Packed with features like a quartet of 120mm ARGB fans and filters covering every fan mount, ADATA's $59.99 XPG Valor Air Plus picks up where the company's previous Valor Air left off: as a good, economical starting point for an enthusiast PC build. We also like this model's shallow front-to-back depth and support for big motherboards, a seldom-seen combination. It's a perfectly serviceable budget ATX case pick if you're willing to roll with some install quirks and tolerate thin panel materials. Otherwise, we'd opt for budget models like the Thermaltake View 270 TG ARGB or Montech Air 903 Base. 

Design: EATX Minimus

The Valor Air Plus’ depth of under 16 inches seems short for a case that has the space inside for a giant 13-inch-deep motherboard. But the design still leaves enough room to put all the key bits behind the front fans, an air filter, and a metal-skinned removable plastic face. It’s almost like the company designed the entire case around an oversized 12-by-13-inch motherboard, which is the method that makes the most sense.

The case front has no Type-C ports, but the Valor Air Plus does include power and reset buttons that light up to indicate power on and hard drive activity. It also has a pair of Type-A ports (fed by the usual 19-pin connector) and a headphone/microphone combo (four-pole) jack.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

All the ports are located at the front of the top panel, between the Valor Air Plus’ removable face and a fan mount capable of holding 240mm-format radiators up to 330mm long (including end caps) and 57mm thick (including the fans).

The power supply inlet is covered in the same perforated metal dust filter material as the top, but it is held in place with tabs rather than glued-on magnetic tape. (The front panel’s filter matches the top in both material and attachment, secured to the back side of its thin steel skin.) Also notice, in the image below, the three screws and sliding tabs that secure the front panel’s plastic frame and an internal drive tray from the bottom.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

We measured the Valor Air Plus at 15.8 inches deep, including its protruding PCI Express card slot bracket. That bracket covers seven expansion slots. Above it is the case’s factory-mounted 120mm exhaust fan, and below it is a full-size ATX power supply bay.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Installing a graphics card on a case that has an external slot bracket like this one requires builders to slide the card’s I/O bracket backward, though the slot bracket’s opening, while being careful not to snag the tabs at the bottom of the card’s bracket on motherboard components. In our experience, a gap smaller than 19mm can make this task tricky; to ADATA's credit, the Valor Air Plus access hole is around 28mm high.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The steel sheet that wraps around the power supply to hide cables and reinforce the bottom edge of the motherboard tray is commonly called a power supply "tunnel” or "shroud." ADATA punched a 3-inch gap at the front to help builders tip front-panel radiators into place behind the Valor Air Plus’ front-mounted fans. The designers also added a set of eight threaded holes around the vented portion to ease the installation of 120mm fans, and a view hole next to the power supply to show off its logo.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Holes in the front-top and front-bottom corners of the motherboard tray are mounting points for the front row of holes on 13-inch-deep motherboards, making the Valor Air Plus one of the few smaller cases to support the full range of EATX-labeled motherboards. That seems little more than a data point in a case that includes only nine total standoffs (six installed, three in the installation kit), and there’s a passage hole where the front-center standoff should have gone. But this is still a far better approximation of true EATX compliance than any of the high-end gaming cases we’ve tested that assume the EATX name without supporting the full-size range of these oversized motherboards. 

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

That said, it's possible the motherboard tray was designed for a different case and modified to fit this one. The tray has half the holes to mount two 2.5-inch SSDs up front, but it is a little too close to the front panel for the other mounting holes to be present. The above-mentioned passage hole looks positioned for the SATA data and power cables of those two drives, if you could install them.

Behind and beneath the motherboard tray are the Valor Air Plus’ cables, a twin 2.5-inch-format drive tray, the power supply bay, and a two-drive cage for 3.5-inch drives. Three 120mm ARGB fans are mounted on the front: ADATA doesn’t talk about the 140mm-spacing mounting points on either side of these fans, probably because the external fascia won’t fit over those (though placing such larger fans on the mount’s inner side might work).

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Fitting the latter drive cage with two 3.5-inch drives requires screwing one to its top first, since the one under it will block access to its screws. The removable drive cage leaves only 35mm of front-panel radiator space (that is, thickness) and 190mm of room for a power supply in its default position, whereas moving it to its other position closes the power supply space by 30mm while opening frontal space by the same amount. Anyone who isn’t mounting 3.5-inch drives can use the entire space for a radiator and power supply by removing the cage entirely, as the picture below makes clear.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Building With the ADATA XPG Valor Air Plus

Because it’s delivered with disposable break-away slot covers, the Valor Air Plus includes six replacement (screw-in) PCIe slot covers. You also get a manual, a bag of screws, a few extra loose screws (four M3 and four #6-32), and some cable zip ties. 

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

In addition to the fan’s ARGB and 3-pin fan cable chain, the Valor Air Plus connects to our motherboard using an old-fashioned split group for the buttons and indicator LEDs, an HD Audio header cable, and the 19-pin USB 3.x cable mentioned earlier.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

We remembered to break away three slot covers first, since in chassis like these, those can be difficult or impossible to remove once a motherboard is installed, and we also remembered that those should be the case’s second, third, and fourth slot covers given the positioning of the top slot on our test motherboard. (Check twice, punch once.)

After that, everything basically fell into place, apart from one big snag: The rear fan was too close to the motherboard tray to slide our motherboard over the case’s standoffs without scraping; the I/O connectors' top cover got in the way. We had to remove the fan first, install the motherboard, and then reinstall the fan; it fit snug against the I/O connector cover.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Other than the practical matter that they don’t require a super-deep desk, reduced-depth cases like the Valor Air Plus also benefit the builder aesthetically by leaving less empty space to look at, if they're not stuffing their build to the max... 

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Testing the ADATA XPG Valor Air Plus

Our current ATX test kit being less than a year old, here we'll compare the Valor Air Plus exclusively to sub-$100 cases that were released after we started using these components. Here's a recap of the parts we use for ATX cases now...

Onward to our results. Despite having three 120mm intake fans to feed air through to the two 120mm fans of our closed-loop liquid cooler and its own exhaust fan, the Valor Air Plus fell to fifth place in our test group in cooling our CPU, then sixth place in both voltage-regulator and GPU cooling. 

As for the acoustic measures, the Valor Air Plus ticked in at fourth place in noise control.

Having noticed all these things, the noisiest case in our comparison group (Montech's) was also among the coolest: The cooling benefits of both compared cases are far larger than the noise deficits of the same. We won’t say that the Valor Air Plus had bad overall performance, only that it’s not nearly as good as some of the cases it was being compared to. 

Verdict: Reasonable Value for Shallow Desks

Of course, the Valor Air Plus is cheaper--indeed, cheaper than most of the lot here, especially given its full complement of fans. That cheapness, though does extend to some of the materials; on our sample, the right side panel was bowed inward. When we tried to fix it, we found it couldn’t hold the new shape. This is a steel panel we’re talking about. It's just a bit too thin.

Meanwhile, some of the budget cases we were just comparing are made of thicker steel, and may include advanced features such as a Gen 2x2-connected USB 3.2 Type-C port, mostly within $15 to $20 difference in price. Aesthetics aside, we'd go with the Thermaltake or Montech cases mentioned earlier, but the Valor stays in the game if you're looking specifically for a short-depth case that can hold a big motherboard and not require buying a whole bunch of fans or accessories to get started. It does have a niche in which it excels.