MonsterLabo The First Review – Not Quite Silent

1. Introducing MonsterLabo The First2. Getting Inside The First3. Cooling Performance4. Closing Thoughts5. View All Pages

You can buy MonsterLabo’s Basic Package for €369 that consists of the chassis and passive cooling system, or you can pay €429 for The First Premium Package that comes with a 140mm Noctua fan, a PCI Express riser cable and some anti vibration mounts.

The key technical feature of the chassis is the amount of power and heat it can dissipate in different configurations. We were given these figures by MonsterLabo:

• Passive configuration: CPU 100W, GPU 120W
• Active configuration: CPU 140W, GPU 160W

The First does not support Intel HEDT LGA2011/2066 and there is no such thing as Mini-ITX Threadripper, so your CPU choices are AMD AM4 and Intel LGA115x. As for graphics, stock RTX 2070 has a TDP of 175W, so it seems that is the highest-end GPU that the First can realistically support in the Active configuration. Alternatively, you can go for something like a GTX 1660 Ti with its 120W TDP, and for that the passive configuration would do the job fine.

Whichever configuration you choose, you will also require a number of extras, such as the PCI Express riser, and you will also need passthrough cables to connect your motherboard to the I/O panel as we demonstrate in our video.

As we explain in our video MonsterLabo sent us The First as a pre-built system, and you can buy it as a pre-built machine as well, with two configurations listed on their website:

• 1,390 Euros:  AMD Ryzen 7 and GTX 1660 Ti
• 1,890 Euros:  Intel i5-9600K and RTX 2070

The system we received is a hybrid of the two, employing a Ryzen 7 2700 CPU with RTX 2070 graphics.

Testing

To put this case through its cooling paces we will be using a test system consisting of an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 and RTX 2070 graphics. This system allows us to produce a substantial amount of heat and effectively test the MonsterLabo The First‘s cooling capabilities. For stress testing we use Blender to stress the CPU and 3D Mark to create a hybrid workload that stresses both the CPU and GPU.

Test System:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (3.3GHz all cores)
• Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix B450-I GAMING
• CPU cooler: MonsterLabo passive cooling
• Fan: Noctua NF-A14 PWM
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR4-3000MHz
• Graphics card: Zotac GeForce RTX 2070 Blower
• Power supply: Seasonic Focus SGX 650 80 Plus Gold
• Storage drive: 120GB Kingston SSD
• OS: Windows 10

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