Gadgetory

so today we have an exciting new product to talk about this is the Coolermaster 1/2 X and really this comes down to a complaint that I've had for quite a while with EVGA and they're overly long motherboards they've been releasing motherboards like they're classified four-way SLI their new SR 2 Super Record 2 dual slot are sorry dual socket LGA 1366 motherboard they've been releasing motherboards with too many PCI slots they're actually longer than a standard case which is 7 PCI flood now the 1/2 X fixes that complaint that I've had that they're releasing these motherboards that there are no cases for well now we have a case for it so let's have a look at the overall specs of this before we take it out of the box it is a black case it is made of steel in plastic there's a bunch of boring stuff now something that they have seemed to forgotten here is that it is micro ATX ATX ehx and it is also something called X L ATX which is kind of an ATX that is too long because if we come down here PCI slots 9 so rather than having a standard 7 PCI slots this case can accept either motherboards with eight slots and then an overhanging dual slot card in the bottom slot or even a motherboard with nine PCI slots o29 got two too long like the classified for way okay so cooling system this is probably relevant included we have a 230 millimeter red LED fan at the front a 200 to 200 millimeter fans at the top and one is optional okay so only one a 200 millimeter fan at the side and a 140 millimeter fan at the rear there's apparently also a 120 millimeter fan which is a VGA fan cover and then a VGA holder has an optional 80 millimeter fan so one of the big features of the 1/2 X is actually also that it is ready so it is ready for nvidia as latest gtx to 470 and 480 graphics cards that means it has really good GPU cooling that kid it kind of goes without saying okay we got an installation guide here so this is going to tell you how to install your components in the system i'll actually just let you read that you can freeze the frame if you want to figure out oh this is neat USB 3.0 converting to USB 2.0 Cal blah I'm sure they mean cable but that's that's a pretty useful thing to know how to do how to install the VGA bracket okay we can kind of refer to this a little bit later and then let's get the case out let's have a look at it the first thing I notice about it is that it is black black everywhere black on the inside black on the back black on the top very nice that is what I like to see the new black we've got a plane flying overhead so I don't know how well you're going to be able to hear me but let's get all these plastic bits off and have a look at this case so the Masters hath line of cases is all about half high air float so we'll start at the front the entire front of the case is covered in grills so all of this is potentially if you've gone a lot of exhaust going to be a passive intake and then down here we have I'm just going to use this as a teaching at the front we have our 230 millimeter red LED pen up at the front we've got all of our front connectivity so they've got everything here we have USB 3.0 SuperSpeed which you can convert to extra USB 2.0 ports we've got eSATA firewire USB 2.0 as well as front audio so it has everything and then this panel actually looks like you might even be able to remove it and mount something else there well maybe not okay here we've got a little slider okay so that has your fan LED button that's pretty cool then a reset switch as well as a power switch so those can all be safely hidden for whatever reason just kind of kind of cool to have little things that slide around on the case like that okay the overall build of the thing actually I'm just going to kind of see what I think of it as soon as you fill up a case like this it's going to be really heavy but it's also very very solid like you could easily put all of my weight on it even when it's empty and even though it has plastic to the construction because you can see the way that they've constructed the plastic is very rugged it's very reinforced and it also has kind of a cool look to it it's along the visual stylings of previous half cases but it doesn't take everything out of their book either so let's take the side panel off side panel fit and finish is pretty good let me just kind of put it back on and see what I think of that because it's not perfect by any means but yeah it gets them there pretty good so you can see even when we take it off and put it back on there are no unnecessary gaps in the case everything fits in really nice that's something hey you can't actually take it for granted so you just pull it away pull it out there we go let's have a look at the inside here that is a hardcore looking fan and duct right there so besides the window we've got this huge grill which you can actually remove the fan from but still leave the grill on so it'll still look pretty cool and you can actually remove this duct from the fan as well if you don't want that but this fan is designed to send as much air flow over the graphics cards as is humanly ourfamily possible you can see it can plug in either using a three pin connector or you can use the included four pin molex adapter so we can go ahead and file this side panel away and have a look at some more aspects of this case the interior once again it borrows a lot from previous half cases so we've got cooler masters three and a half inch or rather this one has an SSD adapter already included in it but I'm assuming yet you can take that out so they're three and a half inch drive bays now these look really flimsy but as soon as you install a hard drive in them they're really really sturdy so I love their hard drive mounting system personally and then they've also gone and included a two and a half inch adapter so if you have an SSD boot drive just right out of the box you can put a couple screws in it slide that into there convenient tool list system and clip it in awesome so it takes up to one two three four five three and a half inch bays here and then what appears to be a hot swap module in the front but we'll have a closer look at that later actually I just want to have a look at the overall layout of the interior first so down here this is the well they've got a little cool designed by Coolermaster stamp on here this is going to hold your power supply alright so your power supply it goes into the bottom of this case and they don't have an option for a top mount which I don't think really matters you've got little rubber um hair right my knife yeah I actually have a knife today check that out alright so why don't we sort of figure out how this works by removing this okay oh yeah this is interesting this is the duct for the Nvidia Fermi graphics cards this is part of what makes it Fermi ready because your ducting dedicated air flow to the graphics cards using like kind of a segmented zone cooling paradigm that we first saw with the Antec P 180 okay but you can actually remove this if you don't want it if you don't like it you can just pull it out just like that it's only two thumb screws so it's no big deal okay so then I'm gonna now that I've removed that I'm gonna go ahead and remove my power supply bracket here because honestly in a build that I'm doing I probably won't use any of this stuff so while something like this power supply cover is great if you're not using a modular power supply because you can hide all the wires behind it if you are using a modular power supply you're probably just gonna pull it out anyway what I mean hey if you think of everything right so this box is probably all of our accessories that's trapped in just like that you can see the way they've positioned the cooling holes here there aren't actually any fan mounts on them but the reason for that is that they just wanted to have a nice open well supported place to put your power supply so even if you have one of those ridiculously long power supplies I mean they can be up to this long you will have proper little rubber supports for it you'll have your four screws at the back and you'll have the right ventilation spacing no matter where the fan on your power supply is so that's pretty cool as well and let's see what else I want to talk about in the interior here right right why don't we just kind of cut right to the chase here here it is this is one two three four five six seven eight nine PCI slots and here's an interesting thing there's actually room for another slot right here so even if you have a nine slot motherboard you can even put a dual slot card in the last one and you're still not going to interfere with your power supply and there's going to be a spot to rest the card right in the case there so that's pretty crazy okay then we've also got the cutout for the CPU cooler nice big cutout so pretty much no matter where your CPUs position you're going to be able to access the backplate we've got our 140 millimeter fan at the we've got water cooling grommets here in case you wanted to do an external water cooling system now up at the top this is a little bit of a disappointment but the first one I've had about this case I don't actually see a convenient place to mount a radiator but that may just be because I'm not I don't have a radiator here to kind of line up against it because something that I do see is that there are a lot of sort of extraneous looking mounting points in here so it's quite possible that they do have the holes there but I'm not seeing them so I wish yeah I wish I had a radiator to try it but I don't have one on me whoop there we go I just undid the other panel so let's have a quick look at that on the inside we've got a bit of a sort of textured thing going on here now this is a smart thing that they've done you see how this panel is not flat there's actually quite a bit of bulge and rather than just sort of having this be flat and working the texture into this side what they've actually done is they've given you more room at the back of the motherboard tray to route all of your cables so with this kind of depth you can route you can route all of your PCI Express cables behind the video cards and then with this slightly less depth you can do the few cables required for the eight pin around the back of the motherboard in your 24 pin so that's a really smart thing that they've worked right into the case they've made it look like just a design element but it's there for a very practical reason so that brings us around to the back where we've got oh these are nice actually we've got really really soft rubber grommets to mount all of our power search amount to route all of our power supply cables through so these are the kind that even if you have a cable sticking through it and butting up against it it's still going to snap right back to its original place we have a nice big hole at the bottom because I mean in theory your routing as many as eight PCI Express connectors through this a 24 pin an 8 pin up to the back you're mounting like you're putting tons and tons of cables in here so it's great that they have a nice big hole for that okay we've got our five five and a quarter inch rather six five and a quarter inch bays these are all standard tool d'affaires but personally I don't mind that some people will complain that they're not to list but I mean oh they are to lists for ha for them are to list my dad and then the other to actually have the hot-swap module mounted in them now I wish I could figure out how that works because it hmm you know it may not actually be hot-swap it might just be like a backplane thing although it looks like hot-swap there's there's got to be a way to do this so just bear with me here I apologize for trying to figure this out on camera but no I don't really I do this all the time okay take off the front bezel and see what we can see what we can discover at the back here far at the front routers behind the front there that's what I'm ready to say okay this is interesting I wonder if you actually have to take off the top as well as the front and cameraman is complaining to me about how long this video is so I guess I'll find out how those work and I'll upload an annotation never mind I got it I got it there we go yes they are hotspot days so I figured out how they were hello let me pop the front bezel back in okay so you just take these two clips at either side push them in pull it out all you do is screw your drive in it'll accept two and a half inch or three and a half inch drives you can see into the back plane there so it accepts up to two drives so that brings the three and a half inch drive capacity up to a potential of seven as well as the two and a half inch drive capacity by default with this case up to three let's see what else I want to still cover uhm else do we got we talked about xle so our camera cut off no big deal let's have a look at the front panel connectors here's our two USB 3.0 connectors and then so these are there's there's a guide in the in the users manual for how to convert them to USB 2.0 so yeah I'm guessing there will be some way to do that we've got HD audio we've got a hard drive LED we've got our sort of standard power switch power LED reset switch all of those we've got our eSATA connection then we have our regular USB 2.0 front header and then we have our firewire front header so no matter how what connectivity options your motherboard has you are going to be able to hook it up in this case I just wanted to quickly show the to Lush mechanism for the five and a quarter inch page you just press the button it locks in the drive you press it again it unlocks the drive very straightforward okay now one thing that I totally forgot about while I was doing the last segment was the included accessories so what do we have in here oh we got wheels hey they really did think of everything this case cuz I mean one of the things I said was all it's kind of heavy there you go they put wheels on it oh here here we go so here's how to adapt the USB 3.0 cables to USB 2.0 headers all you do is this you plug this in here hide it somewhere and all of the oh no that doesn't work okay I have no idea interesting you know what I bet I can figure it out that it's not too hard I'm willing to yeah yeah I'm willing to wager that at the front of the case there's actually ports that you plug these into and then you just run a regular USB 2.0 header very nice okay we have an eight pin extension cable like I said they thought of everything because a lot of motherboard are a lot of power supplies aren't going to have a long enough eight pin to account for those extra two slots of height so there you go they include one and this I think is something to do with the graphics card duct I believe it supports the graphics cards unless you're shipping the system around is probably not a big deal but I think it kind of goes in like that or something okay and then left but not least we have a big baggy of screws mostly black screws all the ones you're going to see your black nice little finishing touches like that black zip ties as well as a little speaker you can attach to your motherboard for dial diagnostic purposes thank you for checking out my unboxing of the cooler master 1/2 X and don't forget to subscribe