Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the shinobi with the twist this is the shinobi XL which stands for extra-large actually I don't know that it does it might stand for XL ATX because while that does mean that the case is probably extra large whoa it's really big huh okay and that's what yeah I said wait no okay backing it up um XL ATX is a longer than longer than standard form factor so that is to say that it is you know about two inches longer than you're probably used to and sometimes wider here we have a manual and let's go ahead and you know what let's look at the box before we open this out there we go soft touch surface treatment we're used to seeing that on BitFenix cases it feels nice looks nice for super speed USB 3.0 ports including or in addition to we'll think about it later they're super charge port which is cool delivers up to 2.5 amps of power on the front USB which means you can charge anything you want quickly tool free design a flex cage hard to scratch which rack which means you can go this way that way or remove the whole thing entirely XL ATX compatibility and superior water cooling support so this case supports up to two triple 120 or 360 millimeter as the kids call them today radiators natively I am glad to see a manufacturer taking or actually a lot of manufacturers these days taking water food so seriously because while it's all fine and good to be able to put one 360 millimeter radiator water cooling guys are like the kings of more is better so two 360 male radiators must be better uses a closed cell phone nice soft foam happy to see this previous 15 s cases I've seen tacked in a hard foam which I do not I definitely like to see closed cell phone because in Canada our country is really big and cases and systems often have to travel very far but an inch of padding by the way I often have to travel very far before they reach their intended destination so what that means that if you got if you've got a hard phone you might be in trouble because it'll survive the first drop for sure and it might survive the second drop but I can tell you now it's probably not gonna survive the third drop because once it breaks the structural integrity is not as good as it was before it was broken which stands to reason so let's have a look at the aesthetic of the case one two three four five five and a quarter inch base beautiful brushed metal BitFenix logo here on the front it has what they're calling a classic shinobi look and I would agree that the shinobi look is very classic with clean lines a nice square overall design although I don't know if you can call the shinobi a classic case just yet because it hasn't been on the market very long although it's probably on its way here on the front we've got our charging part so there it's marked for the battery and it's color-coded yellow we've got four super speed USB 3 ports headphones microphone power and reset that's a nice recessed reset so it's not that easy to hit by accident learn how to get this off it's gotta be a way to do it alright let's move around to well I guess the sides are pretty similar you're not gonna need to see the other side because it pretty much looks a little something like this so you've got your top piece this is using the soft touch the front bezel is using soft touch this is just a powder coated metal finish although it's not bad and then on the back see this is what used to pass for water cooling ready now the manufacturers including BitFenix for this particular case are actually building in mounting space for radiators it used to be there like yeah you can you know run into a radiator outside of your case because someone actually does that no they don't so this is not water cooling ready but it's there in case you actually do want to use it and you could even run two separate loops so I guess that's kind of convenient if you're one of those guys who does run chill liquid for example I have done it so I shouldn't say nobody does it but it's just more rare this is actually very solid this is a big side panel so you have to use a fairly thick grade of metal in order to have it have very very little flex like that you guys see that not bad at all I mean this is a slightly more expensive case then I've typically looked at in the past from BitFenix so I guess it stands to reason that the overall build quality and the features are a little bit sort of higher grade but yeah well I'm really impressed so far to be to be completely blunt with you guys why don't we start with I'll start at the side okay so we have our cables we have em okay at least it uses a nice soft rubber so it's easy to fix there we go we have our cables right here so there is your power to front USB 3s your front audio as well as your front panel connectors and your front USB 2 and 4 other more different front USB 2 so that's how you have additional power presumably for that charging port alright we've got him lots of cable management grommets so regardless of what kind of a motherboard you want to put in here you can see we've actually got a ATX mounting holes way over here we've got standard mounting ATX mounting holes right here and then up to e ATX with three four five six seven eight nine PCI slots all the way down to here supports a standard power supply with for all these are really nice these are nice high quality rubber nice rubber mounting points that hold it a little bit off the bottom of the case filtered intake and it can go up to pretty much as long as you want before bumping into anything and not fitting any more in the back we have a 120 or 140 millimeter fan whichever you prefer although it comes with a bit phoenix specter 120 mil up in the top we have what is hold on can't remember include two 230 yeah so we have a 230 millimeter cooling fan although you can see if I tip it even more the mounting holes are available here for that triple radiator so that's where that's going to go and there's actually a fair amount of space between this on the top of the motherboard which is a bit of a rarity these days even though by the time you put a radiator and fans on it you're gonna need that space so it's good to see that BitFenix has gone ahead and included that I don't see yet how to take off this top piece although I really would break it okay so basically we've got the 230 mil fan here we've got the 360 mil here you've got oh look at this you've got access to the front panel here so if you wanted to I don't know rewire something or something then you could you could do that let's go ahead and put that back on there we go okay uh harddrive mounting so one two three four five six seven these are compatible with three and a half as well as two and a half inch drives they have some flex to them although my experience leads me to believe that they're probably a lot more sturdy once you actually put a drive in them the other 230 mm fed is here on the front this is a Spectre fan bye guys bear in mind these are reasonably high quality fans is sorry so that one's in the front you can actually take this whole cage and you can undoing the screws in the bottom I think yes I'm doing the screws on the bottom you can actually turn the whole thing 90 degrees if you want if you don't need the additional space over here so the benefit of that is you're gonna get a slightly better airflow through and between the drives versus if you have it see this way see how it kind of blocks a lot of the airflow so that way it'll only be blocked where you actually have drives installed however this has a nicer aesthetic in my opinion because you have more options in terms of routing the wires to your drives so I personally would leave it the way it is but it's nice to have the option and it's nice to be able to take it out entirely I mean if you decide you want to turn this case into a modding project of some sort you've actually got a lot of flexibility in here because it's basically a fairly plain a fairly clean looking box with a lot of space inside it you can contrast that with something like the cosmos 2 where it's a very large case but because of the way they've compartmentalized it it's mostly useful for a very specific type of user a very specific type of build whereas this was more flexible but maybe fewer features off the hop okay so here's your tool list mounts these are cool this yeah pretty much it let's go ahead and turn it around and see what we got in terms of room for cable routing because yeah it's fine and good to design a case that can hold all this hardware but if you can't reach anything with the cables look at all that space so that is look at that we've got like looks like over an inch of space behind the motherboard tray for routing cables that is outstanding and you can also see that by the time you install a drive here you're still gonna have like a very very reasonable amount of room behind your drives to route your SATA cables to route your power cables down to where they need to go which is to the power supply or over to your motherboard without any hassle so I'm glad to see that reasonably big CPU cut I wouldn't mind it seeing something a touch bigger and could've come over here but in its place but phoenix has included securing points for routing cables behind the motherboard tray cannot emphasize enough how important these are because these a lack of these is half of the reason that you'll often end up in a situation where you are trying to close your other side panel and you can't because the cables are all crossing each other every time you let go of them so if you can tie everything down you can often have a much tinier build because of it so let's see what we've got in terms of included accessories here is a harness is kinda neat so it's a five and a quarter to three and a half inch bay and then it also includes a fan mount I'm assuming includes a two and a half inch drive mount that's for sure as well as three and a half inch drive mount that looks off a lot like a family so I guess you guys can let me know if I'm wrong or right ok okay so inside here we've got hey look at this more like cable management stuff with little double-sided tapes and these are actually relatively long zip ties which may seem trivial but it really does seem like a lot of case manufacturers cheap out on the zip ties they give you ones that are like this long and you're like okay so I can like wrap that around one cable one ATX cable speaker as well as all of the mounting screws and general whatnots you will need so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look or overview or whatever you want to call it of the BitFenix shinobi XL so far I would say that given the price point it's coming in at and guys don't ask me the price I almost always put a link in the description of the video so you can click and you can see the price and either Canadian dollars or US dollars so there you go but given the price point I'd say it's very very competitive feature wise with a lot of the other stuff out there so don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our boxing's reviews and other computer videos