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Cooler Master HAF Stacker - Only limited by Your Imagination

2013-12-15
so back in October 15th Coolermaster launched a case that's really unique and is really aiming at giving the customer some serious versatility when it comes to meeting your needs without you having to buy a whole lot of extra equipment to fitment fitment I think that's a word fit minute case or outfit a case to your needs so instead they're trying to give you an option of something you can buy that may fit any possible scenario that you find yourself in and any given time and that case is the 1/2 stacker and you guys have been asked me to do a review of the 1/2 stacker and that's exactly what we're gonna do today so this is the way that it ships right here you get the 905 R and the R stands for rear mounted PSU there's also the 911 5 F which is a front mounted PSU and these do also support ITX motherboards in there we'll get more to that in a minute and the 9 3 5 which is the mid tower portion so you do get for one price the top and the bottom piece now we're going to talk real quick about the mid tower case on this it's got a huge side panel window that I really like shows off everything inside your case it's smoked it looks really good it's pretty rigid and I have no complaints about that and all of a sudden I now have like a runny nose so bear with me but when you look at the inside here you get six harddrive cages here our two harddrive cages with three hard drive sleds per cage three five and a quarter drives an SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray and you also have all black sleeve cables here now I don't want to spend a whole lot of time talking about the case itself when it comes to the mid Tower or the 9/11 5 individually because this really comes with everything that you would expect from a cooler master case I mean it's no different you've got your toolless locks you dis LEDs you know pop out really easily you just push this button and they come apart put your hard drive in there put it in slides right in there's really nothing groundbreaking or unique about that so instead of spending time on that let's go ahead and talk about what is unique about this case the fact that it's called the stacker is just that you can stack components on to this or more 9 1 5s if you want you can put one on the bottom or the top so what we're gonna do today I've got a second 9 1 5 right here and this is a 9 1 5f we're gonna go ahead and talk briefly what the differences are between these two cases and then we're gonna show you how they go together and come apart and then I'm gonna throw a bunch of parts in here we've got some alpha cool radiators here we've got four hard drives and we're just going to kind of show you what you can do with this case and that really the only thing limiting you is your imagination ok so looking at the 911 5r which is what comes shipped with the 935 or the stacker you have the side panel more start here it does have native three times 120 millimeter mounts or two times 140 millimeter mounts that are filtered unfortunately the filter is not a pop out or a magnet it does have these four screws so it's a little bit difficult to take out if you need in terms of just the fans already mounted you have to remove the fans a little bit of a drawback but hey it's there this is also how you would mount your radiator we'll get to that in a moment inside the 905 the one that comes with the stacker anyway you have another hard drive cage here with three sleds five and a quarter two lists plenty of options here for routing cables through grommets a giant grommet here motherboard cutout on the back io shield and the PSU mounting in the rear so you could put a second system on top of your main system if you wanted to do like a stream PCE or a guest PC or whatever you can do that with this case you could also remove these two hard drive cages and put them in the top and have a full data bank here or NASA set up or a light coining rig or whatever you want to do with that or you could customize this as a water box so it's very very customizable and before we show that off I just want to show you how simple it is to disassemble this there are four screws in the top here front and rear I've already taken those out you can access the top by simply sliding this really nice meshed top panel here it's very attractive which you can see then gives you practically full access unobstructed access to the top and if you remove the rear you get even more access to this box so that you can completely customize this the front cover literally pops right off giving you access to the single 100 or excuse me the single 92 millimeter fan in the front it's a little bit lacking but hey you know it is pretty small and then there is the top panel completely gutted now if you're like me and you want to use this as some sort of a rad box take out the four screws that are in here again just like the top screw in the front and the back on each side slide this back pull it up and it comes right off exposing the bottom and the top of the 9:35 which as you can see also supports three times 120 millimeter fans or two times 140 millimeter fans so that's really cool there now what if you want to put this on the bottom well no different then the way the feet are the bottom comes off or the top comes off of a 911 five you have four screws on the bottom you guessed it the feet slide right off you can put them on the bottom of this one here which essentially in the end ends up looking like this guy here which has the feet on there already as you can see now let's go ahead and roll briefly talk about the difference about the 9 1 5 F which is as you can tell by the model number there a front-mounted power supply unit for a micro ITX build our mini ITX build I keep seeing micro mini ITX build you've got an extension cable here so that your power supply cable can run to the rear of the case so that's the way they come apart that's the way that they mount oh and also to the 905 F does have the USB 3.0 audio input and output and power switch on there whereas the 905 our that comes with the case as you can see right here does not because this comes with the case you already have those buttons on the case there you go so when it comes to applications what can you do with this why would you want this and why would you almost knock it off the desk like I just did well maybe you're the kind of person that thinks more is more maybe you want to have all kinds of hard drives in the top water cooling set up in the bottom and a nice clean build in the middle maybe you want to stack these all the way to the ceiling because you could continue to stack these infinitely kind of like the Tower of Babel I guess if you're biblical but anyway I'm gonna go ahead and outfit this kind of with some uniqueness and we'll come back we'll take a look at what I did why I did it and it's just an example of what you could do with a versatile case like this okay so here we go this is kind of an extreme build out if you will we've got a lot going on here we took the extra nine one five we stuck it up on top and we put all of the harddrive cages here in the top giving us a total of nine hard drives that we could potentially have up here including a tenth that could be mounted here in the five and a quarter drive so you have like an entire data rack going on up here on the top for all your raid setups and things if you need that much data storage in the middle here we've got nice open air flow I've even mounted a 240 millimeter rad right here in the front got a reservoir here full sized ATX board could go there and power supply could still stay right here in the middle now on the bottom I opted to turn it into a water box for a radiator there's a couple of things I want to show you one when it comes to radiator support you can see we could fit a 240 in the front as well as two 360s in the bottom giving us a lot of surface area for water cooling now it mounts to the side panel here which I'm not a fan of I'm honest I'm not a fan of the way that that mounts but it is doable where you could put the Redbox all together first and then put the top piece on otherwise you have no way of getting in there to hook up all of your hoses and fittings and radiator power the pump and and all of that so I would suggest building the red box on the bottom first then putting the piece on top and lock-in it now so as you can see here it mounts right here on this side panel just like this so there it is we've got the three sixty millimeter rad and we've got three alpha cool fans on there but what I want to show you is that this case also offers something - modders if you're a modder and you'd like to modify cases and if you're like me you want the most radiator space that you can get you probably would be disappointed that this does not natively support four hundred and eighty millimeter rats however with minimal modding effort you could fit a four hundred and eighty millimeter in the bottom I mean if you look I have one sitting down in here right now and as you can see there is more than enough room for four hundred and eighty millimeter red in the bottom as well as having room for your end tanks and your fittings in there in fact you have room for two of them but what's going to be required to do that is you're gonna have to get yourself one of those radiator mounts they're just like an l-shaped bracket radiator mounts to that and you screw it to the bottom you can fit a for ID in there with no problem you would want to enlarge the hole though you would want to take this to a machine shop or something and get this hole opened up maybe put a nice billet cover on there otherwise you're gonna restrict the airflow just because of the opening limitation to this but that if you're a case motor is a very simple very easy and cheap mod to do so I just wanted to show you that you could natively do two 360 Reds in the bottom with the 240 in the front you could technically if you have the extra nine one five do four I'm all you can do for you can do for three hundred and sixty millimeter adds to in the top two in the bottom if you wanted or if you were me mod it for two four hundred and eighty millimeter Reds in the bottom which would for me be the best way to go this has everything you would expect plus more I mean you have ample room in the back for a case of wire management you have a nice thick cutouts right here for your cables to go through and they even indent it in slightly to give you about a full inch right here for your cables to run through has a native SSD mount on the back of the motherboard 140 millimeter fan included does not come with any front fans on there which I kind of found surprising but you can put two hundred are to 120 millimeter fans in their accessories let's talk about that real quick because you are potentially dealing with a long run from the power supply unit if it were in the bottom to the top they include this SATA power adapter that is very long now this is an extension from the point at which you could plug it in from the length of your power supply so you could you could have like a 10-foot cable if you needed it and they're already spaced perfectly for the three hard drives right there so you have a nice extension cable comes with one of those included all of your mounting hardware here for your hard drives and your motherboard standoffs as well as your fan screws some zip ties but the most important thing is if you kind of look at the back here you can see that you have some open holes that wouldn't be used now it does come with one PSU or power supply unit block out plate and it does come with one motherboard IO shield block out plate which you could use to plug up those holes so there it is guys the half stacker from cooler master it's a pretty awesome case in fact the only thing you're really limited by on this is your imagination I mean what would you do with this case I think it's a really cool design I like case modding and this honestly takes a lot of the modding effort out of it and you have to really try to figure out something to mod on this case because they've really thought of a lot of it the only complaint I really have about this case two things I would love to see 480 millimeter rad support because you can see the case size supports it it fits in there you can easily fit two in there the second thing is because the grommets are right in the middle right here your cable management has to come through these grommets they can't flow behind the motherboard so you can't go from top to bottom behind the motherboard and hide them away that's so but if you're good with cable management it may not be that big of a deal that's honestly all I can come up with that I found to be any sort of a downside to this case but there it is guys half stack er tell me what you think about it what would you do with this case and for the price that you pay for this case at the time of recording 169 bucks for the 93 nine one five art there it is I think it's pretty awesome tell me what you think so JC since if you liked this video hit the like button if you didn't hit the dislike button and of course I hope you subscribe if you're new to my channel and as always I will see you in my next video you
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