Bitfenix Prodigy Mini ITX Gaming & Water Cooling Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
3,294 words · ~16 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the bit Phoenix Prodigy this is a completely
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unique case from bit Phoenix that they believe is going to turn the ITX gaming
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system segment completely upside down
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not not upside like the motherboard's not upside down or anything like that
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but the basic point is that they are
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expecting this to just change the way the game is played when it comes to
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small form factor yet very powerful very
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capable machines so the first thing we're going to see when we open it up is
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a quick installation guide actually oh sorry sorry external packaging so
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there's not a whole lot going on out here other than some shipping labels and
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like Canada um toolfree design bit
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Phoenix fuber Flex Uber what does that
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say fiberflex it's like it does it say
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fear I wasn't sure what it said no like
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look at it what am I supposed to think that
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says right anyway I was a little taken
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back by that but it looks like it's all good uh fiber Flex uh soft touch surface
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treatment supports long graphics cards and up to 240 mm water cooling radiators
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which we happen to have what did I do with it here it is which we happen to
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have one of right here so we can take a look at how that's going to fit inside
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uh Flex cage hard disk rack toolfree design and nothing there that looks like
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just a line to help you figure out where to put the stick all right so right so
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we found a little manual inside then we find the case itself got a bit Phoenix
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logo going on here let's flip her upside down and get her out I'm actually really
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really excited to see this case because they've done a lot of things with it
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that are incredibly unique
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and I I it's just one of those things like I
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actually built myself in a Silverstone sg1 BW um a a long time ago I built
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myself a triple water cooled a triple radiator water cooled system in one of
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those just because I've got a bit of a thing for like small systems I think
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they're I think they're adorable and I think they're awesome um so figuring out
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creative ways to put more Hardware in less space definitely floats my boat so
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I really want to see this in person all
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right so let's have a look at the general aesthetic I mean the first thing
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that there is to kind of notice about it is it's kind of like a uh it kind of
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looks like a like a Mac Pro with the whole like handle thing going on on the
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top and the bottom also I specifically asked to to check out the White Version
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because I thought that that would be sort of uh sort of more more more mac
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like I'm thinking we might do a Hackintosh guide at some point on NCI
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Tech tips um although we might just do like an extreme gaming build within a
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small form factor case not really sure what route we're going to go with all of
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that but um I figured this would be more appropriate for that particular project
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so the front is this is wow this this is really nice okay so the soft touch
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finish is on these parts here so this
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plastic trim piece here which has a bit of flex to
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it okay can actually absorb a fair bit of shock but doesn't look bow actually
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even the uh even the bottom right now it's got a little bit of bow to it but
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not much it looks pretty sleek and the soft touch finish is also here on the
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front so on the front piece here as well as the 5 and 1/4 in Bay cover the 5 and
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1/4 inch Bay cover I think is important to have that same finish and that same
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color because a lot of people for an ITX system aren't even going to bother with
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actually a lot of people in general don't bother with Optical drives anymore anyway you've also got a pretty nice
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looking bit bit Phoenix logo here on the front I really like their logo with the
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shield and the wings I think it looks pretty Sleek a lot of the time you get a
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company logo right in the middle of a product and it just looks like stupid
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like uh remember the old remember the old Adele circle logo that theyd put in
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on the side of the panel like this big and you're just looking at it going well
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it's horrible why would you do that so so yeah I don't mind when it's a nice
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cool looking logo like that on the side we find power reset um microphone
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headphone and two USB 3.0 ports on the
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back we find wow look at that 20 mil or
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140 mm cooling fan we've also got oh
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this oh I like this system I've seen this before so you loosen
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this uh okay it's a little bit tight from the factory but I'll have to grab a
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screwdriver but you loosen this piece lift it up and then it moves the plate
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that holds down the uh the two expansion cards so remember guys this is ITX so
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you only are actually going to be installing one expansion card the reason
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that they have two slots there is because a lot of high performance
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graphics cards are dual slots so you will need the additional slot for
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cooling you can see that the motherboard is mounted horizontally uh based on
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where the io Shield uh is going to go and it accepts a standard ATX power
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supply once again using thumb screws and I've seen this before as well so you
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take this plate off you mount the power supply to it and then you slide the
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whole thing in from the back in fact that's not even just a characteristic of
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smaller cases even my tj7 mounts the power supply like that on the top here
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we've got a switch which oh allows us to remove this
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there you go look at that easily cleanable filtered mesh and it just
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snaps in place with a with yeah a snap cool oh and that's where we find the
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place where we would potentially be mounting a dual radiator so it looks
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like that probably goes in from the inside you know it's not they don't
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expect you to just kind of like put it right here although you know what that wouldn't have been a bad approach either
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if uh if they left a little bit more if
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they left a you know you could probably even mod this to go like this if you
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painted a radiator like you know like a nice uh White for example and then put
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like you know pretty slick looking white fan girls on it shave that down a little
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bit and throw this on here that could actually look really really good and
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then you'd save yourself even a bit more room inside you might even be able to go
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like Push Pull if you wanted to be pretty ridiculous about it so that's
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kind of a cool interesting development here all right so moving right along you
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know what give me a second here guys cuz it looks like I'm going to need a screwdriver to open this thing up
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completely yeah it's stuck all right so we've loosened all the screws and we are
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now ready to go ahead and open up the back of the case so here we go we can
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take off things like the power supply bracket
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um like I said you just Mount that to your power supply you can clearly see
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the power supply mounting has nice little rubber mounts there go ahead and
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do that uh okay let's take off the side panels let's take off the back side
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panel first because that's the one I'm a little bit more curious about how
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exactly they've executed it because you can see these buttons are all sort of
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part of it oh okay that's going to be a bit of a wiring trickiness um although I
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don't think it's that big of a deal because what you should really be doing
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is doing all of your wiring putting on
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your back side panel then you wire these up and then
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you put on your other side panel I mean I can't think of any really good reason
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why you need to take off this side panel looking at the interior of the case
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right now here so okay fascinating sorry this sorry I'm
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not letting you guys see what I'm looking at oh another cool thing oh check this out guys we've got SSD mounts
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on the inside of uh of this panel there's just a plastic piece right here
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you can actually take it off you can see there's four screws that hold in this plastic piece and you can put up to two
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ssds in here I'm a huge fan of mounting
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ssds on like the back of your motherboard tray or on your side panel
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because I think in my mind that's the whole point of ssds being small is so
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that you don't actually have to have a huge case and you can have all these
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ssds and stuff so that uh that that definitely gets a big check mark plus
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from uh from me so yeah the whole thing is very solid actually like you can see
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how thick oh I don't have my iPhone in my
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pocket okay whatever so the uh uh yeah
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it's okay no one cares about your HTC
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phone so so anyway thick metal thick
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steel moving right along uh let's flip it around to the other side so we can
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get it all stripped down before we try to uh analyze it too much so here we've
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got more ventilation I am fully expecting this case to be very very
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ventilation friendly so you can see that right next to the graphics card they're
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not just doing it willy-nilly right next to the graphics card is where they've
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put additional uh ventilation holes so what that will allow you to do is
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install a gra hold on I'm trying to find a video card just sort of bear with me
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for a second here guys um you can install graphics cards that
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use a blower design
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cooler um okay I found one that doesn't
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use a blower design uh I found a blower design COA
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that isn't mounted to a card okay this will have to do here we go you can
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either mount a video card that uses uh like a like an afterm markety style
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design that doesn't blow all the air out of the case because you've got pretty
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good ventilation with the vents here as well as the vents in the top but what i'
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really recommend with a case like this is a cooler that uses an external blower
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design so it's pulling air in from here and then it's exhausting it right out
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the back of the case so you can actually isolate the cooling of many of the
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components of your system into zones so
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you've got your power supply isolated into you know what let's just sort of
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hold on to these for now just in case you need them again you've got your power supply isolated into a
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Zone because it's pulling air directly from under the case through a filter so
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you can see the filter is easily removable here you can just clean that
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throw it back in through a filter and then right out of the case you got your
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video card pulling air in through the perforations and then blowing it right
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out of the back of the case and then the only thing that's going to rely on the
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general case air flow is going to be your CPU and you know your RAM and other
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trivial things like that so so it makes for a very a very sound a very uh
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efficient cooling system now of note is the fact that unlike many cases that use
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this bottom intake air thing for the power supply bit Phoenix has actually
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given enough space under the case for it
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to get an adequate airf flow Supply you see a lot of cases that just have little
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feet you know about this big and then if you put them on carpet that power supply
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is going to be completely starved for air flow unless you flip it over and
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then you're pulling in warm air from the video card or whatever else is nearby
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and you're not cooling your power supplies efficiently and since your power supply is one of the fans that you
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have the least control of in your system
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um if you feed hot air into it your system is just automatically going to be
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louder so uh they have thought of that and they have given you ways of of
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combating that you can see the ITX motherboard trays right here again very
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solid I'm really impressed with the rigidity and how solid this cases uh no
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no don't worry that wasn't it not being solid this whole hard drive sled comes
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right out so that's really cool you can mount up to three three and 1 half inch
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drives or three 2.5 in drives in the uh
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with the 2.5 in mounting holes right
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here that also gives you additional room
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for graphics cards so you know what I am going to go hold on let's pause it I'm
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going to go find another graphics card so yeah we found out that we can
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actually install a pretty darn big graphics card in there if we remove the
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hard drive cage so the uh 6990 is the
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largest graphics card that I have on hand and I think almost anyone has on
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hand and that fits in there just fine
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once you remove the other three and A2 in uh base so that doesn't mean that you
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can't install any drives anymore cuz check this out guys it's very efficiently laid out you can actually
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put an additional two 3 and 1/2 in drives or 2.5 in drives right over there
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they've also got more SSD mounting holes right there in the bottom so you can
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mount another SSD in the bottom so you can do two ssds on that side panel an
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SSD bolted to the bottom of the case you can do then up to five 3 and 1/2 in or
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additional 2 and 1/2 in dri so natively I could actually mount my here check
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this out natively I could mount my ridiculous 8 ssds that I use in my
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personal system into the bit Phoenix Prodigy however I wouldn't have anywhere
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to put the raid card unless I wanted to run on board video but you know whatever
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the point is just it accepts a lot of drives given the form factor you can
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mount a 5 and a/4 inch drive and they haven't limited you to a slim one again
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the mounting is very solid you saw this from the top already I think so that's
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pretty uh pretty self-explanatory and now I think the next thing to get oh
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oh check this out okay you know what we'll be back in a moment so we figured
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out the front fan situation you can do dual 120 mm ra uh fans you can do 140 a
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180 a 200 or a 230 if you don't decide
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to do dual 120 so it comes with all the various mounting holes you need and you
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can fully remove the 5 and 1/4 inch cage
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if you don't need it so if you wanted to put a front radiator you need to get
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that out of out of your way all you got to do is undo a couple screws here and
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then you pop off the front panel which incidentally is also how you mount fans
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uh if I can okay we did this off camera so it wouldn't be that hard at least
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slick did it as long oh okay yeah I was pressing
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against the front while I was trying to uncp it so the front panel comes off like that you can see all the
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ventilation holes that are providing actual air flow to those front fans so
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that they don't just starve and uh here
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let's flip it around so here's the sizing so if you were to put a dual 120
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mil r radiator there it would take out up pretty much the whole front of the
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case I mean most of that would be our flow up here would be where the barbs go
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and there wouldn't really be any mesh there but that that is how that would
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work now what slick and I are going to have to figure out is if we do my idea
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where we put the radiator actually on the top of the case and
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um and like make the cuts that we need to could we actually Mount two dual
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radiators in this case which would be
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actually you know what we could probably do two du and a single in the back so we
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could do up to five 120 mm radiators in
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this case with a little bit of creativity which would obviously be the
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ultimate overclocked like Hackintosh editing PC so so we're I honestly this
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case just gets our DIY juices flowing because there's a lot of different stuff
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you can do with it so you can remove this you can remove this if you want to
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you just got to undo a few screws on the bottom and you still have the option to
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mount your three ssds so you can make
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yourself like ssds are getting so much less expensive you can make yourself
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like a raid five of 3 256 gig ssds which
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is going to be 500 gigs of storage space which is more than enough um for
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whatever you need to do sort of day-to-day and you have a separate you know a drobo or something to store for
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your mass storage and uh yeah we let's just say slick and I are really excited
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about what kind of projects we can get going on this case so thank you for
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checking out my unboxing of the now gutted and completely unrecognizable bit
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Phoenix Prodigy and I hope you guys are as excited about this case as I am don't
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