Cubitek Mini Cube ITX Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,592 words · ~7 min read
0:07
welcome to my unboxing and first look at the cubc mini Cube this right here is a
0:15
little mini ITX enclosure that is just
0:18
over 19 l in volume inside so their
0:24
claim to fame with this guy is that it can accommodate VGA cards that are up to
0:29
280 m mm and it has Cable Management in
0:33
the back of the motherboard tray so they
0:37
are saying that this is the first mini ITX enclosure with cable management now
0:42
I wouldn't say that this is quite you know um factual because something like
0:48
an F3 mini from Silverstone does have
0:51
cable management but it doesn't necessarily have the same kind of a form
0:55
factor as a more traditional PC case so let's go ahead and find out what's
1:00
inside so cubitac uses all aluminum construction so I'm expecting it to be a
1:05
fairly basic case in terms of the sort of like you know no plastic pieces you
1:10
know injection molded this or that but what we will find inside is quality
1:15
manufacturing so they use like brushed aluminum finishes and nice lightweight
1:19
design and here is the manual fairly basic fairly straightforward nothing
1:23
really out of the ordinary there uh in fact what I should be doing is showing
1:27
you the manual here so that we can use our b-roll camer camera for that we
1:30
don't have a second camera operator today unfortunately so we're just going
1:34
to have to make do without also here I have all of the included
1:38
accessories so they come in just a plain Ziploc baggie so that'll be all your
1:43
mounting screws motherboard standoffs a bunch of rubber grommets that appear to
1:47
be for presumably mounting yep hard
1:50
there's your hard drive rubbers um what
1:54
else we got your buzzer I think they mean speaker' also oh I got to go
1:58
through all of them now your M3 L6 screw
2:02
that one wasn't fun your number 6 32 screw no fun oh M5 okay sure well that
2:08
was that was all the fun ones anyway we got to the fun ones right at the
2:11
beginning there's your standoffs and then we get to the case itself so it
2:16
comes packed in a soft foam as you guys know soft Foams are my favorite Foams
2:22
it's fairly thin but guys this is an ITX
2:25
case so the expectation from the manufacturer and from me for that matter
2:30
is that you actually wouldn't be um you wouldn't be putting you know like a
2:34
triple radiator liquid cooled triple SLI
2:38
machine in here because it simply won't fit so you don't have that much weight
2:42
to worry about now I am going to go retrieve myself some gloves which I will
2:49
use to handle this case and I would recommend that you do the same because
2:53
brush aluminum finishes look beautiful but the problem you run into is that
2:58
they're very easy to stain and once you stain them then they are not as
3:02
beautiful so I'm just going to show the uh the b-roll camera what the side panel
3:06
looks like here again there's that brushed aluminum on the front we just
3:09
find a cubc logo as well as a power and
3:13
reset button here's your indicator LEDs
3:17
and then on the other side hopefully the
3:21
uh that camera can see the indicator LEDs and the power and reset switches on
3:25
the other side we find just plain black
3:29
aluminum and on the back there is room for the io
3:33
Shield two PCI expansion slots so you
3:36
could install a single graphics card remember ITX only has one expansion slot
3:40
so you could install a single dual slot graphics card for example and then
3:44
there's your standard ATX power supply an 80 or a 92 mm fan Mount and finally
3:51
we've got the io on the top of the case here we find two USB 2.0 ports two USB
3:56
3.0 ports a headphone jack a microphone Jack and that is pretty much all she
4:02
wrote now there's no toolless uh opening
4:05
for this guy so we're going to have to grab a screwdriver and we'll be right back now once we open it up we find out
4:11
what they meant by mini Cube they meant a mini case that is in fact in the shape
4:16
of a cube so here on the back we find all of those hard drive mounts so you
4:21
can do either four 2 and 1/2 in or two 3
4:25
and 1/2 in with all these different hard drive mounting options here now I let
4:30
the uh there we go nope there we go I
4:33
let the instructions get away from me here but they actually show you on the
4:37
back how you can use the various holes actually okay well I guess I should do
4:41
this how you can use the various holes to mount either 2 and 1 half inch or 3
4:45
and 1 half inch drives they also give you the sort of recommended order in
4:49
which you install things which I think is actually quite important because this
4:53
is going to be a very small case once you've got a motherboard that goes to
4:56
here a CPU Cooler that goes here and
4:59
then a graphics card that potentially goes all the way across here now you can
5:02
install sort of the first question I asked when I saw the initial the layout
5:06
of this guy is where do I put my intake
5:09
fan where does the intake fan go because the front of the case is completely
5:13
clean the top of the case is completely clean as are the side panels so you
5:17
could potentially intake from the top and then set your power supply up as an
5:21
exhaust so there's a filtered intake on the bottom of that but you could flip it
5:24
over instead and then have it draw air from the inside of the case and exhaust
5:28
it the other option here is to install a 120 mm fan in the front of the case so
5:33
you can see from the bottom there's either room to mount a 2 and 1/2 in SSD
5:38
there or a 120 mm cooling fan so I would probably go the cooling fan option
5:42
especially if you're putting in a high performance graphics card now you hear
5:45
that other side panel rattling that's not because the side panel rattles due
5:50
to some kind of a manufacturing defect it is because I have pre- loosened all
5:54
the screws so that I can show you um how
5:57
it comes off so there's four screws one in each corner and I almost dropped that
6:02
one so you just take all of those off and last
6:07
one there we go and now we get access to
6:10
the back of the motherboard tray that's actually not bad oh yeah you can see the
6:14
side panels here are quite quite thick aluminum actually very nice so the back
6:18
of the motherboard tray has a good inch of space back there that's outstanding
6:22
so you can see there's lots of room for cable management as well as holes cut
6:26
here and up near the motherboard and at the front of the cave that are also for
6:30
cable management so if I'm going to try and Eyeball this that's pretty tough but
6:35
it looks like one here one here and one
6:39
here and one here for 3 and 1/2 in drives and then the 2 and 1/2 in spacing
6:43
must be there somewhere but it's uh pretty pretty tough to eyeball so here's
6:47
here's what a 2 and 1 half inch Drive oh no those are two and a half inches there
6:51
so that's one two
6:54
three four
6:58
somewhere well I'll take their I'll take their word for it I suppose we'll be
7:02
back in a moment slick and I figured it out all
7:06
right so it goes like this one two three
7:10
four 2 and 1/2 inch drives or three 3
7:14
and 1/2 inch drives so those ones will go uh here here and here so you have the
7:22
option for what you want to put on the back you could even do 2 3 and 1/2 in 2
7:25
2 and 1/2 in and then if you didn't install that cooling fan then you could
7:29
could do an additional 2 and 1/2 inch here so there's actually a lot of expansion room so we're really excited
7:34
to do a build in this particular little Chassy and I think that pretty much
7:39
wraps up the unboxing don't forget to subscribe to lonus Tech tips for more
7:42
unboxings reviews and other computer videos and it's extremely light in case
7:46
you guys were were wondering about that oh yeah front connectors I didn't even
7:50
show these so front connector wise you've got your front USB 3 your front
7:55
HD audio your front um power reset all
7:58
that good stuff and and front USB 3 so those are all just done by one big panel
8:03
up here that then leads sort of through
8:06
the back and goes wherever you need it to go probably out mostly here