Montech King 65 Pro Case Review & Benchmarks: Cable Management, Thermals, Noise

But for those of you who have used the King 95, a lot of this case will be familiar: It’s intended to be a cheaper variation of the theme. There are some paneling changes, like the top panel, but a lot of the interior is familiar. 

Because we never formally reviewed the King 95 as it was during our case benchmarking rework, we’ll treat this as the first look at both the 95 and 65 features and review it fully. Since there’s shared tooling, some of the discussion will apply to both.

Let’s get into the review.

Pricing & Alternatives

We’ll start with the competitors in this price range.

Currently, the King 95 Pro is $140 to $150, including its 6x ARGB fans. The non-Pro variant is the same case, but drops to 0 included fans and is currently around $110. At $100, the King 65 Pro swaps some panels but adds 3 fans back. 

Somewhat confusingly, we found Montech’s own King 95 on Newegg for $90 at the time of writing this. They’re calling this a “holiday sale” -- it’s October 10th as we write this and we have absolutely no idea what holiday that is for, maybe “Newegg Needs Money Day,” but the point is that $90 makes it cheaper than the brand new King 65 Pro and may lead to some product cannibalism. Adding 3 fans wouldn’t be that expensive.

In price and ignoring form factor, the King 65 Pro competes with the Lian Li Lancool 207, the $80 case we just reviewed. The Lancool case is a more traditional design, while this is a dual-chamber fishtank, so they have different looks. Lian Li’s Lancool is an excellent thermal performer with some cable management challenges.

The SilverStone 514X is another case around $100 that the King 65 competes with on price, but is totally different on style.

The Phanteks XT Pro Ultra is $80 and comes with 4x 140mm fans in a standard form factor case as well.

As for actual style competition, the Lian Li Vision is currently $130 to $140 and doesn’t include fans, but would match for the general design.

Montech King 95 & King 65 Differences

The King 65 Pro adds a bolted-on front plastic piece to square out the front/bottom of the case. This is in contrast to the curved design of the King 95. 

Aside from the glass, the top panel also features curved edges as compared to the King 65’s straighter-edge design. The King 65’s top and back side panel also features a more standard mesh ventilation as compared to the King 95’s Hyte-inspired sweeping design. The King 95’s ventilated side panel also features a built-in dust filter, whereas the King 95’s solution does not. 

There are also differences between the fan hubs of both cases. The King 65 features 6 total connections whereas the King 95 Pro has 10 total ports. 

Another difference includes the fact that there are rubber grommets within the King 95 Pro, which are absent from the King 65 Pro. 

Montech King 65 Pro Build Quality & Panels

Those are the key differences. Now we’ll get into build quality and panels of the King 65. A lot of this discussion will also apply to the King 95.

Overall, panel construction quality is good on the King 65, but there are some caveats.

At Computex, we noticed that the front panel was very slightly misaligned with the decorative plate for the I/O side. This is somewhat of a nitpick, but that’s because it’s rarely an issue. 

The cases that we got resolve this issue and have the two front panels level, so that was nice to see. 

The front decorative strip is actually just plastic with a brushed look to sort of fake an aluminum appearance, serving as a cheaper gimmick to emulate the O11D and 6500D (read our review) look.

As a downside, the top metal strip for the supporting backing of the glass front panel was bent up on our black King 65 Pro. We always include damage in our reviews, whether that’s quality control or shipping. This particular damage looks like something that happened at the factory, not in shipping. It could be easily pressed back down with a flat edge.

As a positive, the panel gap between the front and side panel is flush, which wasn’t the case with the show model we saw 5 months ago. Cheaper cases often have problems with panel alignment.

The side panels are secured with thumbscrews, which we always like to see just as a security feature when moving the computer around for cleaning and maintenance. The front panel pops out easily once the side panel is removed.

Like we saw on the Lancool 207, the King 65 uses a reinforced rectangular piece of steel to support the snaps to the frame.

The front corner of the top panel is also relatively strong, unlike the Tryx case, because Montech designed it properly. The Tryx case top panel was caving in not from shipping damage, but from design issues, and we want to make sure that plot doesn’t get twisted because it’s important. The King 65 is relatively stout, which helps reduce the top panel length to provide strength, and is also supported by a more significant anchor to the deeper secondary channel, meaning a lengthier attachment point to serve as a counter support on that front edge.

The top panel itself is of sturdy build and has butted-together steel around the edges to give clearance from the fan rails while adding structural rigidity, but lacks the mesh we saw in the King 95. 

The final side panel is a little floppy from lack of thicker supports, but has no functional downside. It’s also ventilated for air intake through the side. 

Removing that panel, there’s a cable management cover tray with 2x 2.5” SSD mounts in it. Two screws can be removed to hinge the door outward, giving access to the drive mounts and two additional fan mounts with rails in the door. And this is where we get into an area that Montech could improve.

Both sets of fan mounts have heavy obstructions. By accommodating both 120mm and 140mm sizes, Montech needs two sets of mounting points. Unfortunately, in the process of creating these, it has covered up to about 20mm per side of the fan blade, or 40mm total horizontally obstructed. This is a huge amount of intake area loss. Montech could still support two sets of rails, but at least cutting a hole right in the middle would be better -- or even running the rails the entire length of the fan so that there’s some room for air. This is an oversight that likewise extends to the King 95. The King 95 Pro did OK in most of our tests, but falls behind other cases with similar fan count. This is a large contributor to that.

Montech King 65 Pro Cable Management

For cable management, the King 65 continues the trend of including velcro cable ties that secure behind the motherboard tray, which itself is already deep enough to provide functionally limitless cable space. Although we’ve since built in the cases, we liked how the fans were pre-routed and arranged out of the box.

The power supply sits elevated atop a rubber-damped pad, providing clearance on all sides while hopefully absorbing vibration that could cause noise. Although the exterior of the hard drive cage has rubber dampers, the drive sleds themselves do not. If supporting 3.5” drives, we’d like to see rubber dampers at the contact points where the drive meets the plastic or metal. 

Access is through the rear for drive installation, which mostly makes things easier. They aren’t hot-swap cages with pre-wired backplanes or anything fancy like that, but the rear access does make things easy to get to.

As for radiator, GPU, and fan support, it’s the same as the King 95 Pro: Montech’s GPU support is up to 420mm long, so basically any video card, and radiator support is up to 280mm or 360mm top, 140 or 240mm side, and 175mm tall air coolers.

Montech King 65 Pro Thermal Benchmarks

CPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

We’ll start with noise-normalized CPU thermals under a full torture workload.

Unfortunately for the King 65 Pro, it’s the new worst result on the charts. These fans just aren’t powerful enough to provide the cooling necessary, and likewise, extra noise created by paneling choices, such as the sharper angles and the obstructions, leads to a need to reduce speed to normalize for noise.

The King 65 Pro lands at 57.6 degrees over ambient for average P-core temperature, putting it behind even the Hyte Y60 (watch our review) in the baseline setup.

The Antec C8 runs about 3 degrees cooler, which is significant, although it carries a $50 premium. The same-priced Silverstone 514X (read our review) runs about 6 degrees cooler with its own stock fans. The Flux Pro (read our review) does well here, but costs $80 more than the King 65 Pro, so it’s not a fair comparison. We know, that’s hard to believe since they’re both pros.

The Lancool 207 is $20 cheaper than the King 65 Pro though and manages to completely dominate it on this chart. At 44.5 degrees, it’s not even close. The King 65 Pro is just not a great thermal performer.

The King 95 Pro with the glass front ran at 50 degrees over ambient, which is over a 7 degree reduction without even using mesh. That’s a lot of impact from the extra fans and panel changes.

GPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

Here are the GPU thermals for the same noise-normalized test.

The King 65 Pro gets destroyed here. It is not only at the absolute bottom of the chart, but it’s several degrees worse than the previous worst: The FARA 515XR set the floor at 54 degrees over ambient previously, with the King 65 Pro at 57 degrees over ambient. For GPU testing, that’s a big swing. The GPU is not normally as sensitive to the case changes as the CPU in our tests.

The $150 Antec C8 (read our review) is an impressive 15 degrees better than the King 65 Pro. The $80 Lancool 207 is also about 15-16 degrees better than the $100 King 65 Pro.

Standardized Fans: CPU Thermals

The next test is where we pull all the included fans and swap them for 3 standardized fans. Some cases are worsened by this, as we’re removing more abundant or better fans; however, this is useful for evaluating changes to the chassis structure itself. 

As a perfect example: The King 95 and King 65 are suddenly exact equals when we swap to the same fans and positions. They’re within 0.4 degrees of each other for P-core average performance, which is impressive. That’s a testament to our new methodology and is great to see.

The Antec C8 with comparable side intake lands at 46 degrees, outperforming the King 65 and King 95 alike. Because we’ve normalized to the same fans and in the same positions, we can confidently state that the King 65 and King 95 have paneling that obstructs the fans enough to worsen performance. Montech could boost itself by changing its porosity and all the small obstructions to airflow that add up, like those earlier rails we discussed.

Standardized Fans: GPU Thermals

GPU thermals when using standardized fans are also within roughly 1-degree ranges between the King 95 and King 65. The curvature of the glass theoretically should help improve air access to the GPU, but this gets into areas where we’d need CFD to know for certain. Regardless, at about 1-degree difference, they’re functionally the same.

The Antec C8 with side intake again climbs ahead, up at 42 degrees for GPU temperature against 44.6 on the King 65.

CPU Thermals: Full Speed

Back to the included stock fans and at 100% fan speeds, the King 65 Pro landed at 37.8 dBA as tested in our hemi-anechoic chamber, aligning it most comparably with the Antec C8 ARGB, which was 37.11dBA. That’s the same noise level.

The C8 outperforms the King 65 even with both at full fan speed, at 49 degrees to 54 for the average P-core temperature. The cheaper FARA 514X is quieter than both, at an impressive 35 dBA and 47 degrees over ambient. The Lancool 207 sounds more like a vacuum cleaner at 41.6 dBA when running at full speeds, but pushes to 41.6 degrees over ambient.

VRM Thermals: Noise-Normalized

Noise-normalized VRM and RAM thermals position the King 65 Pro at 36 degrees for the VRM and 26 for the RAM. These results have it toward the bottom of the chart, though better than the Hyte Y60 with its stock configuration. Both the VRM and RAM thermals are completely acceptable, it’s just that it isn’t as competitive.

Montech King 65 Pro Conclusion

Thermally, the Montech King 65 Pro is just not impressive. It can’t overcome the limitation it has on its panel and case design. Its 3 moderate fans are just not sufficient for it to get anywhere impressive on our thermal charts and it’s at the bottom of some of those charts.

In terms of build quality, in some places, it’s pretty good. The actual core of the chassis is good overall. There’s a lot of space to work with the cabling. There’s also some cool features like the side-mount fan tray, which is also on the King 95 Pro. Overall, the build and panel quality are fine. It’s just that at $100, it has to be really competitive and one of the things it's competing against is the King 95 Pro without any included fans. 

This makes it hard to recommend the case in any one category. Overall, the King 65 Pro is okay. We don’t hate it, but against standard form factor cases like the Lancool 207 or even the FARA 514X, which we weren’t thrilled about but we thought was fine, those are better options at this price. They are also better thermal performers, though the King 65 Pro is certainly a lot easier to build in than the 207. 

In terms of other competition, the Antec C8 is similar in design to the King 65 Pro, but it’s wider and its non ARGB variant without fans is similarly priced.

Within $20 plus or minus of the King 65 Pro, the case kind of gets its ass kicked in either direction thermally.