Gadgetory

by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Affordable liquid coolers wet dream get it it's a wet dream because it's there dreaming about liquid cooling not sure what you guys thought I was talking about this my friends is the half a stacker there's actually two parts I have here today the half stacker 935 and the half stacker 9:15 F so inside this one we have a full blown mini ITX case that can also be stacked to this one and inside this one we have two components the 925 which is the the sort of the main that's where your ATX chassis is piece as well as another 915 but in this case is a 915 are so unboxing the half stacker 935 is a bit of a treat holy cow so huge inside we find fairly thick but hard foam a static shock awesome fairly thick hard foam but at least it's on the fairly thick side and they put another reinforcement piece right here mid package so there's actually three pieces of foam on the thing since we took it out upside down the case is of course upside down and this will reveal the first look at the half stacker alright now that we've flipped it over we're going to find a couple of things here so number one is that mid section actually goes right in between the two pieces of the case that are included with the 935 package so here we find the stacker 915 are in all of its glory and then under that okay here we go here's another nice thick piece of foam very Hardy looking for that back in the Box is the 925 so you can clearly see this is not really meant necessarily to be its own standalone chassis the top is it is holy it's full of holes you know holy building holes Batman as Robin would say if that show still existed we also have a nice little instruction booklet on how to stack which of course refers to the popular pastime of cups to em no actually it refers to how to stack the half stack er so there's a few different configurations they show you 1/2 945 is 1/2 935 which is what you see here plus another 1/2 950 which is what we have so that's a main one in two small ones you can put three half nine 15 so that's as high as clear master recommends going without additional support or you can do to half nine 15s or you can just have one of these or just one of these and there are lots of different options so I think the only way to really tackle e an unusual case like this is in a bit of an unusual fashion so we'll start at the bottom where we have okay so there's actual rubber grommets right in the bottom of your cat what is going what madness is this this is the way that you are going to be able to pass through cables or water cooling tubes or whatever else you might want into potentially a second 9/15 that is on the bottom of the 925 here so I'm going to show you how you would remove the removable feet just like this pull those babies off and then you can turn this into a stackable module modular rail here so that can be used to stack them to an additional case we've also got a removable power supply fan filter right here on the bottom a fairly small one but no no I'm not too many marks off for that and now let's continue with this unorthodox chassis here now we're going to go to the right side panel where we will find not a whole lot blank side panel all right now we're going to go to the top where yes see that probably looks familiar now that is that same stacking interface nice rugged robust plastic considering the price of this case it's actually quite well built from my initial impressions then we can move around to the front of the case where we find three five and a quarter inch drive bays as well as the characteristic full honeycomb mesh that we find on stacker cases or rather half cases excuse me because it's all about the high airflow also we've got our IO so we have two USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports headphone microphone ports as well as a power switch just like that and then on the left-hand side panel we find a nice tinted window I'm liking that actually it looks quite sharp I'm a bit of a fan of the whole tinted window thing I think they look really really good and we're going to go ahead and slide that off to reveal the internals of the 925 which we will actually get back to so now let's carry on to the 915 R this is the one that comes with the 935 so you get at least two modules now this does not have feet on the bottom of it but what it does have is it has a case top piece so you can see the way it's intended to be used out of the box is with this one with feet on the bottom on the rails this one with no feet on the bottom on the rails and this one stacked on top of this one a little something like this just like that you put four screws in one two three four on either side and you have yourself one handy dandy monstrosity of a massive case here now that's not to say that that's the only way you can do it you saw me removing screws from the top of the 915 are just a second ago and I'm going to just finish doing that and show you guys the other option that's available to you so I'm just going to pull out this last screw here so feet lids and other cases all use the same modular interface so that they can be swapped around so there right there is a nice included honeycomb ventilation thing as well as a dust filter I meant the included dust filter of course sod you know a top panel is included with a top panel that's not really sort of a thing but anyway this gives us our first look inside the 915 are where it now is pretty much empty okay this side panel also has a nice included dust filter so go ahead and check that out and integrated radiator mounting so that leads us to the first real use of these 915 units and that is as the dedicated rad box you could actually do two 280 millimeter radiators in push-pull or two three hundred and sixty millimeter radiators in push-pull throw those on the side panels here and be pretty much ready to rock so the are also comes with three three and a half or two and a half inch drive mounting points as well as a five and a quarter inch drive mounting point which you can see through the top be because that's about the only way we're going to reach it also you can see that it has an M ITX motherboard tray and a power supply mount at the back and then ITX cutout as well as a spot for a dual slot graphics card so this could be a full mitx system or it could just hold radiators or it could just hold drives in fact what you'll notice up here is that in addition to these bays right here there are mounting point for two more of them so we could pull the drive cages out of the bottom for improved air flow to our graphics cards here throw those up here and put all of our drives up in the top routing power to them isn't as much of a problem as you might think because you can just use splitters once you get up there but mounting SATA from your motherboard might be a little bit of a challenge the good news though is that there are at least four different places where you can bring them through so that you can get access to all the different drives with all the different SATA cables alright so that leads me to where I was heading with my explanation further explanation of the modular interface and that is here so if we wanted to we could go you know what I just want like you know I just want you know two systems I just want two cases so I'm just going to use a nine twenty five on its own and I'm going to use the nine fifteen as like a bare bones skeleton I'm going to put like you know a secondary little storage server in it or something you can totally do that right out of the box you can install two systems into the one challenge is that this guy does not include the front IO by default you can pick that up as an aftermarket option from Coolermaster so there is that all right so let's finish up our tour of the internals of the 925 before we continue to move along here with this very very complicated case alright so inside here we find those two three and a half inch bays that I mentioned before so those can hold either two and a half inch SSDs or three and a half inch drives be able to have another SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray you can actually see how that's going to be installed there but don't worry able to take off that other side panel and show that to you guys these are fully removable unfortunately these cannot be relocated here which would have been quite nice that would have given us some additional options in terms of cable routing and all that we have to list five and a quarter inch bays up here in the top right corner as well as a pretty actually a pretty good number of different sort of rubber grommet options the one challenge here again is that there's actually less than an inch of space behind here so make sure your cable management is tight otherwise you might have a little bit of difficulty closing that other side panel all right we've got a bottom mounted power supply as well as a seven plus one configuration for the PCI slot so you could install an excel ATX motherboard if you want it rather there's an eight plus one configuration so you could go ex-lax here they could put something like a fan controller there in terms of included fans for a half series case I'd say the included fans aren't that impressive but we've got a 140 millimeter at the back and then I believe there is nothing at the front in this particular one but then there is I think it's an 80 millimeter fan or something like that yeah that's an 80 millimeter fan in the top one so it has options for fan mounting but not a ton of fans included but when you consider the price I'd say that's that's actually pretty pretty reasonable alright so I'll show you guys those fan options that I was trying to get at before you just got to pop these tabs out from the inside and you can pop the whole front off like that so you can throw a couple more 120 millimeter fans here you'll get better airflow out of these obviously though if you remove those drive caddies and throw them up into the included 915 R that is definitely going to be my recommended configuration for this case so let's go ahead and check out that back panel which I alluded to before but haven't actually shown you yet so there's that SSD mount in the middle as well as a little bit of room for cable management but again really not as much as I'd like especially given the way that you're going to want to run cables over here if you do mount your hard drives here but of course you do have the option of running up through the top of the case and through the bottom of the case depending on where you keep your stuff in fact I think probably my recommended configuration out of the box if you're not liquid cooling would be take all your hard drives chuck them down below run everything down here and then down here from your power supply and then have nice open air flow for your for your gaming system component alright so this is the 915 F this is the one that's available as an aftermarket option you can see that it comes with both a top piece and with feet so that means it can be used as a standalone case unlike the other two which do not come with all the pieces that you'd actually need to use them each individually and it also has a bit of a a bit of a smarter layout in terms of if you were to use it as a standalone case so rather than you know having a bunch of mounts for three and a half inch drives for example where it's it's really just meant to be overflow space for radiators and drives or whatever else for a different case it has its drive mounts kind of spread around and then it has a configuration that allows for a bit of a bigger CPU cooler for example the 915 R that's include oh it has the same radiator mounts though so you could still just use it as a rad box through radiators on the side so you can see here in the included one the are your power supply goes at the back that's what the R is for rear mounted power supply and there's really not much clearance for a CPU cooler here so you could install a full system in there but it's really not intended for you to do that whereas this one the power supply actually goes way over here in the front so they have a removable dust filter right here below it and then you've got your exhaust out the front of the case right up here and then you've got an extension cable that runs to your power supply from the back of the case so that you don't have to plug your power your power directly into the front of your case you've also got a five and a quarter inch bay up here that includes on the bottom here hopefully I can get you guys a good angle of that three and a half inch and two and a half inch mounting holes you have another set of three and a half inch and two and a half inch mounting holes down here on the bottom and then you have a third set here on this cross brace so you can put a total of three three and a half inch or three two and a half inch drives or of course if you install an optical drive then you will you'll be missing that option but we also find here is that optional accessory that's available for the other one with front i/o so USB three audio as well as a power switch now airflow inside this guy isn't really that optimal it was more of an afterthought you know hey why don't we make this available as a standalone case as well as as an upgrade module to the half stacker because it's really not necessarily the best ITX case in the world it just happens to be a part of what is the biggest most versatile liquid cooling and/or storage case for gamers that that's pretty much out there so you've got more rubber grommets for high just knock that one out oops more rubber grommets for pass-through as well as some other things for pass-through and then I those same mounting holes so we could put three three and a half inch cages in here and run in additional nine drives out of this one as well as in the other one so there it is guys that is what Coolermaster internally refers to as the half stacker 9:45 a 9:15 our a 9:15 F and a 9:25 many of these parts modular these side panels can be moved around you can see we actually ended up with some extra modular parts when we assembled the case we've got two extra sets of feet and an extra top so if we bought another 925 we could get a full additional ITX case and a full additional ATX case out of the deal so that's that's actually something to consider that's one large case and then one medium in one small case for what would effectively be I guess just around four hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred dollars or something like that that's not bad so I'm going to spend probably the rest of this video I'm going to take these apart again to talk about the possibilities of a building in here some of what Coolermaster thinks people might do with it and some of them some of what I realistically think people actually might do with it because frankly some of their ideas are not very good one of the ideas they had was oh you could use it for crypto coin mining and I'm like well no because you wouldn't use a mini ITX system for crypto coin mining because you could only have one GPU in it and particularly if you're mining light coins then you're going to need lots of GPUs and then even if you're mining bitcoins you're going to need dedicated folding cards anyway and so you'll need PCI expansion slots and it doesn't really have that but where I see this being useful is more like I thought one interesting scenario was render farm so if you wanted to have your your render your rendering offload machine actually like straps to your main video editing PC another interesting use case scenario that I see is lots of storage if you really want a ton of storage in your PC you could actually run three cages here three cages here so that would be a total of 18 drives between these two you could run another six here which would be a total of 24 drives and all of that would fit in a chassis that eat all these pieces combined is less than dollars so you know you could look at it you go well you could get like a Norco 24 bay you know for you case for that money it would take up less space but you would be paying a lot more for that's about five hundred dollars also the three and a half inch drive sleds are quite excellent so you just release the clip on the back pull it wide and then without doing any bending like we've seen in a lot of our recent drive sleds it's also quite solid you can go ahead attach your drive and then slide that in it feels good even without a drive installed in it and I think Coolermaster was actually the first one to to implement the whole super flimsy drive cages but that are really firm once you get a drive in them but now they've gone away from that anyway another scenario that I see people using this for is very extreme liquid cooling so being able to put dual 360s up here dual 360s down here in the bottom run all your tubing in between using all these convenient holes or you can actually it's like it feels like a magic trick right it's like oh I put my hand in this computer it comes out in this computer holy crap being able to put that much liquid cooling horse power into something that costs again about two hundred and fifty dollars we're comparable if you wanted something that fits you know for radiators you'd be looking at something from mountain mods where it's a cube case and some people will like the height here where instead of having to compromise that much of your floor space or that much of your decks desk space you can have it be vertically stacked get it stacked stacker and have it not take up at least as much square footage of the actual space that it sits on so being able to fit a ton of liquid cooling into something this inexpensive and it takes up this much this little floor space is quite impressive as well one of the other things they talk about is having your having a dedicated game server so if you land a lot for example you can have a dedicated game server machine sitting up here on a little mini ITX board also throw some extra three-and-a-half inch expansion out there you know take one of these out get some extra airflow to your graphics card that's a very realistic one having you know an alternate gaming rig while your main one is editing I didn't think was that realistic because I thought my way the other way around would be better because then you don't necessarily have a full-blown gaming GPU up here that just sits there doing nothing most of the time so in conclusion this really isn't my cup t if you guys have been following me for any period of time I mean I kind of looked at this when coolermaster unveiled it at PAX and I kind of went okay for the six people who are interested in that fine but I didn't really get a chance to look at it that closely I didn't really get to examine the overall build quality of it that much at the time and now I think I understand a little bit better it's still not for me I prefer more like clean lines and and plain a plain aesthetic whereas half has never really been about that it's been about an edgy outward appearance and airflow above all else cooling and flexibility and then the stacker of DNA comes in here with stacking and lots and lots of hardware and it's just it's not for me I prefer having an off loaded raid box that sits in another room and I don't have to look at or listen to but I definitely see the value so for people looking for that value oriented water-cooling case or that value oriented storage optimized case this really is pretty much as good as it gets for either those things it's also built better than I thought the one that I saw was pre-production and it really wasn't that impressive this one is quite solid I would feel confident even once it's full of hardware having three full systems in here which you could actually do and while I'd probably want it against a desk or something on one side it's really not that bad and I'm extremely impressed I think that's pretty much it oh yeah real user reviews I have the benefit now reading reviews from people who actually own the thing and paid their own money for it and they're all extremely positive so I think the people who know they want this guy's despy it you're going to be happy with it for the people who know that this is not for them like me well guys you're probably not going to be happy with it so don't force yourself one last thing that I thought I'd include since this is hilarious is in this configuration has support for three full power supplies so you could put one down here at the front you can put one here in the middle on the bottom of the middle one and you can put one up here in the top so if you did want to use the middle Tower for example for light coin mining then at least you'd have all the power that you needed you could split it across three different power supplies thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the cooler master 1/2 stacker don't forget to subscribe to Alanis tech tips from boxing's reviews and other computer videos like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and let me know in the comments are you a stacker person or are you uh not a stacker person because I think there's only two kinds of people in this world stack four people and not stacker people you