Well, that's what you would think happened to this box. I have no idea
what happened to this box. Zman dropped it off and was like, "Hey, can you check
out this case?" And I was like, "Sure." Was somebody like eating the side of the
box? They said, "We don't know." So, we're going to open this up and find out
if in spite of the fact that this case
has apparently been shipped to and from the depths of hell at least once,
whether it is in okay shape on the inside. This is the Zelman Z11 Plus. It
is an ATX midtower case with a front mesh cover for ultra cooling
performance. It supports up to seven system fans, supports a bottom PSU
installation, and aperture for cable management. Really? I think they mean
cable management holes. Uh, black interior coating. Zelman's powerful HDD
cooling solution. Tool-free hard drive installation. Spacious interior for
installing up to 290 mm or 29 cm video
cards. Acryil tuning side panel. I think they
mean windowed side panel. Supports two USB 3 ports. Front and bottom dust
filters. 2 and 12 in hard drive SSD mount on the rear side of the motherboard tray. Tray place plate tray.
Uh, separate apertures for convenient CPU cooler installation. I think they
mean a CPU cutout. And three in one bracket provided rear tube apertures for
liquid cooling systems. Somebody thinks
that aperture is an appropriate synonym
for hole in this case. And um, you could
make that argument, but I don't think
that that's really what they meant. Okay, here we go. So, we've got a hard
foam. While it isn't my favorite, it is extremely thick,
very robust, and the case did by all
appearances manage to arrive in one
piece. One thing came loose, though. So,
I'm just going to check this out here. Okay, so this is just a little guy that
goes in the front right here. That's a 3 and 1/2 in drive cover. I think that has
to be installed from the inside. So, I'm not going to try for too long at this
because that will be boring for you to watch. So, we'll fix that after. We'll
just leave it out for now. So, this is the Z11 Plus. This is actually kind of a
slick looking case. It looks to have a lot of space inside. There is the uh
smoked side panel window. So, it is not a 100% clear. It is for more of a
darkened subdued look. If you do put red lighting, it looks really, really good
with smoked dark side panels like this. We also have in terms of uh Okay, here I
got to stay stay focused here. It's late and I'm tired. So, let's just take this
off. So, that is protecting what appears to be a tray for storing like you know
screws and um u I don't know like
pocket chain and like SSDs that you
might happen to have lying around. You could store them there. Um I know this
isn't the first world problem, right? Where am I going to store my SSD that's
lying around? Um, moving along, we have two front USB 3 ports, a reset switch, a
hard drive indicator LED, two front USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone
jack. And really, does this do anything? No, it doesn't. Okay. Power switch right
here, and a power LED under the power
switch. Now, ventilation wise, at the front, we have almost a full mesh thing
going on, except where there are ventilation grills. So, it's grills or
its mesh or its apertures, whatever you want to call it. There is a lot of
ventilation on this case. So, here we can see a front 140 mm fan. That is a
filtered fan spot. And it looks like
this does come off. Give me a second here, guys. It looks like we're going to
be able to take this off more easily once we get the case open. So, we'll have a closer look at that, as well as
their unique hard drive cooling solution, which uses these vent holes
here on either side to move air actively
directly over your hard drive. So, the side panels are pretty run-of-the-mill
steel construction with the plastic sort of aggressive car looking venty thing
going on as well as the uh the bulging out window that actually serves not only
an aesthetic purpose, but also a practical purpose because you can install very tall CPU coolers in this
case without any difficulty. at the back. You see here that okay from the
front it looks very more uh like um with
fewer holes in it. And then uh from the back you can see that there is ample
room for air flow coming from the inside of the case to be exhausted out the
back. Uh, at the back we actually see we've
got a 120 mm cooling fan, seven PCI
slots, bottom mounted power supply, and I think all of this was covered when I
was checking out the specs on the box itself. However, here we are reiterating
it because I need to buy time while I take off these screws. Let's take off
the side panel. So, here we go. That appears to be a
80 mil. That appears to be an 80 mm exhaust fan which is pulling air
directly from over the hard drives and
then exhausting that out here. Very
cool. Plugs in with a four pin Molex peripheral connector. Overall side panel
construction is actually fairly solid. Not bad at all. All right. Once we Oh,
you know what? Here, I took these screws off. So, I'm sure to have that fall off
if I don't do something with it. Now, this one is also exhaust. So, both of
them are pulling air from that front intake fan and then exhausting them out
the case. And this one also plugs in with a four pin uh Molex peripheral
connector. And due to like this uh this plastic piece here, once again, it feels
quite quite solid overall.
Kind of unique design actually. Very cool. All right. So, there is the front
140 mm fan that I was talking about. And then here is the toolless hard drive
installation mechanism. So, you just use these. Pull these out if you want to
take out your drives. In fact, we should probably go grab a drive just so that we
can show you assuming I have one lying around, which apparently I do. So, if
you're probably if your first world problem happens to be where to store the hard drives that you have lying around,
uh, Slick is telling me something, but I don't know. I don't know what it is right now. Something about screws. Give
me a minute. All right. So, Slick tells me this is
how I do it. I don't know if you can necessarily call this toolless, but uh
there you go. You slide it in like that, and then this piece is pulled out in
order to remove the drive. Uh you can
also There we go. Put in an additional screw for added security if you're
worried about the drive coming out. However, you will lose some of the
antiibration vibration dampening effects of the
rubber mounts if you do actually happen to do it that way. Uh, what else have we
got here in terms of accessories? So, it comes with an 8 pin extender. This is
actually a phenomenal value ad. These cost anywhere from about 5 to 10 bucks
to buy. So, it comes with the case for a bottom mounted power supply that
actually isn't even in that tall of a case. So, if you have a decent power
supply, you just use this and then like save one of these for a rainy day. All
right, we got a couple PCI back plates, including one that is set up for these
USB 3 cables, which plug into the back. That's a little bit disappointing. Um,
I'd expect at some point they'll revise this case to use an internal header, but
for now it isn't using one. We've also got all of our mounting screws, a couple
cable ties, as well as a boatload of
thumb screws that look like they would be useful for all kinds of things,
including mounting drives. So, these guys are threaded with fine threads,
guys. So,
no, I don't think you're I don't think you're right. I don't think it's for
that slick. I think it's for mounting the motherboard.
I could be wrong, though. Let's find out.
Yeah, I think these are actually for mounting the motherboard. Cool. Because
all the standoffs are in here as well. I actually really like the look of
mounting the motherboard with thumb screws. There's no reason you can't do it in any case, but uh as long as you
have screws that are threaded correctly for your standoffs, but I think it looks really sharp. So, there's a user's
manual and let's get moving with the
case itself. Here we go. So, in terms of the fans you can mount in this thing,
you have a ton of different options. So, there's the front fan. There's the two
other fans that come with it that cool your hard drives. There's also room for
up to another two 120 or 140 mm exhaust
fans up here in the top. A 120 in the back, a 120 or a 140 with a filter. So,
that's going to be an intake. On the bottom, there's your power supply fan.
which is also filtered. That's good. And then finally, you can install another
fan on the back of the on the back of the motherboard where your video card
is. So that will actually for Okay, this is interesting because for video cards
that use um aftermarket coolers like this one where they actually blow a lot
of the heat down towards your motherboard, cooling the back of the
board is something that could be very useful. I've never seen that feature
before. So, that's uh that's an interesting touch. Uh what else we got
here? Right, all your included internal connectors. So, your front power switch
and LEDs and all that whatnot, hoo-ha, as well as your internal USB 2 header.
And then your internal USB or rather your external USB 3 cable. So, those
ones are going to go around to the back of the motherboard and plug in right
there using that PCI slot pass through.
We have a fairly large CPU cutouts, some pre-installed
um motherboard standoffs. So although you'll have to put in the rest yourself,
that's fine because this is pretty much what you need for ITX. Then for MATX or
ATX, you're going to go ahead and expand how many you have in there. 5 and 1/4 in
bays. I actually never did count those. We've got five of them with one of them
with the 3 and 1/2 in adapter that that piece was missing from before. These are
all filtered, so they have foam in them, which will keep dust from accumulating
from air that is sucked in through the front of the case. Overall construction
is actually fairly solid considering what a value this case is. They haven't
uh they haven't cheaped out on the on the overall build quality of it. It
feels very solid, which means it may not be as much of a factor when
it's just a case, but once you load it up with a bunch of heavy hardware,
especially if you're going to ship it anywhere, the cases that aren't built as
well, tend to show very quickly where
the problems exist. So, if you aren't doing things like reinforcing the
motherboard tray with these kinds of bends, which incidentally also gives you
um a lot of different cable routing options or that's Zelman has
incidentally given you cable routing options as well as all these different
places to tie down cables. It's those little nice touches that make a case
much easier to work with and much more solid. Look at this. Look at all these
cable hold downs. These are more handy than you'd think because there isn't a
ton of room on the back of this motherboard tray for cable routing. So,
being able to lay everything down flat and cable manage it cleanly is going to
be the difference between a tidy case with all the cables running up the back
and an awful looking cable manage case with the cables running up the front. I
think that pretty much covers it. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing
and first look at the Zelman Z11 Plus. Don't forget to subscribe to Finest Tech
Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Slick burned me.
That's the SSD mount on the back of the motherboard tray. That is not for a fan.
Although, you know, you could put a hole in the other side panel, and you could
put a fan there if you really wanted to. If you wanted to execute my
well-intentioned plan of cooling the motherboard near the PCI slots better,
you could do that. Or you could just install your SSD here and run your cable
around here to your motherboard and it would look very tidy and clean and that would be a good thing.