ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review

ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review

Cooling Performance  

Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look fantastic and seem silent from the outside, but all of that is for nought if your PC has the internal temperature of an oven. Your PC case needs enough airflow for your components to remain cool under load and to prevent any form of thermal throttling. For our test, we used the following hardware using fixed fan speeds (so that only the case and its included fans can influence thermal performance).

Fractal North
Intel i9-9700K @4.8GHz at 1.2V
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming @ 100% Current Capacity/ LL lvl16
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition @ 9V via Fan Speed Reducer
Nvidia GTX 980 Reference @ 60% Fixed Fan Speed
Corsair LP Vengeance LP (Grey) @ 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD
Corsair RM550X Power Supply

The graph below showcases Delta temperatures with a controlled ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.

Something to note 

Out of this box, ASUS’ TUF Gaming GT502 chassis does not come with any fans, which means that we needed to add our own so that we could conduct our testing. ASUS has provided us with a pack of three 120mm TUF Gaming TF120 fans, which ships with an an RGB controller and costs around £56.99 in the UK. Two of these fans were placed at the bottom of the GT502 and one was paced it the rear, behind our CPU cooler. Additionally, we have also added two 120mm be quiet! fans at the top of the case to add supplemental airflow.

With this in mind, our testing of the GT502 is on the strange side, as we expect most users of this case to utilise a 360mm AIO CPU liquid cooler or a custom water cooling loop. We also expect users of this case to install more fans than this, and to test their setup over a weekend to see if their airflow setup is optimal.

1000 RPM Testing

With our strange and somewhat sub-optimal fan configuration, you can see that the TUF Gaming GT502 sits firmly on the bottom half of our case performance charts. With more fans, optimally located, fans, we expect system thermals to be lower. That said, testing such a use case here would put the other cases in this chart at a huge disadvantage. 

ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review   
ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review

Max Fan RPM

When setting our ASUS TUF Gaming 120TF fans to 1850 RPM, we see GPU thermals decrease in the GT502 and CPU thermals rise. This is an odd result, but a result that makes sense given the fact that the two top fans that we placed in this system max out at around 1000 RPM.

What this result shows is that is isn’t just raw airflow that matters, directionality matters too. Additional fans at optimal locations will allow PC builders to achieve stronger results with this chassis, but a sub-optimal fan configuration can result in worse thermals. Users of this case should place their fans wisely, and consider how air will move through this chassis.  

ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review   
ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 Case Review  Â