Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the cooler Master Elite 120 advanced this is an ITX case that exists within a very small form factor compared to some of its competition which is ITX but actually has a much bigger form factor I think hopefully we know welcome you know I'm just going to say so the BitFenix prodigy is sort of that hot ITX case that lots of people are talking about but my observation about the BitFenix prodigy is that it's really cool and everything but it's actually not that small I mean you could you could easily if you look at the internal layout of the prodigy you could actually fit and n ATX born in there without making the case really any bigger so what if you wanted a truly small ITX system that can still accept a fair amount of hardware have great cooling and is very inexpensive so the elite 120 might be the case for you let's take a quick look at what Coolermaster has to say for themselves so we're not gonna worry too much about this we'll get to that later and nothing and uh-hah supports up to three fans for extreme grooving if I have a pen in my pocket I'm gonna circle that because that's obviously dream okay Mini ITX with ATX power supply support for easy upgrades this is really important aluminum finish on the front panel okay so let's get this going here going to put that pen away because nothing else could be extreme enough to justify that pen ever again I'm not teasing somebody here I just really did think it was that dream um okay I excited and I was teasing so guys to be clear there's nothing extreme cooling about an ITX enclosure if you can get things running cool enough to you know overclock a little bit then like that's fantastic but don't don't be too don't be too worried if you don't get like the maximum overclock that you would have seen on a regular ATX or larger enclosure you know there's awesome cases from the likes of Coolermaster that will be more appropriate for extreme cooling like the half X M alright so the front of the case this is quite nice actually so they've got an aluminum finish here two USB 2.0 ports as well as a microphone and headphone jack one USB 3 port reset switch and power switch and then you've got one five and a quarter inch bay which will look quite nice with kind of a black frame around it once you put a black optical drive in there on the bottom of the case you find some feet and some black paint hey on the other side of the case do you find some air ventilation so that is kind of extreme okay so you've got vents that run all across both sides and the top of the case and this one looks kind of cool because it seems to have a bit of a filter thing going on now this is how they achieve the full ATX power supply and compatibility I actually don't mind this I built myself a mini ITR rather micro ATX system and a silverstone sta-1 and in order to get a triple rad going in that system I had to put both the radiator and the fans and as kind of like an external sort of protrusion out of the case I had cut open the top of the case and I put that there and I ran the tubes down the back and then into the case and I don't mind that sort of a little bit of bulge thing in order to achieve an overall cleaner tighter tighter form factor so some people might not like it I'm I'm a fan okay about some more ventilation holes got your two two expansion slots however this ITX will only have one actual expansion card you can fit Coolermaster seems to be assuming that you're going to be using that slot for a graphics card so these are really tight I'm going to need to grab my screwdriver and we're back and while I was removing this I noticed that the case has water cooling holes where more specifically it has one which means that if you actually did have an external water cooling setup you would be able to get the tube there but not back or back but not there so that's a very strange strange thing to do but you know hey cooler master works in mysterious ways and realistically you don't really need water cooling for your ITX system anyway most ITX boards with the exception of a Seuss's z77 board with like the beefy huge pwm on it aren't really capable of extreme overclocks anyway so there we go we can have a closer look at all the ventilation that's going on in the in the enclosure here and let's get the case open so what do we have in terms of expandability so we've got three three and a half inch drive bays which we will have to try to find there we are and are we missing a sled hold on I'll be back yeah i derped so these are two and a half inch adapters for the three and a half inch drive sleds that are attached to them so you can natively mount there we go let's show you guys how quick it is to mount a hard drive in here although I actually don't know which way they go so we're just going to guess and we're going to guess that the connectors go out the back look there it is - this will go back in there because that's where it belongs back it's like that happy gilmore scene it's your home - good for your home let's go in the hole with the ball okay anyway um so we'll put that in there and that is how you mount hard drives in the Elite 120 advanced alternately you can use these adapters then to mount two and a half inch drive so it natively supports three three and a half inch or up to four two and a half inch dress so two of those drives are with these adapters here and two of them are somewhere else and we are going to go on a voyage of discovery to find out where those other two and a half inch hard drives go and we're going to do that voyage of discovery off camera because I really can't tell and it was actually slick who figured this out which just boggles my mind so you actually mount one two and a half inch drive up here then you flip it over and you screw in another tune a half inch drive from the bottom so using these two adapters you can screw for two and a half inch drives into here and then I guess potentially you could do another you could do another three and a half inch that's cool that's it that's actually outstanding and then the five and a quarter inch drive is pretty self-explanatory so there's just a bay here and then you screw it in from either time none of that fancy coolest stuff I mean this is a fairly inexpensive case considering all the cooling that you got going on here and all the features that has included so let's have a look at cooling since they talked so much about the extreme cool so there's one 120-millimeter fan at the front and this gets air from who knows where oh yeah there we go gets air from these vents here here and here okay blows air through the drive cages then you can mount an additional when I'm doing 20 millimeter fan here on the other side of this assuming you don't have any components on your motherboard that are going to that are going to interfere with that in any way then you can have an additional 80 millimeter fan right here blowing right across the pwm on your motherboard as well as the CPU socket area so that is an incredibly smart placement for that and finally you'll have your power supply fan built-in so you'll have up to 4 fans in the system that are actually actively working on exhaust and and intake all your cables inside are black love to see this they've also got all the power plugs are black right up to the connectors so it looks really really really sharp you've got adapters for these fans as well so you can put them into three pin connectors there you go doctor or you can use the molex pass-through internal USB 3 which is good to see again especially on a more budget oriented case HD audio USB 2 and I think that pretty much covered until this I know guys I've been promising my builds in the prodigy and the FTO 3 mini for a while but this is going to be part of our roundup because the FTO 3 is our super small one and I'd love to see how that one does in terms of cooling and performance the BitFenix prodigy is sort of like a big mini ITX case so the cooling should be great but it's kind of big you know it's not that like ITX not that small and then this is going to be like our more traditional ITX case like our compromise one and it's looking like it's going to be really really strong contender just based on the cooling options that it has in terms of including accessories you got some zip ties you got some screws and you got one more set of those drive rails so you'll have enough because two of them came pre mounted on these adapters thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the elite 120 advanced don't forget to subscribe to - 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