Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with corsair memory and western digital we're here in the cooler master suite with a couple of case concepts that cooler master would really like to get your feedback on in a couple of different ways so first up behind me we've got the half stacker this is that modular case idea where they've got the 925 and then they've got the 915 and then you can put another 915 on the bottom or you can put 2 915 or even 3 9 15 s together and you slide them all together but they want to go beyond that in terms of customizability and start offering upgrade kits whether it's things like oh I don't know you know USB 3.1 comes out in the future and you need like a new you know module here whether okay here's a mock-up for a slimline optical drive maybe you want to add that to one of the 915 so you don't care about front USB but you want one of these ok cool go ahead have one of those they've also got a mock-up here for a windowed side panel for the 915 maybe you want to just build a dedicated system just inside that case you want to upgrade that piece maybe you want like you know I don't know hard drive cage add ons okay these are these are pretty standard these are pretty straightforward those are available for lots of cases but the point of all of this is guys they want to hear your feedback in terms of what kind of upgrades you can think of that you'd like to see for the half stacker series so that they can continue to develop their products around the needs of the people who are interested in this very unique and very flexible chassis and here's an interesting one this is very much pre-production engineering sample whatever you want to call it and the key here guys is cooler master wants to hear from you what you like and what you dislike about their prototype of the half X C so the first thing that's going to stand out to you guys is of course this wraparound windowed side panel this is pretty much a finished idea but of course it doesn't hurt to let them know what you think about it the idea is that most of the hardware is on this side so you've got your motherboard cpu memory graphics card and then all of the cable management is actually wrapped around the back now it's not like we haven't seen this before but who came up with the internal layout first is one of those things where if you dig around enough you'll be able to settle the on your own anyway we're not going to get into that here but the overall features are it does support a 360 millimeter radiator in the front in fact the one that's installed in there right now is an upcoming glacier series so that is the swiftech coolermaster collaborative product with a three hundred and sixty millimeter radiator as well as of course the integrated high quality cpu block and pump and all that good stuff that we found on the 240 millimeter glacier series cooler now a bit of a tour of the rest of this case the top has kind of a 3d mesh as does the front it kind of reminds me of the jam box by jawbone except that it's not nearly as bad sounding although they do have some kind of loud fans in there right now your front i/o is taken care of right here with two USB to two USB 3 in front panel audio the switch is kind of a large switch that you can press of course it's a switch anyway okay you've got to five and a quarter inch bass and this is kind of a neat thing it's intended to be stood upright like this or you can actually turn the little little cooler master badge and you can use it as a desktop case as well once we open up the other side panel will find the power supply all the loose cables that were plugged into all the stuff on the other side as well as room for for two and a half inch SSDs at the top of the back and then closer to the front I actually kind of forget so I'm going to have to I was hoping to cheat and do b-roll for all this but I'm going to have to open up the case and have a look yes right we have two five and a quarter inch cages to go along with the five and a quarter inch bass and then under each of those is another 2-3 and a half inch drive cages alright the last products that cooler master needs feedback on are the silent flow series fans so this is a 1200 RPM fan that is optimized for low rpm operation it only comes in a three pin configuration because DC control can be better for very very low rpm operation when you're under voltage compared to PWM which can have some weird electrical noises that go along with it and they are claiming that they've had this running as low as eight decibels in a lab so I'm extremely excited to check that out especially if they can get it running optimally on something like a radiator next up we've got the hybrid flow fan this one again is very our experimental one more time and this uses axial fan technology much like you would find on your graphics card cooler and it exhausts there in a couple different ways so the intake is on the side that you guys are looking at right now and then normally you'd go okay so the exhaust is here and that much is true there's what looks like about a 70 millimeter or 80 millimeter fan worth of fan blades that's going to exhaust in that direction but wait what's this one of the sides is actually open for sideways exhaust so say for example you had an intake on the side of your case actually the 800d case from corsair is one that's kind of like this where you have a side intake and then it's like it's blowing air in one direction and is mostly blocked well this will allow you to maybe get some hard drive airflow for your cages and then some additional airflow to your GPUs at the same time so I'd like to hear from you guys where you could imagine installing a fan that intakes from the one side exhaust out the other side and then like also exhausts out one of the edges so guys thank you for checking out this experimental ideas video from the cooler master suite here at CES 2014 huge thanks to NCI XCOM for allowing us to be here they are our gold sponsor and they are your source for great technology selection and service and of course we want to thank our other sponsors as well of course our memory and Western Digital for allowing us to be here without them we just couldn't do it