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of the ASRock M8 their tagline for it is
Unstoppable and while I might have agreed with that if they had made it out
of something other than aluminum alloy I think you could stop an mitx system made
out of aluminum alloy it just might be uncomfortable particularly if it hits
you in the head all right let's have a look at the packaging so the first thing we find is a very healthy feeling
accessory box followed by ah yes awesome
closed cell foam ASRock expects this
unlike most computer cases to be shipped
with a fair amount of weight to it because not only is it a very well-built
chassis and lonus how are you saying all this stuff before you even opened it
well I've seen it before so not only is it a very well built chassis it also has
a pretty significant amount of Hardware in it and it can hold a significant
amount more so the first thing we find opening it up is the usual do not eat of
course please do not eat this put it away put it in the garbage keep it away
from babies all of that good stuff and then we find the chassis itself this is
the M8 it was designed in collaboration I have it upside down with BMW design
Works USA it uses oh man it's just
absolutely gorgeous I mean we'll do some b-roll of this but I'll still try and
show it to you guys a little bit so it can be configured either to stand up
like this or you can lay it down on its side it actually has a a g sensor a
Gravity Sensor for the front OLED display that also has a little
rubberized or soft touch knob around it so you can use that for a variety of
different functionality you can use the knob to control things like uh volume as
well as power management it has a display that can show you a clock CPU
usage clock speed all kinds of cool stuff like that they have a little
application a command yes a command so
to me this baby really is about Form and
Function so while I will spend a lot of time sort of getting all dyed over the
gorgeousness of the exterior as well as the industrial design here I would like
to take a moment to show this to you guys it is also extremely robust you can
actually use these cross braces here around the outside as handles for the
unit you can move it around that way and you're not going to risk damaging it in
any way so here in the front we have a Slimline DVD rewriter that is actually
included for USB 3.0 ports as well as a
nice little stealthy I love this nice touch boom front headphone and
microphone jacks as well as an SD card
reader so this is hooked up via USB inside we also find just I really quite
like this a stylized sort of maze likee
pattern over uh over the ventilation holes so you can actually see there are
two 60 mm fans in here the fans are arranged in a bit of an unusual
configuration by default but what you're going to want to do is have a look at the kind of system you're installing and
optimize it yourself for the best possible air flow you have more sort of
air flow here you've also ah yes this is a Bare Bones folks so it actually has a
motherboard included and a rock has done a great job of including a motherboard
that isn't a piece of junk that you're going to have to remove and they have
included a standard Mini ITX board which means that when it becomes time to
upgrade it you will actually be able to throw a standard component in there and
upgrade the system fully big thumbs up to azrock for that one so you've also
got a power in here so there's going to be an internal cable presumably
somewhere inside running to a power supply then we move around to the bottom
of the unit where we find two more fans so a couple more 60mm fans so this one's
intake that one's exhaust it's a very very strange configuration as well as a
couple of rubber feet right here that keep it from slipping and sliding around
all over the place depending on how you're using it on the left hand side
where traditionally we would see all of the internal components we have some of
the most gorgeous Cable Management that I've ever seen in a pre-done system I
mean this is fantastic this is the kind of thing that uh Apple's philosophy I
think really um reminds me of and that is that things should look beautiful
whether you can see them or not and if you're proud of it I guess you might as
well show it off and put a window on it I I like it and there's another sort of
stylized window on the other side here that allows you to actually see the
components inside so this is where we can see the motherboard the PCI Express
Riser the power supply as well as some other stuff now I want to show you guys
the accessories that are included very briefly here you've got six SATA cables
why would you need six SATA cables you might ask well I might answer because
you can actually install six SATA devices inside so there's the optical
drive there's a 2 and 1 12 in SSD drive and then there's a 3 and 1/2 in Drive
Bay that can also be converted to four ssds should you so desire you have some
included screws an included power cable included keys and included pen and
included screwdriver so that's for that's like a hex screwdriver as well as
uh little feet for mounting it horizontally so that you don't damage it
so you can actually see there are little indentations here so you can put it down
whichever way you want they're on both sides and then this key right here which
is going to allow us presumably to open up the chassis so these guys are held on
magnetically so there are actually no screws it is completely toolless magnets
are basically magic I'm a big fan of I think that everything should be magnetic
actually the side panels feel quite robust you can see the the gauge of the
aluminum is actually quite thick there so normally with an aluminum chassis
it's going to have a bit more Flex than a steel one but if you use thick enough
aluminum then it's not an issue at all so we're going to start on that side
that had the cable management on it again this is just absolutely beautiful
aluminum no plastic so this is all red anodized aluminum this piece right here
is plastic but that's about it other than that we've just got nice sleeved
power supply cables running from where they need to go to where they came from
all right let's shift her around to the other side and have a look at the layout
of the internals so first of all there is our DVD CD rewritable drive over
there so that could be removed and replaced with a different Slimline slot
loading opticle should you so desire here is our standard sfx power supply
that is a 450 watt power supply so that will be
able to handle even something like a 4770k and something like a GTX 780 to go
along with it however that will be quite tight it's not going to you're not going
to be able to run much more than that we can also have a look at the custom
motherboard that ack does include once again okay I don't mean Custom Custom uh
form factor I mean custom it's designed for this machine but of course you could
put a different M ITX board in here so this is the Z87 M8 and it includes AC
Wireless as well as Bluetooth 4.0 it includes sound core 3D audio which is
something unique about this is the fact that it can handle head phones that have
up to 250 ohm impedance so it actually has a decent headphone amp on the front
panel audio that's very unusual often even good onboard Audio Solutions skimp
on the front panel audio implementation it has a PCI Express 16x slot that leads
up to this Riser right here so the graphics card actually goes I grabbed a
graphics card this is a GTX Titan so the graphics card actually goes a little bit
under there you can see that a 10 and 1/2 in card like that is going to fit
just just nicely just barely one unusual
thing is that it does use sodium slots you can see what azrock was doing here
though is they wanted to give you the options to install all six of the SATA
devices that you can potentially have in here so they include all the SATA cables
you need all the SATA ports you need and in order to do that well they have to
use sodiums the good news is that sodiums really don't cost anymore
anymore they cost about the same as a standard dim uh We've also got Intel
gigabit land so that's a really nice thing to see I don't think we went over the in detail here so on the back
there's four USB 2.0 ports EAD a DisplayPort HDMI Intel gigabit L 4 USB 3.0
ports that's a total of eight of those as well as that 7.1 audio out including
optical audio out so here's a look at
the giser card which is all like gisen
something I don't know what I'm talking about anyway so that's just a straight
Pinto pin PCI Express Riser card so that came out of the slot right here then the
next thing you have to do is move those giant hex screws up here and
then you can pull off the top of the unit so you can actually see how they're using a fan splitter to power those two
fans and you can actually see as well that you can unscrew those fans you can
undo this cage and you can swap around the orientation as needed which is
important because the stock orientation is a little bit funny with this as an
exhaust and this as an intake which um will work that is just bizarre that's
just not a very good idea because the graphics card even a blower design
graphics card is going to then go in like this so you would want the fresh
air coming in this way and the exhaust coming out away from this so like no
matter how you slice that that just that's not the greatest thing ever but
the good the good news is once we get around behind here we find the 3 and 1/2
in or 4X 2 and 1/2 in hard drive sled as
well as the way to actually get the graphics card in there so you just go
ahead and remove this piece right here undo the two screws and install the
graphics card the way that you normally would so what I would probably do is go
uh two intakes here um get some positive air pressure going on in here I'd
probably go intakes at the bottom as well just because there's so much
General ventilation on this case that the air is not really going to have anywhere to go except out the back for
the most part so I think that pretty much wraps it up guys if you're looking
for something that is mostly pre-done for you although a little bit tricky to
uh a little bit tricky to put together if you're not willing to look at a
manual you will definitely need the instr manual which fortunately is quite
clear and outlines each of the steps in Exquisite detail um so if you're looking
for something that's a little bit I don't know I can't call it easier for a
first di DIY computer or anything like that but at least the hardware selection
is easier because it comes with pretty much everything you need so you're going to want to add storage you can put in
pretty much whatever you want there I'd probably just throw in an SSD and a hard
drive and call it a day you're going to need a CPU so any LGA 1150 CPU is going
to do you just fine you'll use the stock cooler or a very low profile cooler from
the likes of Silverstone or Noctua would be quite appropriate you'll need sodum
RAM so just DDR 3600 anything like that along those lines and you are pretty
much ready to rock once you get an operating system installed and you throw
an optional graphics card and you don't have to run it with a graphics card
because you do have those HDMI and DisplayPort ports on the back thank you
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let me know would you you go barebones
at this point if it meant that you could have a very compact well-engineered case
that's designed to fit together versus diying something that might not be quite
as space efficient