I went with an older Crucial Ballistix 3000 MHz kit which I may switch out later to a higher capacity kit. Then for storage, I wanted to keep everything simple and fast. I installed the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus on the back of the board and the Crucial P5 on the top under the heatsink. Both are 1TB and NVMe, I installed windows 10 on the Sabrent and have extra room on the P5 for more game installs in addition to the main drive. 

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With everything installed into the motherboard ahead of time, it made installation a lot simpler. Slide it in and install the board and we are already halfway done! I just needed to get the wiring hooked up, the AIO, and the GPU. The PSU wiring was mostly simple, they have shortened cables to help with things but it did cause problems with the 8-pin CPU power on the Aorus motherboard which was near the rear I/O down on the bottom left corner. I ended up having to run this across in a way that goes over the CPU which if we went with air cooling could have caused some issues. Speaking of air cooling, the Revolt 3 does support it, you can run up to a 140mm tall cooler, but it is obvious that the design favors water cooling with an AIO where you can get more surface area in the same space. The 24-pin motherboard was up on top of our motherboard which was reached easily by the PSU but it does create a lot of wires all in that one area. Not having tall memory helped here but this is also the same area where the Aorus board has some of its other connections like the USB 3.0 and the USB 2.0. For the USB 2.0, they used a weird adapter cable which adds more wires in this area as well but is needed for our AIO cooler.  

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The front panel connections all run from the bottom and go through that one cable hole above the rear I/O. I do wish there was maybe a small slot for a few small wires to get to behind the motherboard tray or event over the video card. The front panel USB 3.2 Gen 2 plug is also different. They didn’t go with the newer Gen 2 internal connection which our board had and instead used a standard Type-C. So it uses the Type-C connection on your motherboard's rear I/O. I was hoping we would end up with two gen 2 type-C ports but the front is basically just a passthrough.  

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At the back, the opening they left does a great job of allowing room to get at the CPU and in our case the M.2 slot as well. You can also see that the included PSU also has a power cord sticking out back here to help with the 2.5-inch drives back here if you use them.

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Here is a look at the CPU power when hooked up, like I said there wasn’t any way to avoid it running right over top of everything. The placement of the hole at the bottom of the case where the front panel connections come in is similar as well but I did later clean those up a little with cable ties.

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The swing out door for the AIO or fan installation was really nice when installing the Corsair H100i RGB PLATINUM SE. I installed the fans on the radiator outside of the case and the same goes for making sure I had the correct bracket installed on the water block for our CPU. From there you just mount the radiator to the door and install the pump side. You do need to keep your wiring all to the left to make cleaning that up simpler and so that when you use the door it doesn’t get pulled on. Then for the water cooling lines install them at the bottom and try to give them room to loop around the pump when the door is closed.

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All of the fan and RGB wiring was then cleaned up with zip ties and with I did the same with those front I/O cables on the GPU side. Installing the GPU was easy because you have access from both the front of the case and the side. The weird Founders Edition power adapter complicated things slightly but was still workable. I should also point out that HYTE even included three PCI plugs for the highest-end GPUs that might need them. Each plug is a 6+2 so you have any combination you might need. Once I closed the AIO mount door I did end up using a zip tie on the water lines. They didn’t touch the fans without it, but I wanted to have a little more room for airflow around the cooler, and I didn’t want the lines to touch later on after transporting the case. I would suggest everyone look in the side and double check for cables and the fans before powering things up to save yourself any future trouble.

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Here is a look at the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition installed in the Revolt 3 and this is a full-sized card. It helps give scale to the room they left for larger aftermarket cards to be able to fit which is rare in any SFF case.

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I did also swap out the front mesh to check out the brass accent on our white Revolt 3. It looks good but I think I still favor the black or maybe a bright custom painted color.

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With everything together, I did get the system back on the scales which totaled in at 21lbs and 10oz. There is room for that to be higher depending on your configuration. If you have a 3.5 inch hard drive for example that would add over a pound and a half, two 2.5 SSDs wouldn’t add much but if either were hard drives it would add more. Then if you went with a dual 140mm AIO where ours is a dual 120mm setup you would add more weight as well. Altogether though it is still going to be under the 30 pound limit on the handle so no worries there. Add in the flight case which was 13 pounds and our setup would be close to 35 pounds, plus tucking your power cable, keyboard, and mouse into the case so it will fit under the 40-pound limit for a carry on as long as you don’t add to much weight in with the peripherals.

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With everything together, I tossed Windows 10 on and jumped right into testing. My main focus was that the 3070 Ti and the 10600K would both be able to run cool and had the thermal headroom to run at full capacity. To test this out I started with a worst case scenario using AIDA64’s stress test to run the 10600K at 100% using the FPU workload which is far above will be seen when gaming and had it stressing the GPU as well at 100%. I did this to make sure they wouldn’t overheat and to get a look at thermals using our Flir. The CPU and GPU both settled at 82c with this extreme workload and the motherboard ran cooler at 54c. There wasn’t any CPU throttling but the CPU did run 8c higher than when doing this same test in an open-air configuration (with the same cooler). That isn’t bad considering I have the AIO set to push air out so it is pulling in air warmed from the GPU inside of the case. I may eventually switch the AIO to pull cool air in to test it out but I suspect that this is going to be the best configuration as it pushes the hottest air out. The GPU was also running 9c warmer than the same test on the open-air bench.

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Here is a look at the thermals when running our worse case setup. The left side of the Revolt 3 is of course pushing out a lot of hot air with the AIO blowing out that direction. The right side is half the temperature as the left. There is a little heat ending up down in the bottom of the case which surprised me. I assume that is blowing out the end of the Founders Edition card. That does bring up a good point though. The Revolt 3’s configuration doesn’t work at all with an older blower design which is something normally I would prefer in an SFF build because it isn’t blowing the hot air into the case. Here though it would be blowing it all in that small compartment under the motherboard with your cables and almost no ventilation.

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I pulled the side panels off so we could see the thermals inside as well. The hottest area is right at the center of the top of the GPU where Nvidia has their Founders Edition cards pushing air out of the top. The motherboard was warm but was also in line with what the motherboard sensors were showing in AIDA64.

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Noise isn’t a Revolt 3 specific thing because the only fan included with the case is the fan in the power supply. So your noise levels will depend on what GPU you go with and what you do for cooling. Overall in my testing, the noise was only really an issue when I did the worse case test when the GPU and AIO were running at full capacity. The rest of my testing which included playing games and everyday use wasn’t an issue.

Speaking of other testing. I did test using Time Spy to check out how the combination performed. The 12189 score isn’t too bad.

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I also tested using 3DMark Time Spy set to loop to get a better look at the temperatures in a more realistic situation. The GPU was still reaching similar temperatures as before at the peaks but the CPU was running much cooler when not being loaded using the FPU workload.

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