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of the affordable liquid coolers wet
dream get it it's a wet dream cuz it's they're dreaming about liquid cooling
not sure what you guys thought I was talking about this my friends is the
half a stacker there's actually two parts I have here today the half stacker
935 and the half stacker 915f so inside this one we have a
full-blown miniitx case that can also be
stacked to this one and inside this one we have two components the 925 which is
the the sort of the main that's where your ATX chassis is piece as well as
another 915 but in this case it's a
915r so unboxing the half Stacker
935 is a bit of a treat holy cow so huge inside we find
fairly thick but hard foam ah static
shock awesome fairly thick hard foam but at least it's on the fairly thick side
and they put another reinforcement piece
right here mid package so there's actually three pieces of foam on the
thing since we took it out upside down the case is of course upside down and
this will reveal the first
look at the half stacker all right now
that we've flipped it over we're going to find a couple of things here so
number one is that midsection actually goes right in between the two pieces of
the case that are included with the 935 package so here we find the stacker
915r in all of its glory and then under
that okay here we go here's another nice
thick piece of foam very hearty looking throw that back in the box is the
925 so you can clearly see this is not really meant necessarily to be its own
Standalone chassis the top is is is Holy it's full of holes you know holy holy
holes Batman as Robin would say if that
show still existed we also have a nice little instruction booklet on how to
stack which of course refers to the popular pastime of Cups no actually it
refers to how to stack the half stackers so there's a few different
configurations they show you half 945 is
a half 935 which is what you see here plus another half 915 which is what we
have so that's a main one and two small ones you can put three half 915 that's
as high as Cooler Master recommends going without additional support or you can do two half 915s or you can just
have one of these or just one of these and there are lots of different options
so I think the only way to really tackle a an unusual case like this is in a bit
of an unusual fashion so we'll start at the bottom where we have okay so there's
actual rubber grommets right in the bottom of your C what is going what
Madness is this uh this is the way that you are going to be able to pass through
cables or water cooling tubes or whatever else you might want into
potentially a second 9915 that is on the
bottom of the 925 here so I'm going to show you how you would remove the
removable feet just like this pull those babies off and then you can turn this
into a stackable module modular rail
here so that can be used to stack onto an additional case we've also got a
removable power supply fan filter right here on the bottom a fairly small one
but uh no no not too many marks off for that and now let's continue with this
unorthodox uh chassis here now we're going to go to the right side panel
where we will find not a whole lot blank side panel all right now we're going to
go to the top where ah yes see that probably looks familiar now that is that
same stacking interface nice rugged
robust plastic considering the price of this case it's actually quite well built
for my initial Impressions then we can move around to the front of the case
where we find three 5 and 1/4 in Drive Bays as well as the characteristic full
honeycomb mesh that we find on stacker cases or rather half cases excuse me
because it's all about the high air flow also we've got our I/O so we have two
USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports headphone microphone ports as well as a
power switch just like that and then on the left hand side panel we find a nice
tinted window I'm liking that actually it looks quite sharp I'm a bit of a fan
of the whole tinted window thing I think they look really really good and we're
going to go ahead and slide that off to reveal the internals of the 925 which we
will actually get back to so now let's carry on to the
915r this is the one that comes with the 935 so you get at least two modules now
this does not have feet on the bottom of it but what it does have is it has a a
case top piece so you can see the way it's intended to be used out of the box
is with this one with feet on the bottom on the rails this one with no feet on
the bottom on the rails and this one stacked on top of this one a little
something like this just like that you put four screws
in one two three four on either side and you have yourself one handy dandy
monstrosity of a massive case here now
that's not to say that that's the only way you can do it you saw me removing screws from the top of the 950 15 R just
a second ago and I'm going to just finish doing that and show you guys the
other option that's available to you so I'm just going to pull out this last
screw here so feet lids and other cases
all use the same modular interface so
that they can be swapped around so there right there is a nice included honeycomb
ventilation thing as well as a dust filter I meant the included dust filter
of course a you know a top panel is included with a top panel that's it's
not really sort of a thing but anyway this gives us our first look inside the
915r where it now is pretty much empty okay this side panel also has a nice
included dust filter so you can go ahead and check that out and integrated
radiator mounting so that leads us to the first real use of these 915 units
and that is as a dedicated rad box you could actually do two 280 mm radiators
in push pull or two 360 mm radiators in
push pull throw those on the side panels here and be pretty much ready to rock so
the r also comes with three uh 3 and 1/2
or 2 and 1/2 in Drive mounting points as well as a 5 and a/4 in Drive mounting
point which you can see through the top up here because that's about the only way we're going to reach it also you can
see that it has an mitx motherboard tray
and a power supply Mount at the back and mitx cutout as well as a spot for dual
slot graphics card so this could be a full mitx system or it could just hold
radiators or it could just hold drives in fact what you'll notice up here is
that in addition to these Bays right here there are mounting
points for two more of them so we could pull the drive cages out of the bottom
for improved air flow to our graphics cards here throw those up here and put
all of our drives up in the top routing power to them isn't as much of a problem
as you might think because you can just use Splitters once you get up there but
mounting SATA from your motherboard might be a little bit of a challenge the
good news though is that there are at least four different places where you
can bring them through so that you can get access to all the different drives
with all the different SATA cables all right so that leads me to where I was
heading with my explanation further explanation of the modular interface and
that is here so if we wanted to we could go you know what I just want like you
know I just want you know two systems I just want two cases so I'm just going to
use a 925 on its own and I'm going to use the 9915 as like a bebone skeleton
I'm going to put like a you know a secondary little storage server in it or
something you can totally do that right out of the box you can install two
systems in the one challenge is that this guy does not include the front IO
by default you can pick that up as an aftermarket option from Cooler Master so
there is that all right so let's finish up our tour of the internals of the 925
before we continue to move along here with this very very complicated case all
right so inside here we find those two 3 and 1/2 in Bays that I mentioned before
so those can hold either 2 and 1/2 in ssds or 3 and 1 half in drives we also
have another SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray you can actually
see how that's going to be installed there but don't worry we'll take off that other side panel and show that to
you guys these are fully removable unfortunately these cannot be relocated
here which would have been quite nice that would have given us some additional options in terms of cable routing and
all that we have toolless 5 and 1/4 in Baye up here in the top right corner as
well as a pretty uh actually pretty good
number of different sort of rubber grommet options the one challenge here
again is that there's actually less than an inch of space behind here so make
sure your cable management is tight otherwise you might have a little bit of
difficulty closing that other side panel all right we've got a bottom mounted
power supply as well as a 7 plus one configuration for the PCI slot so you
could install an XL ATX motherboard if you want rather there's an 8+1
configuration so you could go XL ATX here you could put something like a fan
controller there in terms of included fans for a half series case I'd say the
included fans aren't that impressive but we've got a 140 mm at the back and I
believe there is nothing at the front in this particular one but then there is I
think it's an 80 mm fan or something like that yeah that's an 80 mm fan in
the top one so it has options for fan mounting but not a ton of fans included
but when you consider the price I'd say that's uh that's actually pretty pretty
reasonable all right so I'll show you guys those fan options that I was trying
to get at before you just got to pop these tabs out from the inside and you
can pop the whole front off like that so you can throw a couple more 120 mm fans
here you'll get better air flow out of these obviously though if you remove
those Drive caddies and throw them up into the included 915r that is
definitely going to be my recommended configuration for this case so let's go
ahead and check out that back panel which I alluded to before but haven't
actually shown you yet so there's that SSD mount in the middle as well as a
little bit of room for cable management but again really not as much as I'd like
uh especially given the way that you're going to want to run cables over here if
you do Mount your hard drives here but of course you do have the option of
running up through the top of the case
and through the bottom of the case depending on where you keep your stuff in fact I think probably my recommended
configuration out of the box if you're not liquid cooling would be take all
your hard drives Chuck them down below run everything down here and then down
here from your power supply and then have nice open air flow for your for
your gaming system component all right so this is the 915f this is the one
that's available as an aftermarket option you can see that it comes
with both a top piece and with feet so
that means it can be used as a standalone case unlike the other two
which do not come with all the pieces that you'd actually need to use them
each individually and it also has a bit of a a bit of a smarter layout in terms
of if you were to use it as a standalone case so rather than you know having a
bunch of mounts for 3 and 1/2 in drives
for example where it's it's really just meant to be overflow space for radiators
and drives or whatever else for a different case it has its Drive mounts
kind of spread around and then it has a configuration that allows for a bit of a
a bigger CPU Cooler for example U the
915r that's included oh it has the same radiator mounts though so you could
still just use it as a rad box throw radiators on the side so you can see
here in the included one the r your power supply goes at the back that's
what the r is for rearm mounted power supply and there's really not much clearance for a CPU Cooler here so you
could install a full system in there but it's really not intended for you to to do that whereas this one the power
supply actually goes way over here in the front so they have a removable dust
filter right here below it and then you've got your exhaust out the front of
the case right up here and then you've got an extension cable that runs to your
power supply from the back of the case so that you don't have to plug your
power your power directly into the front of your case you've also got a 5 and a/4
inch Bay up here that includes on the bottom here hopefully I can get you guys
a good angle of that 3 and 1/2 in and 2 and 1/2 in mounting holes you have
another set of 3 and 1/2 in and 2 half inch mounting holes down here on the
bottom and then you have a third set here on this cross brace so you can put
a total of 3 3 and 1/2 in or three 2 and 1 12 in drives or of course if you
install an optical drive then you will you'll be missing that option what we also find here is that optional
accessory that's available for the other one with front IO so USB 3 Audio as well
as a power switch now airflow inside
this guy isn't really that optimal it was more of an afterthought you know hey
why don't we make this available as a standalone case as well as as an upgrade
module to the half stacker because it's really not necessarily the best ITX case
in the world it just happens to be a part of what is the biggest most
versatile liquid cooling Andor storage case for gamers that's pretty much out
there so you've got more rubber grommets for I just knocked that one out oops
more rubber grommets for pass through as well as some other things for pass through and then ah yes those same
mounting holes so we could put three 3
and 1/2 in cages in here and run an additional nine drives out of this one
as well as in the other one so there it is guys that is what Cooler Master
internally refers to as the half stacker
945 a 915r a
915f and a 925 many of these parts modular these
side panels can be moved around you can see we actually ended up with some extr
modular Parts when we assembled the case we've got two extra sets of feed and an
extra top so if we bought another 925 we could get a full additional ITX case and
a full additional ATX case out of the deal so that's that's actually something
to consider that's one large case and then one medium and one small case for
what would effectively be um I guess
just around $450 or $500 or something
like that that's not bad so I'm going to spend probably the rest of this video
I'm going to take these apart again and talk about the possibilities of of
building in here some of what Cooler Master thinks people might do with it
and some then some of what I realistically think people actually might do with it because frankly some of
their ideas are not very good um one of the ideas they had was oh you could use
it for um cryptocoin Mining and I'm like
well no because you wouldn't use a miniitx system for cryptocoin mining
because you could only have one GPU in it and particularly if you're mining
litecoins then you're going to need lots of gpus and then even if you're mining
bitcoins you're going to need uh dedicated folding cards anyway and so
you'll need PCI expansion slots and it doesn't really have that but where I see
this being useful is more like um I thought one interesting scenario was
render farm so if you wanted to have your your render your rendering offload
machine actually like strapped to your main video editing PC um another
interesting use case scenario that I see is lots of storage if you really want a
ton of storage in your PC you could actually run three cages here three
cages here so that would be a total of 18 drives between these two you could
run another six here which would be a total of 24 drives and all of that would
fit in a chassis that all these pieces combined is less than $250 so you know
you could look at it and you go oh well you could get like a Norco 24 Bay you
know 4 U case for that money it would take up less space but you would be
paying a lot more for it that's about $500 also the 3 and 1 half in Drive
sleds are quite excellent so you just release the clip on the back Pull It
Wide and then without doing any bending like we've seen in a lot of recent Drive
sleds it's also quite solid you can go ahead attach your drive and then slide
that in and it feels good even without a drive installed in it and I think Cooler
Master was actually the first one to uh to implement the whole super flimsy
Drive cages but that are really firm once you get a drive in them but now
they've gone away from that anyway um another scenario that I see people using
this for is very extreme liquid cooling so being able to put dual 360s up here
dual 360s down here in the bottom run all your tubing in between using all
these convenient holes where you can actually it's like it feels like a magic
trick right it's like oh I put my hand in this computer it comes out in this computer holy crap um being able to put
that much liquid cooling horsepower into something that costs again about $250
where comparably if you wanted something that fits you know four radiators you'd
be looking at something from Mountain mods where it's a a cube case and some
people will like the height here where instead of having to compromise that
much of your floor space or that much of your Des desk space you can have it be
vertically stacked get it stacked stacker um and have it take up at least
as much square footage of the actual space that it sits on so being able to
fit a ton of liquid cooling into something this inexpensive and that
takes up this much this little floor space is quite impressive as well one of
the other things they talk about is having your uh having a dedicated game
server so if you land a lot for example you could have a dedicated game server
machine sitting up here on a little mini ITX board also throw some extra 3 and a
half inch expansion out there you know take one of these out get some extra air
flow to your graphics card that's a very realistic one um having you know an
alternate gaming rig well your main one is editing I didn't think was that
realistic because I thought my way the other way around would be better because
then you don't necessarily have a full-blown gaming GPU up here that just
sits there doing nothing most of the time so in conclusion this really isn't
my cup of tea if you guys have been following me for any period of time I
mean I kind of looked at this when Cooler Master unveiled it at packs and I
kind of went okay for the six people who
are interested in that fine but I didn't really get a chance to look at it that
closely and I didn't really get to examine the overall build quality of it
that much at the time um and now I think I understand it a little bit better it's
still not for me I prefer more like um
clean lines and and plain a plain aesthetic whereas half has never really
been about that it's been about an edgy outward appearance and air flow Above
All Else Cooling and and flexibility and then the the stacker of DNA comes in
here with well stacking and lots and lots of hardware and it's just it's not
for me I prefer having an off loed raid
box that sits in another room and I don't have to look at or listen to but I
definitely see the value so for people looking for that value oriented water
cooling case or that value oriented storage optimized case this really is
pretty much as good as it gets for either of those things it's also built
better than I thought the one that I saw was pre-production and it really wasn't
that impressive this one is quite solid I would feel confident even once it's
full of Hardware having three full systems in here which you could actually
do and while i' probably want it against a desk or something on one side it's
really not that bad and I'm extremely impressed um I think that's pretty much
it oh yeah real user reviews I have the benefit now of reading reviews from
people who actually own the thing and paid their own money for it and they're
all extremely positive so I think the people who know they want this guys just
buy it you're going to be happy with it for the people who know that this is not
for them like me well guys you're probably not going to be happy with it
so don't force yourself one last thing that I thought I'd include since this is
hilarious is in this configuration has support for three full power supplies so
you could put one down here at the front you could put one here in the middle on
the bottom of the middle one and you could put one up here in the top so if you did want to use the middle tower for
example for Litecoin mining then at least you'd have all the power that you
needed you could split it across three different power supplies thank you for
checking out my unboxing and overview of The Cooler Master Half Stack
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a