Rosewill Ranger: All About Compromising

Conclusion: What Sacrifices Will You Make?

In the Ranger, Rosewill has produced an enclosure that serves one master: cooling. Above all else, that's where its performance and strengths lie. Aesthetically it's good but not great, though that's mostly going to be a matter of taste. Where assembly is concerned, there are many issues, but it's still nowhere near as fraught as the Lian Li PC-A05FN we tested. In terms of noise it could be a lot worse; the soundproofing in NZXT's H2 backfires horribly, necessitating a move up to at least a Fractal Design Define R3 to keep the noise down.

The fact is, until you start spending in the neighborhood of the Rosewill Thor v2 (and to a lesser extent the Antec P280), you're just not going to get good acoustics with good thermal performance; there's always going to be a tug of war between the two. It's only when you're willing to spend a lot more money that you can get a case that's big, solid, quiet, and cool. These less expensive cases oftentimes have a lot of potential if you're willing to muck with them a bit, but the same could be said of something like Antec's P280. (The real expensive monsters like the SilverStone FT02 and Thermaltake Level 10 GT are pretty much golden out of the box.)

There are reasons to go with any number of the cases floating around the Ranger's price point. I like the aesthetics and design of Bitfenix's Shinobi better, and that enclosure can also be found for less than the Ranger, but you'll have to do some work to extract the best performance out of it. Fractal Design's Arc Midi is much easier to build in, too, but the Ranger is able to produce better thermals at less noise despite having no real allowances made towards acoustics. Even the vastly less expensive Bitfenix Merc Alpha can probably put in a good showing with one or two extra fans and still come out less. At the same time, moving up to Fractal Design's Define R3 or the Antec P280 negates a lot of the compromises that come with a less expensive enclosure.

If you need maximal thermal performance and you're on a budget, I'm not sure you can really do better than the Rosewill Ranger—though there are other cases that likely match it. With a couple of side intake fans it could probably make a killing for even an inexpensive multi-GPU box. Just remember the sacrifices you're making to get here: it's going to be noisier than more expensive cases, and it's a lot harder to build in than it should be. Rosewill would do well to make a couple of modifications to this design (specifically increasing the size by about 2cm on every axis); with some minor tweaks, we'd have a homerun here.