Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the BitFenix prodigy this is a completely unique case from BitFenix that they believe is going to turn the ITX gaming system segment completely upside down not up sights like some other boards not upside down or anything like not let the basic point is that they are expecting this to just change the way the game is played when it comes to small form-factor yet very powerful very capable machines so the first thing we're going to see when we open it up is a quick installation guide actually oh sorry sorry external packaging so there's not a whole lot going on over here other than some shipping labels and like Kemah tool free design BitFenix uber flex uper what does that say fiber flex it's like it doesn't say pure I wasn't sure what it said no like look at it what am I supposed to think that says right ah anyway I was a little taken aback by that but it looks like it's all good fiber flex soft touch surface treatment supports long graphics cars and up to 240 millimeter water cooling radiators which we happen to have what did I do with in here just which we happen to have one of right here so we can take a look at how that's going to fit inside flex Kage hard disk rack to a free design and nothing that looks like just a line to help you figure out where to put the sticks all right so right so we found a little manual inside then we find the case itself got a 15 a global going on here let's flip it upside down and get her out I'm actually really really excited to see this case because they've done a lot of things with it that are incredibly unique and I it's just one of those things like I actually built myself in a silverstone sgo 1vw Oh a long time ago myself a triple water pool a triple radiator water cooled system at one of those just because I'm not a bit of a thing for like small systems I think they're I think they're adorable and I think they're awesome so figuring out creative ways to put more hardware in less space definitely floats my boat so I really want to see this in person all right so let's have a look at the general aesthetic I mean the first thing that there is to kind of notice about it is it's kind of like a it kind of looks like a like a Mac Pro with the whole like handle thing going on on the top and the bottom also I specifically asked to to check out the white version because I thought that that would be sort of sort of more more more Mac like I'm thinking we might do a hackintosh guide at some point on NCIX tech tips although we might just do like an extreme gaming build within a small form-factor case not really sure what route we're going to go with all of that but I figured this would be more appropriate for that particular project so the front is this is Wow this is this is really nice okay so the soft touch finish is on these parts here so this plastic trim piece here which has a bit of flex to it okay you can actually absorb a fair bit of shock but doesn't look bowed actually even the even the bottom right now it's got a little bit of bow to it but not much it looks pretty sleek and the soft touch finish is also here on the front so on the front piece here as well as the five and a quarter inch bay cover the five and a quarter if a cover I think is important to have that same finish in that same color because a lot of people for an ITX system aren't even going to bother with actually a lot of people in general don't bother with optical drives anymore anyway you've also got a pretty nice-looking BitFenix logo here on the front I really like their logo with the shield in the wings I think it looks pretty sleek a lot of the time you get a company logo right in the middle of a product it just looks like stupid like remember the old remember the old Adele Circle logo I've been put in on the side of the panel like this big and you're just looking at it going wool it's horrible why would you do that so so yeah I don't mind when it's a nice cool-looking logo like that on the side we find power reset microphone headphone and two USB 3.0 ports on the back we find Wow look at that 120 ml or 140 millimeter cooling fan we've also got oh this oh I like this system I've seen this before so you loosen this okay it's a little bit tight from the factory but off to grab the screwdriver but you loosen this piece lift it up and then it moves the plate that holds down the the two expansion cards so remember guys this is ITX so you can only are actually going to be installing one expansion card the reason that they have two slots there is because a lot of high-performance graphics cards are dual slots so you will need the additional slot for cooling you can see that the motherboard is mounted horizontally based on where the i/o shield is going to go and it accepts a standard ATX power supply once again using thumb screws and I've seen this before as well so you take this plate off you mount the power supply to it and then you slide the whole thing in from the back in fact that's not even just a characteristic of smaller cases even mighty jo7 mounts the power supply like that on the top here we've got a switch which now allows us to remove this there you go like that easily cleanable filtered mesh and it just snaps in place with yes now cool oh and that's where we find the place where we would potentially be mounting a dual radiator so it looks like that probably goes in from the inside you know it's not they don't expect you to just kind of like put it right here although you know what that wouldn't have been a bad approach either if if they left a little bit more if they left to let you know you could probably even mod this to go like this if you painted a radiator like you know like a nice white for example and then put like you know pretty slick-looking white fangirls on it shave that down a little bit and throw this on here that could actually look really really good and then you'd save yourself even a bit more room inside you might even be able to go like push pull if you wanted to be pretty ridiculous about it so that's kind of a cool interesting development here alright so moving right along you know what give me a second here guys because it looks like I'm going to need a screwdriver to open this not completely yet stuck all right so we've loosened all the screws and we are now ready to go ahead and open up the back of the case so here we go we can take off things like the power supply bracket like I said you just mount back to your power supply you can clearly see the power supply mounting has a nice little rubber mounts there go ahead and do that okay let's take off the side panels let's take off the backside panel first because that's the one I'm a little bit more curious about how exactly they've executed it because you can see these buttons are all sort of part of it oh okay that's going to be a bit of a wiring trickiness although I don't think it's that big of a deal because what you should really be doing is doing all of your wiring putting on your backside panel then you'll wire these up and then you put on your other side panel I mean I can't think of any really good reason why you need to take off the side panel looking at the interior of the case right now here so okay fascinating sorry this sorry I'm not letting you guys see what I'm looking at another cool thing I'll check this out guys we've got SSD mounts on the inside of this panel there's just a plastic piece right here you can actually take it off you can see there's four screws that hold in this plastic piece and you can put up to two SSDs in here I'm a huge fan of mounting SSDs on like the back of your motherboard tray or on your side panel because I think in my mind that's the whole point of SSDs being small so that you don't actually have to have a huge case and you can have all these SSDs and stuff so that that that definitely gets a big checkmark plus from from me so yeah the whole thing is very solid actually like you can see how thick oh my don't my iPhone in my pocket okay whatever so the odd yeah it's okay no one cares about your HTC phone ah sorry so cuz anyway thick metal thick steel moving right along let's flip it around to the other side so we can get it all stripped down before we try to analyze it too much so here we've got more ventilation I am fully expecting this case to be very very vent elation friendly so you can see that right next to the graphics card they're not just doing it willy-nilly right next to the graphics card is where they put additional ventilation holes so what that will allow you to do is install a Bravo I'm trying to find a video card just sort of bear with me for a sec here guys um you can install graphics cards that use a blower design cooler um yeah I found one that doesn't use a blower design found the blower design cool if it isn't mounted to a card okay this'll have to do here we go you can either mount a weird video card that uses like a like an aftermarket e style design that doesn't blow all the air out of the case because you've got pretty good ventilation with the vents here as well as the on the top but what I'd really recommend with a case like this is a cooler that uses an external blower design so it's pulling air in from here and then it's exhausting it right out the back of the case so you can actually isolate the cooling of many of the components of your system into the zone so you've got your power supply isolated into you know let's just try to hold on to these for now you've got your power supply isolated into a zone because it's pulling air directly from under the case through a filter so you can see the filter is easily removable here just clean that throw it back in through a filter and then right out of the case you got your video card pulling air in through the perforations and then blowing it right out of the back of the case and then the only thing that's going to rely on the general case airflow is going to be your CPU and you know your RAM and other trivial things like that so so it makes for a very very sound very efficient cooling system now of note is the fact that unlike many cases that use this bottom intake air thing for the power supply BitFenix is actually given enough space under the case for it to get an adequate airflow supply you see a lot of cases that just have little feet you know about this big and then if you put them on carpet that power supply is going to be completely starved for airflow unless you flip it over and then you're pulling in warm air from the video card or whatever else is nearby and you're not cooling your power as efficiently and since your power supply is one of the fans that you have the least control of in your system if you feed hot air into it your system is just automatically going to be louder so they have thought of that and they have given you ways of combating that you can see the ITX motherboard trays right here again very solid I'm really impressed with the rigidity and how solid this case is no no don't worry that wasn't it not being solid this whole harddrive sled comes right out so that's really cool you can mount up to three three and a half inch drives or three 2.5 inch drives in the with the 2.5 inch mounting holes right here that also gives you additional room for graphics cards so you know what I am going to go hold on let's posit I'm going to go find another graphics card so yeah we found out that we can actually install a pretty darn big graphics card in there if we remove the hard drive cage so the 6990 is the largest graphics card that I have on hand and I think almost anyone has on hand and that fits in there just fine once you remove the other three and a half inch base so that doesn't mean that you can't install any drives anymore because check this out guys it's very efficiently laid out you can actually put an additional two three and a half inch drives or 2.5 inch drives right over there they've also got more SSD mounting holes right there on the bottom so you can mount another SSD in the bottom so you can do two SSDs on that side panel an SSD bolted to the bottom of the case you can do then up to five three and a half inch or additional to the half inch drive so natively I could actually mount my hair check this up natively I could mount my ridiculous eight SSDs that I use in my personal system into the BitFenix prodigy however I wouldn't have anywhere to put the raid card unless I wanted to run onboard video but you know whatever the point is just it accepts a lot of drives given the form factor you can mount a five and a quarter inch drive and they haven't limited you to a slimline again the mounting is very solid you saw this from the top already I think so that's pretty pretty self-explanatory and now I think the next thing to get home Oh check this out okay you know what we'll be back in a minute so we figured out the front fan situation you can do dual 120 millimeter wave fans you can do 140 on 180 of 200 or 230 if you don't decide to do dual 120 so it comes with all the various mounting holes you need and you can fully remove the five and a quarter inch cage if you don't need it so if you wanted to put a front radiator you need to get that under out of your way all you got to do is undo a couple screws here and then you pop off the front panel which incidentally is also how you mount fans um I can okay we did this off-camera so she may be that hard at least slick did it this long oh okay yeah I was pressing against the front while I was trying to clip it so the front panel comes off like that you can see all the ventilation holes that are providing actual air flow to those front fans so that they don't just starve and you're flipping her around so here's the sizing so if you were to put a dual 120 mil radiator there it would take out pretty much the whole front of the case I mean most of that would be our flow up here would be where the barbs go and there wouldn't really be any mesh there but that that is how that would work now what slick and I are going to have to figure out is if we do my idea where we put the radiator actually on the top of the case and and like make the cuts that we need to could we actually mount to dual radiators in this case which would be actually you know what we could probably do two duals and a single in the back so we could do up to five 120 millimeter radiators in this case with a little bit of creativity which would obviously be the ultimate overclocked like hackintosh editing pc so so we're I honestly think this case just gets our DIY juices flowing because there's a lot of different stuff you can do with it so you can remove this you can remove this if you want to you just got to undo a few screws on the bottom and you still have the option to mount your three SSDs so you can make yourself like SSDs are getting so much less expensive you can make yourself like a raid 5 of 3 256 gig SSDs which is going to be 500 gigs of storage space which is more than enough for whatever you need to do sort of day to day and you have a for it you know ad Roble or something to story for your mass storage and yeah let's just say slick and I are really excited about what kind of projects we can get going on this case so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the now gutted and completely unrecognizable BitFenix prodigy and I hope you guys are as excited about this case as I am don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos