Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at what should be fairly evident based on the outside of the box this is the hath XP from coolermaster which is a continuation of the ever popular half series so it started with a half 932 which was an ATX mid tower that offered extreme airflow for the price and for the form factors I mean the whole thing was basically like mesh and fans and making sure that all your system components stayed cool then we saw the lower cost half 922 then I believe we saw the half X and then the half nine one two now we have a half a cube case now cute cases are more common with some of these sort of boutique e case guys like we've seen a cube from Lee and Lee we've seen cubes for mountain mods and pace labs over the years but most of the mainstream guys don't really do cubes so I'm really excited to see what sort of a a more experienced case maker like coolermaster can do with this form factor the cube form factor is sort of unique because what it does do is it gives a lot of room but you normally don't find in an enclosure above and potentially below the motherboard because the motherboard usually takes up a lot of space inside the case not because it is actually physically large I mean a motherboard is thin but it takes up a lot of space inside the chassis because you can't really put anything over top of it it's it's just sort of it's sort of full so what you can do by lying the motherboard down flat is you can get access to sort of unique ways to use the space so first where you see the packing material so you got a little about an inch and then a little more than an inch on the sides and I mean honestly for our pretty this is a pretty light case considering its size and the steel construction it feels very very sturdy like you could probably yeah just put all your weight on this thing I mean like I said an experienced case maker like Coolermaster don't expect them to make any new bearers like it being kind of flimsy like you see with mountain mods and closures although those are all aluminum which is harder to make more rugged and more strong so the first thing we're going to do is I get all these panels on screwed actually not quite all in because I want to show you the outside first so on the side you find ventilation you expect that from a half series enclosure you also find handy dandy handles that can be used for carrying the case around and you can use to maneuver it quite easily these are not levers so you don't pull up on these to open up the side panel the side panel is removed by removing the screws and then sliding it back so those are just for airflow and for handling the case the other side is identical same thing you got handles you got airflow holes so nothing that you haven't seen before like ten seconds ago all right on the back we've got a 120mm fan more ventilation again as we've come to expect 280 mill fans standard seven PCI slots as well as it appears to be a cable tie and a protruded power supply mounting cage so what that does is that gives us more room inside the case for things like cable management because remember your power supply is going to be like this long and then you're going to have a bunch of more space on the end for where the cables need to come out so by doing this case manufacturers instead of making their entire chassis another inch deeper can just protrude the power supply a little bit and I guess sort of sort of cheap give you a smaller enclosure that way with just a little bit of a bump up the back in the top you see what appears to be a 200 millimeter fan mounting fan mounting spacing with rubber grommets and what is a very see-through mesh so while I like to see windows to see into my chassis and see what you know the cool leet stuff that I put in there I don't mind a thin mesh like this because you can as you can hear as you can see you can see through it quite clearly so you'll get a very good aesthetic even though it's not using a window on the front of the case we've got two 120 millimeter fans with more mesh to five and a quarter inch base to hot-swap three and a half inch drive sleds which are really cool because here so they're compatible with three and a half inch or two and a half inch so this is that standard rubberized grommet mount thing that we've seen with Coolermaster in the past you can put a two and a half inch drive in using these holes more ventilation on the drive cage itself and instead of bending it like we used to you actually just slide it open and then clip it into place just like that with a drive on it this allows it to be a lot more sturdy whereas on those other ones like I don't have commented on this a lot in the past where I say yeah it looks really flimsy once you put a drive in it it's okay now I no longer have to say that it just doesn't look flimsy and once you put a drive in it should be that much that much more okay so those lock into place quite nicely you've also got your front power reset endicott excuse me power led you've got hold on nope power led is the illuminated button here that's your hard drive activity LED microphone headphone and 2 USB 3 ports USB 3 is finally standard on pretty much every single new case which is great I remember it was so frustrating for so long you know half the chassis didn't have USB 3 the other half of them had it but with a pass-through that plugged into the back of your motherboard so in order to put together your half XP you're going to want it look at that Wow considering the price of this case that is a very very solid side panel I mean that's the big again guys like color master they do not screw around when it comes to the overall build quality of the case so even though it's pretty light it's not like they're using lightweight material mean look at this they've punched out most of this panel but it still has only this much flex to it and I'm putting a lot of force on it you can see from oh yeah no still good yeah you can see how much force I'm putting on it it does not bend at all extremely rigid love to see that because it just means that there's going to be less strain on the components if anything does happen if you're shipping the system which is a concern if you're a system builder like NCIX you know you look at you go oh well you know huh that's going to put a lot of strain on the motherboard when that when that gaze flexes like that not gonna have that happen with a well-built chassis so in terms of included accessories you've got tons and cable management ties this is way more than I'm used to seeing with a case you have a whole whack load of two and a half inch drive sleds and I'll show you where these go in a minute included speaker as well as all the screws you'll need to assemble your system so once we get inside let's start on this side check this out dedicated two and a half inch drive mounting so with those two front hot swaps you can mount up to six SSDs in this case completely natively all you do is throw your SSDs in the little rails slide them in and it's pretty much what you're used to seeing in terms of hard drive mounting except it's an entire dedicated two and a half inch cage and again extremely well-built at the back of the case remember those two 80ml fans those are going to be directly cooling your your SSDs here and honestly I probably wouldn't install anything here I'd just use them as passive airflow the five and a quarter inch base are completely tooless so you open them up lock them just like that and you can remove them very easily and this is a design we've seen on the half series before just by folding back these little tabs which don't even look like a tab they're very well integrated into the aesthetic design of the case which is very industrial and then you use the tool list mounting in order to throw your five and a quarter inch drive in there lots of space at the back for longer optical drives and cable management speaking of cable management there are tons of cable management options in this case check this out cable management loops here I love these things they're awesome they help you keep things tidy look at all the cable management loops that they've popped into the bottom here so you can see those here all the cables that need to write even like they've even put in dedicated cable management loops for these fans at the back so you can go cable here tie it down here tie it down there and get everything over to the power supply area where you can see more cable management loops more cable management loops the interface for the hot-swap 3 and of 3 and a half inch drive bays in the front so single molex power then you run two SATA data cables in order to activate those you've got noise dampening foam so this is under the power supply as well as a removable filter that goes under the power supply itself they've also lifted the power supply up a little bit and I'm glad to see that because I recently had power supply died in in an older define r2 case from fractal this was totally my bad but what I did is I put a 120 millimeter fan power supply in it fan down and I put the case onto a carpeted area yeah that thing died it totally starved from air Floyd didn't even think about it as I was kind of throwing it under a desk and not thinking I was using it as a file server so this would have saved my power supply right here because even though it wouldn't have been optimal it would have been able to grab some air from the inside of the case by bringing it up through these gaps so it wouldn't have completely suffocated so that ya would have saved my bacon let's move up into the top of the chassis where we find a couple cool things so number one is the removable motherboard tray which you can take off just by removing four screws here and lifting the whole motherboard tray out that'll make it easier to cable manage the bottom of the case as well as you know install all your components outside of the case and then put them in personally and I'd probably try and do it without it because yeah my hands are pretty small but I can handle it if you have larger hands though that could be a boon for you huge CPU cutout so you'll have no problems installing the back plates of larger CPU coolers yeah even when the even when everything is still in the chassis even when the motherboard is already installed on the motherboard tray you can see also that those front 120 millimeter fans also have 140 millimeter fan mounts and the spacing looks right for a radiator which is outstanding because you could put a dual 120 millimeter radiator here looks like you could pretty easily fit ah yes you could easily fit another 120 millimeter radiator here that looks like enough spacing so you could have at least a triple triple radiator water cooling setup in here with no problems at all aesthetics are awesome I mean if you're going to have that nice loose mesh on the top so you can see everything inside the case then you better make sure you're including things with black cables so black cabled fans that are either either three pin or molex another black cabled vent and all black cables for the front panel connectors including the audio the power the and the LEDs the USB 3 as well as yeah that's pretty much it hold on a sec guys here's something cool guys check this out with a little bit of modding you could install a seven a seven PCI slot motherboard but you could install a dual slot card in the very bottom this is a big deal if you want to do sort of massive sli configurations as some boards don't have the correct spacing to put your last dual slot card here because it just doesn't really work that way so check this out you can put it here and then all you'd have to do very high panel on you can see the cards going to get lots of ventilation through these holes right over here so no problems there so all you'd have to do is in order to use the rear exhaust on your card potentially if you have a rear exhaust card is I'd probably you know Dremel some holes kind of here so that you can you can get access to that airflow so very cool stuff the crazy Russian spotted that he's guest helping me film today so kudos to him for for noticing that that's awesome and I think that actually pretty much covers it I just want to show you guys yet more cable management loops right here in here above the five and a quarter inch and the three and a half inch cages I guess if I had one thing to caution you guys about before buying this case is make sure that you have an external storage solution because it only really supports two three and a half inch drives other than that this guy is completely ready for SSD more than anything else thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the half XP from Coolermaster don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from Roma boxing's reviews and other computer videos here's something I didn't notice until we were putting the case back together but check this out so those super sturdy plastic handles I showed you on the outside are actually reinforced by this piece of metal here that's part of why they're so strong and they're not going anywhere because you're picking up the chassis by the actual chassis not by a piece of plastic that's attached to the side panel which is attached to the chassis good stuff again just great design choices overall in this case