so today we have an exciting new product to talk about this is The Cooler Master
half X and um really this comes down to
a complaint that I've had for quite a while with uh EVGA and their overly long
motherboards they've been releasing motherboards like their classified
fourway SLI their new sr2 uh super
record 2 dual slot or sorry dual socket
um LGA 1366 motherboard they've been
releasing motherboards with too many PCI slots they're actually longer than a
standard case which is seven PCI slots now the half 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 and
plastic uh there's a bunch of boring stuff now something that they have seem
to forgotten here is that it is Micro ATX ATX eatx and it is also something
called XL ATX which is kind of a an ATX that is
too long because if we come down here PCI slots nine so rather than having a
standard seven 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 so two
nine uh two too long like the classified four-way okay so cooling system this is
probably relevant included we have a 230
mm red LED fan at the front a 200 two
200 mm fans at the top and oh one is optional okay so only one a 200 mm fan
at the side and a 140 mm fan at the rear there's apparently also a 120 mm
fan which is a VGA fan cover and then a VGA holder has an optional 80mm fan so
one of the big features of the half X is actually also that it is firmy ready so
it is ready for NVIDIA's latest GTX 470
and 480 graphics cards that means it has
really good GPU cooling that kind 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 uh 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 C I'm sure they mean cable
but that's a 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 uh let's get the case out let's
have a look at it the first thing I noticed about it is that it is black
black everywhere black on the inside black on the back black on the top on
the front very nice that is what I like to see for almost any case these days is
a nice black interior as with a black
exterior black goes with everything it's the New Black we 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 cooler Master's
half line of cases is all about half high air flow 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 got 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 cheat she at the front we
have our two 130 mm red LED fan up at
the front we've got all of our front connectivity so they've got everything
here we have USB 3.0 super speed which
you can convert to extra USB 2.0 ports we've got eat fire wire 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 oh maybe not
okay here we've got a little slider okay so that has your o fan LED button that's
pretty cool then a reset switch as well as a power switch so those can all be um
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 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 in 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 ducked 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 um humanly or fanly
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 uh 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 3 and 1/2 in in or rather this one has an SSD adapter already
included in it but I'm assuming yeah you can take that out so they're 3 and 1/2
in Drive Bays uh now these look really flimsy but as soon as you install a hard
drive in them they're really really sturdy so I I love their hard drive
mounting system personally and then they've also gone and included a 2 and
1/2 in 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 their convenient tooless system and
clip it in awesome so it takes up to 1 2 3 4 5 3 and 1/2 in Bays here and then
what appears to be a hot swap module in
the front but why don't 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 oh they've got a little cool design by Cooler Master stamp on
here this is going to hold your power supply all right 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 got little rubber um here where's my
knife see I actually have a knife today check that out all right 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 fmy graphics cards this is part of what makes it fmy ready because
you're ducting dedicated airflow to the
graphics cards using like kind of a segmented uh Zone cooling Paradigm that
we first saw with the antech p180 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 going to now that
I've removed that I'm going to 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 going to pull it out
anyway but I mean hey they think of everything right so this box is probably
all of our accessories that's strapped in just like that you can see the way
they've positioned the uh 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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 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 CPU is positioned you're going to be able to
access the back plate we've got our 140mm fan at the back 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 uh 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 uh I
wish yeah I wish I had a radiator to try it but I don't have one on me
unfortunately 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 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 and 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 to mount all of our power or to mount 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 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
cuz I mean in theory you're routing as many as eight PCI Express connectors
through this a 24 pin an eight 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 5 and a/4 in rather 6 5 and 1/4 in Bay
these are all standard tooled Affairs but personally I don't mind that some
people will complain that they're not tlist but I mean oh they are Tess four
four of them are Tess my bad and then the other two actually have the hot swap
module mounted in them now I wish I could figure out how that works because
it h you know it may not actually be hot
swap it might just be like a a back plane thing although it looks like hot
swap there's there's got a be a way to do this so just bear with me here I
apologize for trying to figure this out on camera but
uh no I don't really I do this all the time okay let me just take off the front
bezel and see what we can see what we can Discover at the back
here or at the front rather behind the front there that's what I meant to
say okay H this is interesting I wonder if
you actually have to take off the top as
well as the front and uh cameraman's complaining to
me about how long this video is so I guess we can wrap it up at some point
well you know what I'll find out how those work and then I'll upload an
annotation never mind I got it I got it there we go yes they are hot SWAT
Bays so I figured out how they work hold on 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 2 and 1/2 in or 3 and 1/2 in
drives you can see into the back plane there so it accepts up to two drives so
that brings the 3 and 1/2 in drive capacity up to a potential of 7 as well
as the 2 and 1/2 in drive capacity by default with this case up to three let's
me see what else I want to still cover
um what else do we got we talked about XL 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 uh in the users manual for how to convert them to USB
2.0 so uh 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 fire wire 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 uh just wanted to
quickly show the tooless mechanism for the 5 and a/4 inch Bay 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 hey they really did
think of everything with this case cuz I mean one of the things I said was oh
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 in 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 I bet it's not too hard I'm willing to Y yep 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 an8 pin extension cable like I said they thought of everything
because a lot of motherboard or 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 uh 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 last but
not least we have a big baggie of screws mostly black screws all the ones you're
going to see are black nice little finishing touches like that black zip
ties as well as a little speaker you can attached to your motherboard for Di
diagnostic purposes thank you for checking out my unboxing of The Cooler
Master half X and don't forget to subscribe