welcome to my unboxing of the bit Phoenix Prodigy this is a completely
unique case from bit Phoenix that they believe is going to turn the ITX gaming
system segment completely upside down
not not upside like the motherboard's not upside down or anything like that
but the basic point is that they are
expecting this to just change the way the game is played when it comes to
small form factor yet very powerful very
capable machines so the first thing we're going to see when we open it up is
a quick installation guide actually oh sorry sorry external packaging so
there's not a whole lot going on out here other than some shipping labels and
like Canada um toolfree design bit
Phoenix fuber Flex Uber what does that
say fiberflex it's like it does it say
fear I wasn't sure what it said no like
look at it what am I supposed to think that
says right anyway I was a little taken
back by that but it looks like it's all good uh fiber Flex uh soft touch surface
treatment supports long graphics cards and up to 240 mm water cooling radiators
which we happen to have what did I do with it here it is which we happen to
have one of right here so we can take a look at how that's going to fit inside
uh Flex cage hard disk rack toolfree design and nothing there that looks like
just a line to help you figure out where to put the stick all right so right so
we found a little manual inside then we find the case itself got a bit Phoenix
logo going on here let's flip her upside down and get her out I'm actually really
really excited to see this case because they've done a lot of things with it
that are incredibly unique
and I I it's just one of those things like I
actually built myself in a Silverstone sg1 BW um a a long time ago I built
myself a triple water cooled a triple radiator water cooled system in one of
those just because I've got a bit of a thing for like small systems I think
they're I think they're adorable and I think they're awesome um so figuring out
creative ways to put more Hardware in less space definitely floats my boat so
I really want to see this in person all
right so let's have a look at the general aesthetic I mean the first thing
that there is to kind of notice about it is it's kind of like a uh it kind of
looks like a like a Mac Pro with the whole like handle thing going on on the
top and the bottom also I specifically asked to to check out the White Version
because I thought that that would be sort of uh sort of more more more mac
like I'm thinking we might do a Hackintosh guide at some point on NCI
Tech tips um although we might just do like an extreme gaming build within a
small form factor case not really sure what route we're going to go with all of
that but um I figured this would be more appropriate for that particular project
so the front is this is wow this this is really nice okay so the soft touch
finish is on these parts here so this
plastic trim piece here which has a bit of flex to
it okay can actually absorb a fair bit of shock but doesn't look bow actually
even the uh even the bottom right now it's got a little bit of bow to it but
not much it looks pretty sleek and the soft touch finish is also here on the
front so on the front piece here as well as the 5 and 1/4 in Bay cover the 5 and
1/4 inch Bay cover I think is important to have that same finish and that same
color because a lot of people for an ITX system aren't even going to bother with
actually a lot of people in general don't bother with Optical drives anymore anyway you've also got a pretty nice
looking bit bit Phoenix logo here on the front I really like their logo with the
shield and the wings I think it looks pretty Sleek a lot of the time you get a
company logo right in the middle of a product and it just looks like stupid
like uh remember the old remember the old Adele circle logo that theyd put in
on the side of the panel like this big and you're just looking at it going well
it's horrible why would you do that so so yeah I don't mind when it's a nice
cool looking logo like that on the side we find power reset um microphone
headphone and two USB 3.0 ports on the
back we find wow look at that 20 mil or
140 mm cooling fan we've also got oh
this oh I like this system I've seen this before so you loosen
this uh okay it's a little bit tight from the factory but I'll have to grab a
screwdriver but you loosen this piece lift it up and then it moves the plate
that holds down the uh the two expansion cards so remember guys this is ITX so
you only are actually going to be installing one expansion card the reason
that they have two slots there is because a lot of high performance
graphics cards are dual slots so you will need the additional slot for
cooling you can see that the motherboard is mounted horizontally uh based on
where the io Shield uh is going to go and it accepts a standard ATX power
supply once again using thumb screws and I've seen this before as well so you
take this plate off you mount the power supply to it and then you slide the
whole thing in from the back in fact that's not even just a characteristic of
smaller cases even my tj7 mounts the power supply like that on the top here
we've got a switch which oh allows us to remove this
there you go look at that easily cleanable filtered mesh and it just
snaps in place with a with yeah a snap cool oh and that's where we find the
place where we would potentially be mounting a dual radiator so it looks
like that probably goes in from the inside you know it's not they don't
expect you to just kind of like put it right here although you know what that wouldn't have been a bad approach either
if uh if they left a little bit more if
they left a you know you could probably even mod this to go like this if you
painted a radiator like you know like a nice uh White for example and then put
like you know pretty slick looking white fan girls on it shave that down a little
bit and throw this on here that could actually look really really good and
then you'd save yourself even a bit more room inside you might even be able to go
like Push Pull if you wanted to be pretty ridiculous about it so that's
kind of a cool interesting development here all right so moving right along you
know what give me a second here guys cuz it looks like I'm going to need a screwdriver to open this thing up
completely yeah it's stuck all right so we've loosened all the screws and we are
now ready to go ahead and open up the back of the case so here we go we can
take off things like the power supply bracket
um like I said you just Mount that to your power supply you can clearly see
the power supply mounting has nice little rubber mounts there go ahead and
do that uh okay let's take off the side panels let's take off the back side
panel first because that's the one I'm a little bit more curious about how
exactly they've executed it because you can see these buttons are all sort of
part of it oh okay that's going to be a bit of a wiring trickiness um although I
don't think it's that big of a deal because what you should really be doing
is doing all of your wiring putting on
your back side panel then you wire these up and then
you put on your other side panel I mean I can't think of any really good reason
why you need to take off this side panel looking at the interior of the case
right now here so okay fascinating sorry this sorry I'm
not letting you guys see what I'm looking at oh another cool thing oh check this out guys we've got SSD mounts
on the inside of uh of this panel there's just a plastic piece right here
you can actually take it off you can see there's four screws that hold in this plastic piece and you can put up to two
ssds in here I'm a huge fan of mounting
ssds on like the back of your motherboard tray or on your side panel
because I think in my mind that's the whole point of ssds being small is so
that you don't actually have to have a huge case and you can have all these
ssds and stuff so that uh that that definitely gets a big check mark plus
from uh from me so yeah the whole thing is very solid actually like you can see
how thick oh I don't have my iPhone in my
pocket okay whatever so the uh uh yeah
it's okay no one cares about your HTC
phone so so anyway thick metal thick
steel moving right along uh let's flip it around to the other side so we can
get it all stripped down before we try to uh analyze it too much so here we've
got more ventilation I am fully expecting this case to be very very
ventilation friendly so you can see that right next to the graphics card they're
not just doing it willy-nilly right next to the graphics card is where they've
put additional uh ventilation holes so what that will allow you to do is
install a gra hold on I'm trying to find a video card just sort of bear with me
for a second here guys um you can install graphics cards that
use a blower design
cooler um okay I found one that doesn't
use a blower design uh I found a blower design COA
that isn't mounted to a card okay this will have to do here we go you can
either mount a video card that uses uh like a like an afterm markety style
design that doesn't blow all the air out of the case because you've got pretty
good ventilation with the vents here as well as the vents in the top but what i'
really recommend with a case like this is a cooler that uses an external blower
design so it's pulling air in from here and then it's exhausting it right out
the back of the case so you can actually isolate the cooling of many of the
components of your system into zones so
you've got your power supply isolated into you know what let's just sort of
hold on to these for now just in case you need them again you've got your power supply isolated into a
Zone because it's pulling air directly from under the case through a filter so
you can see the filter is easily removable here you can just clean that
throw it back in through a filter and then right out of the case you got your
video card pulling air in through the perforations and then blowing it right
out of the back of the case and then the only thing that's going to rely on the
general case air flow is going to be your CPU and you know your RAM and other
trivial things like that so so it makes for a very a very sound a very uh
efficient cooling system now of note is the fact that unlike many cases that use
this bottom intake air thing for the power supply bit Phoenix has actually
given enough space under the case for it
to get an adequate airf flow Supply you see a lot of cases that just have little
feet you know about this big and then if you put them on carpet that power supply
is going to be completely starved for air flow unless you flip it over and
then you're pulling in warm air from the video card or whatever else is nearby
and you're not cooling your power supplies efficiently and since your power supply is one of the fans that you
have the least control of in your system
um if you feed hot air into it your system is just automatically going to be
louder so uh they have thought of that and they have given you ways of of
combating that you can see the ITX motherboard trays right here again very
solid I'm really impressed with the rigidity and how solid this cases uh no
no don't worry that wasn't it not being solid this whole hard drive sled comes
right out so that's really cool you can mount up to three three and 1 half inch
drives or three 2.5 in drives in the uh
with the 2.5 in mounting holes right
here that also gives you additional room
for graphics cards so you know what I am going to go hold on let's pause it I'm
going to go find another graphics card so yeah we found out that we can
actually install a pretty darn big graphics card in there if we remove the
hard drive cage so the uh 6990 is the
largest graphics card that I have on hand and I think almost anyone has on
hand and that fits in there just fine
once you remove the other three and A2 in uh base so that doesn't mean that you
can't install any drives anymore cuz check this out guys it's very efficiently laid out you can actually
put an additional two 3 and 1/2 in drives or 2.5 in drives right over there
they've also got more SSD mounting holes right there in the bottom so you can
mount another SSD in the bottom so you can do two ssds on that side panel an
SSD bolted to the bottom of the case you can do then up to five 3 and 1/2 in or
additional 2 and 1/2 in dri so natively I could actually mount my here check
this out natively I could mount my ridiculous 8 ssds that I use in my
personal system into the bit Phoenix Prodigy however I wouldn't have anywhere
to put the raid card unless I wanted to run on board video but you know whatever
the point is just it accepts a lot of drives given the form factor you can
mount a 5 and a/4 inch drive and they haven't limited you to a slim one again
the mounting is very solid you saw this from the top already I think so that's
pretty uh pretty self-explanatory and now I think the next thing to get oh
oh check this out okay you know what we'll be back in a moment so we figured
out the front fan situation you can do dual 120 mm ra uh fans you can do 140 a
180 a 200 or a 230 if you don't decide
to do dual 120 so it comes with all the various mounting holes you need and you
can fully remove the 5 and 1/4 inch cage
if you don't need it so if you wanted to put a front radiator you need to get
that out of out of your way all you got to do is undo a couple screws here and
then you pop off the front panel which incidentally is also how you mount fans
uh if I can okay we did this off camera so it wouldn't be that hard at least
slick did it as long oh okay yeah I was pressing
against the front while I was trying to uncp it so the front panel comes off like that you can see all the
ventilation holes that are providing actual air flow to those front fans so
that they don't just starve and uh here
let's flip it around so here's the sizing so if you were to put a dual 120
mil r radiator there it would take out up pretty much the whole front of the
case I mean most of that would be our flow up here would be where the barbs go
and there wouldn't really be any mesh there but that that is how that would
work now what slick and I are going to have to figure out is if we do my idea
where we put the radiator actually on the top of the case and
um and like make the cuts that we need to could we actually Mount two dual
radiators in this case which would be
actually you know what we could probably do two du and a single in the back so we
could do up to five 120 mm radiators in
this case with a little bit of creativity which would obviously be the
ultimate overclocked like Hackintosh editing PC so so we're I honestly this
case just gets our DIY juices flowing because there's a lot of different stuff
you can do with it so you can remove this you can remove this if you want to
you just got to undo a few screws on the bottom and you still have the option to
mount your three ssds so you can make
yourself like ssds are getting so much less expensive you can make yourself
like a raid five of 3 256 gig ssds which
is going to be 500 gigs of storage space which is more than enough um for
whatever you need to do sort of day-to-day and you have a separate you know a drobo or something to store for
your mass storage and uh yeah we let's just say slick and I are really excited
about what kind of projects we can get going on this case so thank you for
checking out my unboxing of the now gutted and completely unrecognizable bit
Phoenix Prodigy and I hope you guys are as excited about this case as I am don't
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