Do you know what Cooler Master thinks? They think your life's too easy.
They think you don't make your life harder if you had to build your own PC case.
Which is why they made the cube, which is conspicuously named,
I don't know why they called it a cube. It's not cube shaped. It's not even, even when it's built,
rectangle, box, rectangle, it's not a cube.
Let's not let that distract from the fact that it is a flat packed computer.
It's supposed to be a build as you go experience. It's gonna be step by step, just as I take it out.
And also cool, there's,
yo, this is Lego brand Lego. That's very cute.
A Pico ATX case. Can we just switch to a Lego building video?
So right here in the box, we have printed instructions as well as some build suggestions.
We got a liquid cooler. So I guess we should try and aim
for the fluidly liquid cooled mode.
Well, Kaplaners, Kaplaners, I just don't make the case. Kaplaners like one of you just quit halfway.
And here are the instructions. I am also interested because they have a QR code here
for a video manual. And each step itself actually has a QR code as well,
which is pretty cool. And it links to a playlist. They have a full YouTube playlist
with each individual video for each individual step. That's pretty cool.
These steps are numbered strangely.
And I thought, oh, one motherboard, okay. So it's one, two.
And then you go to step two, which is one.
Oh, God. Three.
One, one, two, one, two, two, two, three, three, one.
A GPU one, but it's not following the ver... Cooler master.
You put in so much effort to make this simple. And this is garbage.
This is just nonsense. Well, let's start. So start, mount motherboard on motherboard tray.
So we'll take out our motherboard tray. The nice thing is that they give you these very clear
markings that are all pressed in all over this backplate.
They have some pre-installed motherboard standoffs. They pre-install everything for what it looks like to be ATX
because we have some ones down here. We don't actually need those because we're doing a micro ATX build.
So we're just going to move one of these into the slot right here for this micro ATX,
just to get that last little mounting point in the right position.
One thing that would be nice to see is just, maybe some labeling on these bags,
just to make it a little bit clearer when exactly I need to use them. It's a lot of screws.
You're definitely not used to getting this many screws with your computer case.
Okay, we've got, we've mounted the motherboard. What's the next step, cooler master?
Mount the PSU on motherboard tray plus motherboard tray.
Is this just an adapter bracket? No, we got ATX, FFX, the instructions are not useful.
So this little bracket is going to go on the end of the power supply like this.
It can support SFX and SFXL power supplies as well.
This is a really fun exploration. I'm sorry I'm doing a rough job of hosting it
because it's very confusing. It's very unusual,
but definitely the most interesting PC build I've been able to do in a long time.
So what this bracket does is it gives us these two little notches on the side.
You see right there and right there. And what that allows us to do is to take our choice
of three mounting positions for our power supply.
I guess it's going to basically allow us to have a little bit of extra height if we want to put a top radiator in
because we do have to route this custom cable
so that it comes out the back of the plate. Oh, that is really cool. So this really, that's how this works as a test bench.
That's kind of neat. So I see how this could cause some issues already.
Basically, if you had a longer GPU, like we have a relatively short GPU,
but if you were, say, getting like one of those large, like 4080s or even the 4070s get pretty big.
If they extend in front of here, you're going to lose the ability to access
a lot of these ports. It's going to go like right there. If you are going with this case,
it might be worth considering an SFXL power supply, but I guess we'll see how much of a problem
it actually ends up being when we get there. It's in there.
It's got a little wiggle, but it's a computer. What's going to happen?
Now we go into the next layer. And as we follow down the layers,
we can see in the box that we have front panel and mounting rear panel.
Oh, that's kind of neat. They come with two of the PCI brackets and already removed.
That's actually surprisingly convenient because that's how it always is.
And especially because you never use the first slot because that's going to be your SSD now.
You're only really looking at the second and third slots for most mounts. I like that saving me a little bit of a step
after adding so many steps.
So I get the idea that it's like, okay, shipping an empty PC case
means you're shipping just a lot of empty, just air. It's all empty in there.
But because this is disassembled, it requires like every bit of it
to be that much more rigid so that it's easier to work with
without warping or bending. And that makes this whole thing a lot heavier.
So how much are they really saving on shipping? Because that's the other big expense for shipping is weight.
No. Damn it. It's micro ATX.
I have to take out this. I have to take out the top PCIe bracket.
I'm so embarrassing. So let's go the front panel, the next step.
Ooh, it's mint green. So I've been informed that this is the Macaron edition,
which is a fancy one that comes with three different colors. And I imagine they're all dessert themed.
This is really cute. I love this. On the front panel, we have a 20 gigabit per second USB type C port
and two five gigabit per second USB A ports,
as well as a combo jack for audio. And a slightly unsatisfying power button.
Look at, look at that cable. Plenty of length that's gonna make it easy
to reach wherever you want to go. This probably is also what they use
for like normal sized cases. Cause like look at how much, look at how much play we got.
I like how there was one screw type for every part of this case, whether that's mount to your motherboard
to put in your GPU to put the case itself together.
That just simplifies my life so much. And I more companies should do this.
It's very annoying when you get like a computer case and you have like four different types of screws
and you're not really sure what each one's for cause they don't label the bags cause they're lazy.
Cooler master went the extra mile here and I appreciate that. I guess to screw this in,
we need to take off this front panel, which is magnetic
and it has a removable dust filter.
Nice, easy to wash. I like that that mesh itself seems pretty dense
and like a lot of it is wasted on the fact that it's a circle structure instead of like a grid.
This is pretty dense cause they're matching the circle design that's on the front of here,
which is just like, there's a lot of extra space. Before we get any further,
we're just going to put in our CPU and RAM real quick. Yo, we got a Star Wars.
We got a lightsaber SSD. Hell yeah, let's go.
B-D-D. Whoa. Ha-cha!
I'm just going to plug the front IO in while I'm here. All right, we got everything wired up.
So now we're going to move on to the next step, which is going to be the bottom panel.
Mmm. At the bottom, we see a fan filter made of the same material
as on the front panel, but this one is magnetic. And we have rails for up to a 240 millimeter rad
or what looks like maybe a 280. Also, we have mounting points for hard drives.
There's going to be a couple of legs that I believe go on at the bottom here that we're yet to get to
in our construction journey. So we're going to move on to the top panel.
On the top panel, we have more of that minty freshness
as well as another layer of, wow, that is going to be pretty restricted for air flow.
It's just like the front panel. And I think this is actually going to be a bigger issue than I thought.
Circles at the front that are going to be blocking stuff. Then a layer of dense mesh in the middle.
Then another series of cutouts on the backhand. I think the reason they did this was to add extra modularity
so that this could be used in multiple different locations. Like this could be the top or the bottom panel.
This could have just been the fan rails and this could have been completely unobstructed,
which would benefit both air flow and probably also fan noise.
And now we got to get our radiator out. Corsair and a lot of other companies
include the pre-installed fans now. It's so much better.
These ones I have to do myself. And we'll screw in this top panel real quick.
Oh boy, a computer builds. But I lack a sense of urgency when I do them.
And they take really long. Stay at home. Don't build a computer.
Yeah. My girlfriend was in that.
It's not that. Just because I let you be friends with her,
it doesn't mean it's our girlfriend.
We're all dating Shay now.
The feet, they just clip in. And if you're having trouble getting them all the way in, you just get them one at a time.
Yo, we got SSD and hard drive. We can mount a hard drive on the bottom,
on the backside of the motherboard background. We have mounts for two and a half inch drives
right there and there. Or a three and a half inch drive going along this way.
So this case actually supports four, three and a half inch hard drive mounts,
which is awesome. I also like this integrated handle on the back.
Could you imagine? That's what we get for supporting not just full ATX,
but also even EATX. You can see we have a little bit of extra space right here.
If we have a smaller power supply that we can get an EATX motherboard in here. Honestly, quite spacious,
especially for the size, for its compact size. I like this thing quite a bit.
It's pretty charming. I will say that actually in the backside of things,
you do have a decent amount of space for cable management.
But the nature of this kind of front mounted power supply
here, you kind of have to round this like little corner
in this tab and it's just gonna be a little bit of a pain.
It's not a ton of room, it's maybe an inch of depth. Cable management is probably not this case's strong suit.
It's always kind of hard to hide cables when your PSU is right there,
as opposed to somewhere at the bottom where you can round them up to the back and then just kind of sneak out holes.
It feels like we're nearly there. We just need this front panel and this back panel to go on.
So it comes with two different types of panels. You can get a mesh panel or a glass panel.
It comes with both. So you can choose which side you want it on, if you want it on the back to hide your cables
or if you want it on the front to hide your cables. I'm airflow focused. I like that stuff.
So say you're using the mesh panel, you can actually take this and mount your radiator to it,
or maybe a couple of fans if you want to get some direct air right to the GPU.
So I think you would take this bracket,
put it on here. You can just toss the radiator in like that.
Nice. We can also actually take this whole GPU out and use a vertical bracket.
It's really impressive how many options they've provided in this case,
while still making it flat-packed, you know? Like surprisingly modular.
And I guess we're gonna use our tempered glass panels gonna go on the back.
Whoa, look at that.
There's so many different colors. Wow, this is the macaron colors
that they were talking about. Neat.
What is this? There's so many mysteries yet to be found in this box.
Shove this on the back.
Come on, squish down wires. The problem with having detents
is that if you have too much outward pressure, they'll just pop off really easy. Obviously still easier to get them on and off in general.
So in here, we have all of the accessories with which you can customize.
I guess you gotta go with the white on the edges, but I could just swap them out like that if I wanted.
Get rid of that filter up there, maybe. And they also have a couple of other things
like we have this tiny little gem here where you can run a cable through it.
And you can put in things like a headphone hook. So look at that, you can just hang it there.
Or if you use two, it's a controller hook.
Incredible. And they come with a second handle, so if you wanna have two handles
or you can just replace the one. So you can get that little hint of mint green in the back.
Overall, as a building experience, it was actually pretty fun. Very nifty being able to put together a flat-packed case.
I am worried about the noise and the airflow coming from these really dense and thick panels.
And I think that some of Cooler Master's claims about environmental sustainability
are really gonna be offset from the extra steel that's required in building this thing.
I don't really know the math about whether steel production or shipping is more carbon-intensive.
Both of them are just carbon-intensive. When we were doing some research and prep for this,
we found a review from Kickeroo that said removing the mesh from your panels
can have as much as a nine-degree difference on your temps on their CPU rad.
So that's why I was kind of like, let's not put the mesh at the top.
I think that the mesh does help a lot though in terms of the looks.
Like you can see on the front, we don't have the mesh. And it just kind of looks messy
with that like cross-hatchet patterns on the inside of the build.
And the mesh really serves to clean up that look when you have it here.
But that's at the cost of nine degrees of thermal performance, which is pretty significant.
There are a couple of things that we had problems with. You can see this top panel.
There's like some paint chips that we already have. And then there was some weirdness with shipping.
I don't know if that's really a QC problem, but something to note.
Also the instructions are kind of wonky. I think that the step-by-step process in the box
is really well thought out and very cool and very nice. And the videos that they provide are really helpful.
The written instructions are kind of a dog's breakfast.
And they could really, really be improved. Cooler Masters also released plans
for 3D printable objects that you can download if you want to print anything that's compatible
with these holes. So if you want more of these little hooks or anything you can come up with,
you can borrow those plans and make something pretty cool. I love that.
I think that's really neat. And the price of this whole kit in Kaboodle
is $90 to $100, depending on the version,
which is a pretty solid price. I think that it's a unique case
and a unique building experience, and that should be factored into the price in my opinion.
But obviously that's a really, really competitive price point.
There's a ton of selection for good, capable cases at $90 to $100.
So you have to really kind of be into the vibe of this whole look and the DIY aspects of it.
You can get a Phanteks P400A case for around $100. I know Lee and Lee has a really great case
for around $100 now. Like if you have worries about thermals,
this might not be the case for you. I think it's really unique.
I like its style, but it doesn't feel super competitive.
If it was a $60 or $70 case, I think it would be really compelling.
It offers quite a bit of compatibility and it's a really fun case to build in
if you are somebody who's like a hobbyist,
somebody who's already in the PC space. But I think at $100 it's kind of tough to recommend
with the scene as it is. I would love to see Cooler Master continue this idea.
I think it's really neat. It's really outside of the box. I like it, but I wanted to love it.
But do you know what I think? You'll love subscribing to ShortCircuit. Thank you so much for watching.
If you like this video, why don't you watch my video on the Fractal Terra? That's a much smaller case,
but it's also very well built, a little bit more expensive. And it's the case that I actually personally own now
because I loved it that much.
No, keep rolling.
Thanks for that.