Gadgetory

hey guys what's up Jays two cents here bringing you a video that I'm pretty excited about and that's because we are taking a look at case labs is very first SMA eight in the very limited edition gunmetal gray now we've already taken a look at this case a little bit here on my channel when we did project red mist which by the way is still not done at the time of recording this video it's like an ongoing project that feels like it's never going to end but this is going to be for my personal rig and I couldn't be more excited to show you guys the ins and outs what makes case labs cases just pretty much the best on the market okay now before I get into the review I want to tell you guys a little bit about the company case labs it's a family-owned company that's right here in Southern California and everything you see is done in-house the machining of the parts the powder coating the acrylic panel cutting everything you see is done in-house all the way down to their laser printed man Hill with blade with homemade staple no seriously guys case labs is pretty much exactly what you expect from a guy who one day said you know the case is on the market today suck and he came up with his own and the company went from there and here they are now and they have a whole line of cases everything from small ITX all the way up to ginormous double wide or even the sth ten which isn't this tall if you put the complete top and bottom pedestals on there me it's almost as tall as me but today we are looking at the SMA eight now this is one of their Magnum series cases and what I love so much about these cases is the fact that they are completely modular everything about this case is upgradable you pretty much have to configure it for your own needs unfortunately that type of quality does carry a hefty price tag now I know a lot of you may at this point already be going wow these are probably as expensive as complete belts but you have to understand who the marketed demographic is for these cases and this is for the zero compromise have to have the best of the best type of PC builder and believe it or not there are people like that out there that's why I have one and obviously red mist is based off one if you go and check the overclock net forms and look at their builds you'll find case labs cases everywhere so the people out there recognizing if you want the best that's exactly what this is and I want to point out I received absolutely no monetary compensation of saying they are the best this is purely my opinion I just have to put that out there because I know some of you guys may be wondering now everything in this case is aluminum there's no steel there's no plastic completely 100% aluminum now first things first we're gonna go ahead and get this door out of the way simply open it up and lift it off BAM the door is completely out of the way now the SMA 8 here features a couple of really unique things now they were one of the first companies if not the first company to actually market the removable motherboard tray it's got 4 thumb screws here that pop out they're spring-loaded and they don't come out so you don't lose them motherboard tray pops right on out there it is you can put your motherboard on your graphics card get everything ready to go on here and simply slide it back in the case when you're done a guy really love this gunmetal color I just have to admit now actually I'm going to stop right here for a second before I get too far into the review I want to point out that my case did come assembled because I live local to them in Southern California we were able to pick it up and it was already assembled now in order to come back shipping charges by shipping up the hemat like this it does come flat packed that means all of these parts are completely flat inside of a box and you have to assemble it and that's pretty much what this is right here these are all the instructions of putting the thing together so that you know how everything goes it's crazy to my next point everything is screwed together with very tight fitting screws that's what she said which means that there's absolutely no rickety no creaking no movement in this case whatsoever which we all love the fact that you can take it apart and put it together if you've ever had to drill up a rivet for a custom case mod you would certainly appreciate now mines put together obviously so we're going to start from there one of the things I do like is you guys will notice there's all these holes kind of going all the way around the build in the entire frame these are what they call their accessory mounts and they sell different pieces different bars that you can install that can you know be placed across here to give you some sort of accessory support if you want to do something custom it also gives you the ability to mount lighting to this without having to drill holes it's actually come in really really handy and it's nice and thick it's about an inch thick in depth so that you can height lighting behind there and it's not going to show you know through the actual case at all so I do really like that now if you come in here a little closer and you take a look at the floor on this one you'll notice in red miss we had some fan holes on here and this one does not this is just another case option that I chose with the solid floor which I really really like because I am going to do an acrylic panel on here more than likely I just opted not to do the fan holes on mine there now on the top here you can just pop this top panel off and you can order this top panel in different depths you can get it this is a I think a 20 millimeter I think some of that I remember exactly what it is 35 millimeter all the way up to like a super thick I think they even go up to 120 millimeters thick if you want to do giant rads up here but this just simply pops off and you can see you've natively got 4 times 120 millimeter radiator support as well as these rectangle cutouts on both sides of the case which is nice because this gives you a place to put your radiator fittings on here and have passed through if you want to come up or if you want to go down whatever you want to do it's supported now the other cool thing is you have these pre-drilled holes on the top of the case you pop these plugs out and if you want it you can even route tubing up to the top here and have no problem whatsoever you've got these four cutouts for the fans so you just remove the ones you need if you only need one or two you remove those the other state blocked off so you have air could ever pay a control as well as dust control inside this case now moving around to the front right here the same thing applies to the bottom you can just pop the side panel off it's just a little pop rivet of them not Ribbit's but there's a little ball mount's and just pop into these little tabs and here is our lower support now you can see I do have the five sixty millimeter red support already in here today I'm going to go a five sixty but you can also get radiator support for any size radiator do you want to put in here all the way down to I think a 240 maybe even a 120 which would be kind of silly but you could do that now the front of the case here as you can see we've got all these panels blocked off for the front airflow and the reason for that is you can now this is a separate you know component but you can buy this piece here to mount the radiator or fans to or radiator and fans and this mounts on the inside just like this to give you your airflow you can also get optional vents for the bottom if you want the entire front to be airflow but since we are in my bill going to be doing complete separation of the lower compartment from the front I have to delete these solid for the bottom and this one's going to basically get installed right there now over here on the front power switches you have high quality LED switches in here as well as the optional USB 3.0 floats that are right here on the front with headphone and microphone jack now you can see you have some very large openings right here which shows you just how deep the rear panel is for cable management as well as being able and you can see that that fits on there really tight I'm gonna need to loosen this up just a little bit don't say that's what she said or I'm going to flag this videos in a program remove the side panel just the same as the front and now you can see the frame of the SMA eight and case labs cases in general you can see just how well built these are there's absolutely no flex in this whatsoever in fact we'll take the bottom panel off here for the side and now you can see we're getting deeper and deeper in this case and we still haven't taken a single screw driver to this whatsoever now some of you guys in red Mis for asking me how are the hard drives mounted well if you take a look at the back here all of the hard drive cage is right here are mounted on the back so I think this is a great design I don't like having my hard drive cages in the visibility portion of the case so I don't like my 900 II it's got the hard drive K just sitting right there I think it really really ugly they hinder airflow so I'm gonna have nice open airflow in the front by them moving these cages to the back now for drive support they do have native support here for two three and a half inch drives and for two and a half inch drives right here so you can fit six drives on the back here before you even have to buy an adapter for the front which you could also put some hard drives in the front if you wanted you can see you have nice black sleeved cables here for the front input powers led the USB 3.0 my I mean I do think these could be a little bit longer especially the USB the front side USB something I encountered a red mist I do wish these cables were a little longer considering this case is about 25 inches in length it's a huge case there's no other way to put it now on the bottom you can see just how much room we have for power supply as you can see they do have two power supply options right here in the bottom this entire bottom panel removes this is an option that I opted for so this whole bottom panel removes and then massive radiator support how huge any link power supply you want and plenty of room for your plumbing your pumps whatever else you want to put down there in the bottom and as I mentioned you can get a good sense just right here by my hand it that that's basically can't even do this live long and prosper I don't know how to do this okay so three fingers keep this very clean I promise three finger depth is how much depth you have right here now I could scientifically just bust out the ruler which would probably make a little more sense what I'm gonna say we've got three J finger depth for cables bottom line is plenty of cable management room back here and you can even run 1/2 inch tubing all up through here and have no problem whatsoever so yeah plenty of room for that well guys the case loves SMA 8 and pretty much any line of product from case labs whatsoever it's going to give you just a whole new level of quality that I guarantee you've not felt in any other case before I mean there's some as I do kind of come close but the amount of craftsmanship that goes into this case is just bar none now I'm going to talk about some pros I'm going to talk about some cons because there's no such thing as a perfect product in my mind pros modularity the DES business modular modular Ness whatever it's modular so you can put stuff in here that you want in fact if you take a look right here on the desk you can see we've got you know this is all stuff that came with the the case I mean you've got all extra brackets extra screws the front covers you've got you know the little flex pay device mounts that come with it you've got a handle for the motherboard tray you even got motherboard tray feet so that you can turn the motherboard tray into like a little mobile test test bench if you want extra grommets and plug kits extra screws and I mean it's just endless anything that you guys could possibly need for this it's pretty much included but you can add on to that power supply supports just you can configure the back panel how you want it to have just the hex mesh on there even little fans I mean it's just so much you can do with these cases now the downside to that is the fact that it has a cost that goes along with it I mean this is not for the faint of heart for those that are worried about having the best case available and are a little bit less concerned about how much it hits their pocketbook now that's definitely going to be a - for a lot of people now other pros because it's 100% aluminum it's a lot lighter than you would think it is in fact this case right now I don't know exactly what's curb boy is but it's actually much much lighter than any other case in its class I mean the 900 II a lot heavier because it's ass main steel construction all aluminum I thought you got pretty good that's a good baseball who dumped me anyway yeah all aluminum construction so you know now what I do like is the motherboard is actually ATX compatible so as you can see I've got an e 80 EVGA z97 classified motherboard in here it goes all the way to the edge so it fills it out nicely if you don't have an EI TX view it just standard eat at ATX you have a little bit of a gap there kind of like red mist has some other boards you just can't help that now I do like the fact that you can pretty much drill in this anywhere that you want because it's aluminum I did drill into red mist I'll likely be drilling into this so it makes a lot easier to mod aluminum than it does to mod steel especially you know steel plated or folded steel that is some of these other cheaper cases that are pretty much surrounding me right now so the case slabs SMA a I'm pretty excited I don't know what I'm going to call the project yet the motherboard is pretty much just sitting in here I have not made a definitive decision on exactly which motherboard is going to go into this build yet I do have some options available to me but I'm not in any rush for this project so I don't know exactly what I want to do it because it does have kind of military look to it I was thinking about calling it actually my camera man right now coconut monkey was thing about call it project skunk works kind of like the Raptor project you know over at Lockheed Martin so it does have a very stealth look to it it looks like the best way to describe the gunmetal color it's like the color of the stealth fighter I mean it's just really militarized shake the camera yes you know do you think it looks like a military build here coconut monkey yeah thought so so I don't know when it's time to do the build after red mist is done in god will will do a build series on that and I'll get some feedback from you guys and how you want it to work but case lapse case guys it just doesn't get any better than this go and check them out case labs net.com dotnet follow them on twitter you can see some of their stuff up there and if you see this gun metal case up on their website this is the exact case because as I mentioned it is the first one they have done and assembled in-house and the full gunmetal color which if you guys know is a very limited edition color so there you go very excited to have this I can hardly contain my excitement no guys I really am excited about this so JC sense hope to see you guys my next video follow me on Twitter about tech stuff go to the website JC cents calm and as always I will see you in my next video make sure you there I'm gonna get you I'm gonna ciao hey you want to hear a really funny programmer joke yeah hey ready so the wife tells her husband who happens to be a programmer for Microsoft go to the store and buy a loaf of bread if they have eggs get a dozen he came home with a dozen loaves of bread programming humour take a literal if you had eggs good it doesn't the last statement was get a little for bread so a programming statement would say if get loaf of bread if condition exists eggs or present get a dozen loaves of bread it's a programming oh I gotta case the cameras you like good all right not funny I'll stop me yeah Hindu is a bit slit I know clearly I'm just done playing why are you looking