Gadgetory

what's going on everyone welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well today is very exciting because the folks over at fantex have just released two brand new cases they are the evolve shift and shift X I'm going to be building my new htpc inside of the shift today it's actually the shorter of the two cases doesn't have quite as much liquid cooling support but still one hell of a case as we're about to see so yes I will be using this case for my upgraded home theater PC that we will be building today this is the current home theater PC that wifey sauce and I have been using for the last six or seven years now granted we made a couple hardware upgrades along the way for example we now have a Sapphire Radeon r9 285 in here it's nothing super current but definitely not six or seven years old the initial or the original CPU is still mounted however we've got a core i5 35 70 K Ivy Bridge quad core processor no hyper threading so it's not a slow PC but it's definitely not rocking like current gen modern part so this will be a pretty phat upgrade to say the least in case you guys are wondering about the chassis this is the silverstone sg0 5 a fantastic mini ITX case that really just boils down all the parts to pretty much a smallest of a footprint as you can probably get even by today's standards so outstanding case but it is time to move on to the evolve shift and we'll be talking more about this case of course throughout the rest of this video but first the rest of the parts that we're using for our upgraded home theater PC my cpu of choice is the core i5 7600 K KB Lake processor from Intel it's got four cores no hyper threading but that's totally fine this is more than enough for what I need it for don't worry no one stole the CPU it's just I took it out of the box a while ago but it's a fantastic CPU the reason why I'm going Intel for this build and not horizon for example is first all first of all I don't need more than four cores for what I'm going to be using this system for which is mainly light web browsing and streaming streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime things like that additionally there aren't many fantastic mini ITX am4 boards out right now I mean there's the biostar one that I've already used it might go anywhere do anything PC but it doesn't have Wi-Fi I really wanted Wi-Fi for the upgraded home theater PC because we've got Wi-Fi on the existing one it wouldn't be much of an upgrade if we remove that so until those new boards roll out we're going Intel it's going to be more than that again for what I'm using this system for that being said we've got a pre suite motherboard here this is the ACS ROG Strix Z 270 I gaming that's a mouthful a fantastic board I've actually used this before in the end case m1 build that I did back in the day if you guys want to go ahead and check that out it's a great board it's got Wi-Fi on it m2 nvme support and all that jazz it's beautiful it's one of the nicest looking Z 270 boards at this form factor in my opinion so it's going to be fantastic looking in this build also we've got kind of a gray gray anodized aluminum panels on the front and back of the shift so I think that's going to match really nicely with the board which you will be able to see through the double tempered glass side panels on that case pairing nicely with an H 80 IV - that's of course going to be our liquid a IO for our 7600 K this is from Corsair it does have fans on either side of it it's a 120 rad I'm very curious to see if we're going to be able to fit both of those fans with this thicker radiator inside of this evolve shift we're gonna have to see I've got some other backup a iOS in case that doesn't work though not to mention the gray fan blades and accents on the cooler itself are matched pretty nicely with the rest of our system including this Dominator platinum kit 16 gigabytes 2 by 8 gig sticks these are the 3200 kit but I don't think we needed to go that fast so we're actually going to be using these sticks which are rated at 3000 megahertz thank you very much autofocus pulling out all the stops for our video card I've got the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti for the win 3 because we can this is not required or necessary at all this is totally overkill for what we're going to be building today but it's fun we can do it we're doing it because we can folks this is a fully air-cooled triple fan design from EVGA icx of course get that all those thermal sensors in there this is going to be a total beast of a card it is fairly large for a dad and board partnered 1080i so we're again this is one of those things we're going to see hopefully fingers crossed that it actually fits inside of this case if not I've got other cards for backup but that should be pretty cool I believe there's two eight pin PCI connectors for power on here so we're going to need a pretty hefty power supply to handle that such as this 500 watt SFX L unit from silverstone i've had this unit for a while it's a t+ golde fully modular it's fantastic all the cables that it comes with our flat black so it should match really nicely as well and very reliable have not had any issues in my past experience with that unit I should also mention that the evolve shift that we're talking about here only supports s FX and s FX L units you'll have to upgrade to the shift X if you want that full ATX PSU support one of our last parts before we move on to the case itself is this Patriot hellfire m2 SSD I actually dug this out of an older PC of the month with inside of the enthu proach is also a fan text case I totally overlooked the fact that I had left this SSD just rotting away in the motherboard there and a little m dot to slot but here it is a 480 gig capacity drive superfast so thank you very much patriot for sponsoring this drive way back when so that we can use it again today and now last but not least our case of the our the evolve shift from fantex the anodized aluminum panels look really sweet they are super high quality a nice finish and no sharp edges or anything like that at all this is again the gray version it does come in black as well just gives it a really nice stealthy look if you go that route same with the shift deck so you can get in either these gray or black panels dual tempered glass again on either side very high-quality looking there it looks like they've got a slight tint to them front i/o you pretty much just got these two USB 3.0 ports hovering at the back here I think fantex decided to put them back there just to tidy up the front look the appearance is much more minimalistic with the ports out of the way but they're still side mounted so it should be fairly easy to reach back there and pop in a flash drive should you need to and you've also got some nice ventilation at the front and back so you can see the side ventilation pretty generous pretty pretty good ventilation at the top as well I should also mention that this case is can be mounted either vertically or horizontally so you can actually lay it completely on its side if if that's the way you want to go gives you some flexibility when deciding where to put this in the living room or wherever and I'm almost positive that you'll be able to move these little feet should you decide to orient the case on its side additionally we've got a nice looking top here very very sexy kind of a big metal grill it looks like there's a power button right here and this looks to be I thought it was a reset button at first but after looking at the spec sheet I think it's an RG button actually we'll test it out later but there's an RGB LED right here or a little strip right there which does sync up with fantex compatible LED strips and the RGB LEDs on your motherboard for example that can all be controlled and configured in programs like Asus Ora pop this guy open you just simply apply some pressure and it lifts up like so get an accessory box right here very easy access for when you first receive your case everything's good to go right there I want to give you guys a look at the backside of the case so you can see where the cables get routed out of so there's a cable routing hole right up here you can go out to you know your keyboard your mouse monitors etc that could all be routed out of this hole right here or even out of the bottom of the case vent X gives you the option to route either/or or a combination of both if you really want to this is also where your AC power cord plugs in to additionally I should have also mentioned that instead of using these USB 3 ports at the back if they're too cumbersome or whatever hard to get to you could probably just pop this open the top panel which gives you access to where your rear i/o would be technically it's now your top i/o based on how the internal layout works in this case so you can if you wanted to just pop in a USB flash drive straight from the top assuming that it's short enough to not interfere with this top grill so there's a quick rundown of the cases exterior let's go ahead and start building though that way I can give you guys an idea of what it's like to build inside of the chassis and of course take a closer look at the internal layout so got my screwdriver all handy let's get to building my new home theater PC alright so the first thing we want to do here is take off these side panels all four side panels so we can actually start installing things in the case the way we're going to do that is we're going to press down on the top panel so that it lifts up like so as I demonstrated earlier so it looks like each panel has two thumb screws apiece so I'm going to go ahead and start uninstalling the right side panel it looks like they are captive which is really nice because you don't want to drop a screw inside of the case and completely lose it so those are those are loosened I think the way to do this is you lift it uh-huh just kind of lift it up like that beautiful they came off really easy next up we got this sucker ha now looks like the thumbscrews for the front and back panels are actually mounted sideways as opposed to top-down which is kind of interesting so as long as you don't have super fatty fingers you should be able to get in there fortunately I'm able to unscrew these no problem straight from the factory usually for first time use you still have to use a screwdriver on thumb screws because there just tightens too tight when they leave the factory but this looks like it should be just fine I believe this pops off just the same way as the tempered glass panels do and their last panel come off just like so alright so the great thing about this design is that it sort of offers you of this 360 degree view of your open chassis so it's going to be really easy to just attack this from any angle from any side and that's going to help the build go along quite smoothly so that's really nice I'm just going to leave off the other side panels for now there was something that I wanted to mention about them though the front and back panels the aluminum ones actually have removable dust filters the best aside dust filtration that I showed you guys earlier those are actually removable filters looks like they just pop out like so you can run them under some like a water faucet or just you know use a can of compressed air or something like that to clean them off maybe once a month or so and then pop them back right in they are plastic they look kind of flimsy but you know fortunately not the handle them too often so they should be fine but that's that there's a removable dust filtration system here now that you guys have a better look of the inside of the case you might notice that it comes included with a 140 millimeter fan at the front this is the only included fan with the case and it's positioned again at the front right next to the motherboard and where your graphics card will be mounted on the other side there are mounting additional mounting points for a 120 or 140 just but just below the first fan and same mounting options at the very bottom of the case this is also where you would mount your your 120 millimeter rads either right here at the front bottom or at the very bottom of the case you can again I don't know if I mentioned this but you can mount both of them simultaneously but that will limit your radiator thickness to 27 millimeters on those rads so bear that in mind alright let's go ahead and install our motherboard now which you can see here I've already mounted the CPU water block of our a i/o onto the board itself of course we'll need to mount that little pesky IO shield first now you got to remember that the IO is going to be facing the top of your case it's going to be facing up so it's going to mount in something like that so we're going to want to make sure that we install our IO shields correctly it looks like that IO shield is in and go ahead and mount the motherboard to the four pre-installed standoffs so you'll notice that the the two on the bottom the two standoffs on the bottom actually have a little lip a little collar just to help you situate the boards that it just sort of rests on easy you also got to be mindful of the the PCIe riser it is sort of in the way so you've got to just hold it out like so before your mount as you mount the motherboard in there so there we go motherboard installed there's actually a cable management area right here you can see there's a little fold down door to conceal some of it keeps it looking nice and tidy I'm going to fold this little cable management door down magnetic you can see we've got some front panel connectors here tied down with a included velcro strap let's go ahead and plug in our USB 3 and front panel connectors so here's a front angled view I've just sort of started routing some of the front panel connectors like our USB 3 our power switch etc I've also wired up the front fan I actually wired it I ran the cable through this channel here which gets covered up really nicely with that magnetic door and then I passed it through the left side or the back side I should say of the case because is where all of the excess cabling technically goes is underneath the front and rear panels and fantex has done a real nice job of including plenty of velcro straps to hold those cables down so that you can fit those side panels on pretty easily and does a really nice job of concealing them as well pretty much this is all the cabling that I think I can do for now I guess I could pass the four pin fan connectors coming off of the CPU AIO water block through the rubber grommets there's actually two rubber grommets in this hidden cable channel here so that's really nice now since our Patriot Hellfires the only drive we'll be putting in today's system we won't really be utilizing any of the other storage options in this case but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about them so first off we've got two removable mounts right here these are two trays two and a half inch tray so you can put a pair of SSDs here the removable and they come off they basically mounted these little rubber washers so it's to lift you technically have to use a screw driver and physically mount the SSD to the tray but once it's mounted to the tray it just kind of pops onto these rubber washers here we've seen this design in other cases from fantex and other manufacturers in the past so that's really convenient on the opposite side of this wall where all of your where most of your cable routing goes all the excess kay in cable management you've also got a single mount for a three and a half inch drive or if you wanted to you could take one of these removable two and a half inch trays and move it to the opposite side assuming you're not going to be installing a three and a half inch drive I think that's a pretty pretty fair fair number pretty fair storage options for a case of this size and form factor we've also got this PCIe ribbon cable that sort of leads to the opposite side of the case telling us that this is really divided into two chambers more or less decide that you're seeing now with the motherboard and CPU and memory and then the opposite side with our graphics card we'll take a closer look at that later on alright so now we're ready to install the radiator of our a i/o and it's a 120 again and this case does support to 120 radiators one at the front here kind of towards the bottom of the front and then one at the very bottom we're going to opt for the bottom today because that might give us a bit more room for GPU clearance once that's in there so here's a look at the bottom plate which is removable in a very easy way you just kind of pull it and pop it off but like most front panels for a traditional ATX mid tower and it pops off like so it's very easy it's just got these four pegs that fit into these four holes two feets the feet that we saw earlier they are they're long feet but they have two pads per foot so here's two pads on one foot here's two pads on the other long foot and these are removable I can confirm that now with the two screws on either end just go ahead and remove those and the feet come right off if you want to lay this case on its side kind of like how it is now there's also a removable dust filter it's a nice little plastic filter comes out from the side underneath here we see a bunch of mounting points just tons of flexible mounting strips for 120 or 140 so we're going to start off with our fan and radiator we're going to do one fan at first and then install the GPU and see if we can get away with installing a second fan for push-pull priority number one right now is just getting at least one fan and the radiator installed so let's go ahead and see what this is going to look like here try to block it out all right radiator and fan installed pretty smooth we've also got our fan cable here which we can probably route through either this this generous opening right here to the right of the fan we can't actually route it to the left of the fan simply because that's where our power supply is going to go which by the way we are blocking our frigging power supply gosh darn it son of a bitch so apparently I screwed up guys I was supposed to install the power supply before mounting the radiator in here the order of operations in a case like this it's just such a unique internal layout is all it's all backwards it's all upside down so do this I can't I can't fit this in here so I messed up I should have been reading the instructions more carefully or even at all the manuals like underneath that box under the graphics card box I haven't been looking at the instructions so that's really my fault not fan text in any way but it goes to show that you know with a case like the evolve shift you kind of have to forget everything you know about building PC's because it is such a unique layout and you really have to sort of rely on the user's manual for the first go otherwise you could run into some snags such as this one so on that note I'm going to go ahead and uninstall this so I can install this and then reinstall that and then we should be good to go alright so here we have the power supply mostly installed it's kind of just put in place right now sort of difficult to get it in here with the plugs because what the plugs installed into the unit itself we hardly have any clearance above this is about 130 millimeters long for a power supply and we're just barely getting enough clearance so it was really a tight fit we still have to screw it in for now but let's go ahead and finish screwing this guy so we've got the power supply screwed in now and you can see here we've got a little pass-through at the bottom of the case it's just long enough to plug into the back of the power supply don't forget to flip the switch so the system boots properly when it's time to boot and you can see the pass-through goes to the rear of the case I think we might have spotted that earlier when we were taking a look at the exterior so that's all pretty good I mean power supplies complete for the most part now we can go ahead and reinstall our radiator alright so now we're just going to do some cable management so we've got all of our power supply cables right here at the back of the case there is a fairly large opening a nice cutout on the back wall for routing cables to there appropriate connector so we're going to start with our do our 24 pins get the meaty guy out of the way first see how easy it is to fit in through this little routing hole actually I'm going to unplug USB three header just for now to get it out of the way and sure enough our 24 pin seems to be getting through just fine here we go 24 pin installed next that we can do our 8 pin EPS for the CPU a lot now I have to bear in mind that the memory stick still have to go in here and they have pretty tall heat spreader so let's install the memory right now it's good to install the RAM especially if you have taller heat spreaders on your modules around the same time that you're doing cable management because otherwise if you install the memory well well before that it can get in the way and if you fell it too late then the cables that you've routed will get in the way of your memory stick so that looks pretty good for now not much we can do about this cable here what an issue that you might have is that the 8 pin or any cables that are to the right of the motherboard may interfere with the front fan here because it's just there's hardly any clearance between the fan and the motherboard so bear that in mind fortunately looks like we're getting by just fine here alright so now let's move on to our video card the video card is on the completely opposite side of the case it's got its own little chamber so we're going to turn this around so here's a look at the graphics card chamber and it's a pretty ingenious design how they've set this up so basically here's the the ribbon style extension for your PCIe going to a by 16 PCIe slot which you kind of can't see right here but it is right here that's attached to this bracket that's sort of on Rails and you can see here it's got a flexible mounting strips you can mount it all the way to the right or all the way to the left in the center wherever you want based on your clearance needs the bracket itself is being held in place by two of these screws here and there's one standoff on the opposite end where the cable channel is underneath the motherboard so we'll have to get back there in just a sec to remove the bracket the other cool thing about the bracket is that it's reversible so it allows you to flip the card 180 whichever way you want so right now it's configured in a way where the fans would be facing inward and that probably be the best for airflow I would imagine but you can reverse it as I mentioned to have your your powers I'm sorry your graphics card shroud facing the tempered glass if you want to get some nicer visuals of your card depending on you know what your temperature needs are what your thermal requirements are and just your aesthetic preferences I suppose so we're going to go ahead and I think we're going to mount it like this just for now just so we can kind of see it through the glass we'll see exactly how hot it gets when it's mounted with the fans facing the glass and how much clearance is left for that so let's go ahead and remove this bracket here this should remove just like so easy peasy now we can go ahead and flip around since we want to do the opposite orientation here basically the way you do that is you take this little stand off if you remove that and basically place it on the opposite end let me go ahead and do that really quick which you will need like a wrench to do that all right so now we can mount the graphics card to the bracket got to make sure that our little tab is downward just like on a regular motherboard looks like it's in there and we got to put two screws to keep the card fixed to the bracket all right video card mounted to bracket now we can install thing as a whole up actually no we can't houston we have a problem so it looks like we don't have quite enough slack on our PCIe extension cable to mount this card in this position without it running into clearance issues with our power supply there's just too much interference unless we were able to move the card further to the front of the case slide it slide it to the left but we can't do that because this is too short so we're just going to have to flip it the way it was initially intended which is like that so just really quick I want to show you guys how we routed the PCIe cables to the graphics card so from our power supply here with the cables coming out this end we sort of routed both of the PCIe connectors through the cable the cable channel right here in the middle of the case and then we stuck them through the bottom or the right side grommet there's only two grommets there so we stick it through the right side grommet and then wired it directly to the graphics card and fortunately there was enough length on the power supply cable to actually reach this is this is a very large card and I should also mention that it barely fit inside of this case any longer it would have run into clearance issues with the radiator here we would have either had to swap it out for a different a i/o entirely or take a smaller or shorter graphics card so fortunately it just barely fit and it still looks really nice even though we're not taking a look at the shroud itself the backplate is pretty sexy and kind of gives it a nice blackout vibe compared to this side all right so at this point since we don't have any drives other than the m2 that's already installed we're pretty much good to go other than cable management so we just need to tidy up the cables that are at the back of the case make them look nice and neat so that we can actually fit the back panel back on without too much trouble but I'm also going to throw in this LED strip this is actually a fan text branded LED strip it's RGB and it is actually compatible with the RGB controller on this case as I mentioned earlier so we're going to go ahead and connect it and the only thing is that it's completely lost all the adhesive the adhesive came off entirely and there's no magnets unfortunately so I don't know exactly how we're going to fix this to the case here but I guess we'll have to get creative alright so we've got a bit of duct tape here it's probably won't hold for very long but just for the sake of the video so I can show you guys the RGB controller later on so here we've got our makeshift adhesive which should temporarily hold this in place okay we'll see how long that holds for and I'm going to go ahead and plug in the cable already plug it in to our fan controller here last thing we have to plug in for this build is the RGB controller we meet we need to give it power just a little SATA connector I'm really glad that it's SATA and not molex so +12 you fantex why are that guy up and this is pretty much what we're left with in terms of our as far as our excess cabling goes this is it you're looking at it it's just it's just this mainly the SATA cable our USB 3 and some of the you know the front panel connector stuff but really easy should be really easy to tie down again most of our cabling our excess cabling is in this cable channel here so plenty of space honestly even though we didn't even utilize the drive mounts here either the three and a half inch or two and a half inch drive you can kind of see the mounting points here even though we didn't utilize those at all I could imagine that you'd still have plenty of room for cabling even if you did populate those mounts in some way so that's cool got these lovely little velcro straps I don't want to block our power supply fan that's a no-no let's kind of wire things up upwards all right so cable management took next to no time at all and it looks like we've still got plenty of room to pop our rear panel back on so let's go ahead and do that as we approach the end of this build there's hardly any clearance between the back plate of the graphics card and the tempered glass side panel so I'm actually kind of glad in hindsight's that we are mounting the video card with the with the the shroud facing inward I think that'll probably be a little bit nicer on our temperatures and now the final piece oh wait I didn't clean the inside of it yet there we go there's a little bit firm oh man this is looking nice and baled complete let's turn it on ready for it here we go moment of truth whoa my goodness that looks amazing holy I can't tell is that blue is that blue or white why I don't know why does it look like this boys well you know what honey this would be a perfect opportunity to do an RGB demo with the evolve shift and a compatible fantex LED strip what do you say let's do it let's see what happens I believe this button cycles through ten different colors so that's definitely blue I think the one before was just a white with a very bluish tint next up we've got oops let me go ahead and dim the lights a little bit and that's pink for a fuchsia fuchsia type of color we've also got red I think if there were different colors components there were different color components in there that looks pretty nice actually this is kind of like a yellowish green and that is green that's like a forest green and then that's turquoise yeah there's our teal so the other cool thing is that you can I believe you can turn off the LEDs if you hold the button down yep you have to hold it down for a good five seconds or so but the LEDs will disable you can go ahead and press it again to turn them on and I believe if you do a long hold a long press is supposed to give you different effects so now it's actually breathing doing like a breathing thing right Faden up and down this just fades between all the colors of the rainbow that's like the show floor mode I think it's just static after that point and of course you could just do away with the RGB button altogether if you wanted to by simply routing the LED strip to an RGB header on your motherboard should it support it and that way you can configure all of the stuff in the software whether it be Asus Ora or similar definitely a reason to pick up a fan Tex RGB strip or something like that if you want some additional bling and here's just a quick look at the opposite side well it's not quite as glamorous you can see some of the EVGA logo here through the backplate it's very it's very minimalist but minimalistic but it looks nice I believe that's also customizable in the EVGA precision X software so you get options you get lots of options and of course the RGB light at the top of the case is the matches the color of the RGB strip and stuff so pretty cool alright guys so there is mine YP sauces new home theater PC it looks fantastic you guys let me know what you think though in the comments below as far as the evolve shift awesome case for a hundred and ten dollars I don't know if I mentioned that yet but 110 MSRP at the time of launch at the time of filming there's this wifey sauce on your phone Annie but the shift X is $50 more than that so you can get that one for 160 I believe and yeah worth every penny at least for the shift I have yet to even open the box for the shift X let me know what you guys want to see with that case if anything in the comments below as well but a very lovely case very well thought out every inch of space is for the most part utilized quite well the cable routing in this case is also just managed very smartly the fact that you can hide all the cables underneath both the front and rear panels and this middle channel here for routing all your cables from the power supply to whatever components that need to be routed to is very very handy and it looks tidy too I mean if you're just looking at it dead-on you can't even tell there's just a cluster of cables behind that little magnetic door there so very good job fantex thank you for making another great case but guys let me know what you think of the shift so far what you think about its looks and its functionality as well let me know what you think and also toss me a like on the video if you enjoyed it before you go feel free to check out bit wit ultra might add free early access channel for a buck 15 month the first two weeks are completely free and you can back out any friggin time otherwise I'm Kaila big with thank you guys so much for watching subscribe to the channel for more tech stuff if you haven't already and I will see you all in the next video