Antec Lanboy Air Ultimate Airflow Modular Computer Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,945 words · ~14 min read
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What's the first thing you think of when you see this picture? If it's not Tonka
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or Lego, then you've probably seen the marketing for the Landboy Air already.
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This is Anttech's latest and greatest chassis. It is fully modularized, and
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we're going to talk a lot in this unboxing about what exactly modularized
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means, and it is really unlike anything
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else we've seen on the market yet. So,
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the Lanboy Air, the Landboy series has
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been dead and buried, I thought, for the longest time. I actually owned an
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original Landboy. And then there was the uh the Super, it came with the smart
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blue 350 W power supply. And then there was the Super Loy that came with that
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weird uh grill at the front. And since then, there's been not a whole lot. But
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this is it. Ant has revived the Lanboy
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product line with the Lanboy Air. So, there you
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go. That yellow is not quite the same as it looked. It's not quite as tonka like
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as it looked on the picture on the front, but uh Okay, here we go. So, the
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first thing we find in here is a little instruction manual. And based on all the
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things you can customize on this case, I'm going to go ahead and venture a
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guess that you're probably going to need it. Lanboy Air grounding. Okay, they
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show you how to ground the case. That's good. How to mount your 2 and 1/2 in
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SSDs. Okay. So, there's a little manual on that. How to install USB 3.0. Okay.
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Cuz it does have one USB 3.0 port at the front as well as a quick product
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overview. So, here's a little product overview. Shows you a bunch of stuff
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about it. Okay. And then a little survey that you can take to win PC accessories.
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Thank you, Ant. All right. Now, I want to go through Let's take the case out of
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the box. Uh, as is typical for Antech, the case is extremely well packaged.
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Uses a good quality double wall box as
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well as a high quality close cell foam
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packing material. So, you can see that's not going to be a problem in terms of
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shipping. And then I wanted to go through all the stuff it says here and
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maybe I'll point at the case while I do it or
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something. Honestly, I'm a little scattered cuz I can't wait to get this
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out of the box. I've been looking forward to uh playing with one of these in person since I first heard about this
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case, just because, like I said, it is
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so completely different from anything we've seen on the case market uh
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ever. There we go. Wow. It actually looks a lot better in person than it
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does in photos. I can see why Antech really wants to do uh a lot of video
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coverage of this a lot. They've actually got a pretty good video on their site
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right now that shows off the Lan Boyer. So, first thing we see here, carrying
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handles. Even with a fully loaded computer in there, there's no way these
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are going to break off. And uh I'm really glad they didn't because that
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would have made for a very uh anticlimactic test of the Landboy Air.
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So, they fold down just like that. And then, let's have a look at the back
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here. So, you can see you've got support for dual 120 mm fans right here at the
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top of the case. And speaking of fans, the Landboy Air, although it comes
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equipped with uh five 120 mil fans,
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supports up to 15. And Anttech is really
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encouraging users to use every fan as an
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intake. And because the case is so
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covered in mesh and airflow
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nonrestrictive materials, you can see the whole other side of the case is
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completely mesh. What that means is by using every fan as an intake, you can
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create positive pressure inside the case, which means that air will
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naturally blow out of anywhere that you
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don't have an intake fan. So, what that means is you're able to keep dust out of
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your case because everywhere where there isn't a fan drawing air in, there's air
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just blowing out of all the little nooks and crannies of the case. So, it's very,
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very difficult to get dust buildup in a case like that. So, there you go. That's
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why Anttech encourages you to take advantage of the positive airflow design
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of this particular chassis. Now, the finish on this is just phenomenal,
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actually. Look at that. It's a very glossy black finish on the top of the
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case. Looks like we're going to have support for up to uh a dual 120 mm
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radiator here in the top. Although, don't quote me on that. I'm not 100%
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sure. Now, in the front of the case, this looks like it should be something.
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What is that? Okay. Well, why don't we
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run through these marketing bullet points so that uh we can get a clearer
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idea of what we're dealing with here. So, the modularity optical drives can be
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mounted in three different orientations. You can actually mount an optical drive
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facing out this side of the case or you
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can mount it facing out the front or you can mount your optical drive facing out
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the other side of the case. Same thing goes for your hard drives. The hard
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drives use a new system called air mounting. And I'm going to go ahead and
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take this off. These panels are modular like many aspects of this case. So, the
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hard drives use a new system called an air mount, which you can see is like a a
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rubber elastic thing, and then you screw your hard drives in. And what that
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allows you to do is reduce vibration. And it also allows you to mount it also
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in any orientation. So, your hard drives can be mounted with the connectors
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facing your motherboard, facing this way, or facing towards the other side of
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the case. So, that's pretty cool, too. So, you can mount hard drives, optical
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drives, whichever orientation you want. But wait, there's more. You can actually
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move around the optical drives to be
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down here, or you can move them here. And you can put hard drives in the top
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if you feel like it. Yeah, you can actually customize where all that stuff
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sits. Down here in the very bottom, you can see there are two spots for 2 and
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1/2 in SSDs. So, you can do up to a RAID zero with two 2 and 1/2 in SSDs right
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down there on the bottom of the case. Now, let's go ahead and This is going to
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be kind of a long unboxing. I've got I've got that feeling that uh it's going
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to take a lot to cover this particular chassis. Okay. Modular motherboard
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mounts. Yeah. Okay. We'll get into those a little bit later. Okay. So, we've
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taken off the side panel now. So, here we'll have a look at the construction of
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the side panel. As I mentioned, there's a lot of mesh on here that's very
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conducive to good air flow. It's got metal pieces here, but it's a mostly
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plastic construction. So, what that means is with the metal mesh and the
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metal bars, it actually retains a good degree of rigidity. Okay. So, then
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you've got your little Anttech design sticker there, which is very, very nice.
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And then, uh, yeah. Okay. Well, we took that off. Let's keep on going then,
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shall we? Here is the back of the motherboard tray. So, the motherboard
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tray is modular. Let's find out exactly what that means. You can ah, yes, you
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can move the motherboard tray down. So, you see these screws here, here, here,
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here, and here. You can move the motherboard tray down to the bottom, and
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then you can actually move the power supply mount up to the top if you'd
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prefer that. You don't have to use a bottom- mounted power supply. That's
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what they mean by modular. And the motherboard tray, I should also mention,
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does support up to eight PCI expansion
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slots. So, that means you can mount a 4-way SLI motherboard in this chassis.
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Once again, it wouldn't be customizable and modular if you can't mount whatever
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you want in it. Am I right? Okay. Back of the case, we got a 120 mil fan. We
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got water cooling grommets, the aforementioned 8 PCI slots, as well as
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your PSU modular mount. All right, let's
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keep turning it around. I'll use the convenient carry handles because
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remember this is a Landboy series case. It is designed to be moved around to
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land presumably or to your mom's house
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if uh she has a faster internet connection than you and you want to
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download something quickly. The point is you can move the
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computer around. I don't want to hear about it.
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Okay, so I'm just undoing screws here. I really wish I'd remembered my
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screwdriver, but I never do. That's how I roll. Cameraman's going to help me.
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Thank you, cameraman, for contributing at the very last minute when there's
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only one more screw to remove. Cameraman can't even do it
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because he has Mac hands and they're not strong enough. Been using a Mac all
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day. Oh, wow. That one is pretty tough.
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Okay, well, give me a minute off camera then.
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So, we've opened up the other side panel. You can see here there are two
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120 mm antec twos two-speed fans mounted and the ones in the front are trioos.
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The one in the back is a two-speed in case you were wondering. So that means you can switch them between high or low
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air flow mode with this convenient low high switch. Oh, look at that. The
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medium is actually uh there's still a spot for it, but it's like blanked out.
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Okay, so that's not a triool. It is a two cool. Now you can mount up to
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another two 120 mm fans with the pegs here and here and the holes here and
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here. So Anttech includes presumably all the mounting screws you would need for
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that. So that means you can throw up to four 120 mil fans on the side panel. You
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can orient them like this and then you can put the side panel on. I hope now
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that I've said it, I hope you can. No, you can't. Okay, so you orient it like
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this and then you just put the fans wherever you want. Okay, let's keep it
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rolling here. We'll keep looking at all the different aspects of the Lanboy Air.
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So, here's our front panel connectors, which are secured with a little twist
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tie. And let's go ahead and have a look at those. So, because this is not a very
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conventional chassis, as I mentioned, Anttech has instructions on how to
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ground out the case. So, you're going to want to attach that where Anttech tells
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you. Please do that. You don't want static buildup on your case because that
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is bad. Static in computers, bad. Not
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grounding. Very, very bad. Okay. Here is USB 3.0. All right. So, you run that out
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the back of the case. You plug it into the back of your USB 3.0. 0 compatible
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motherboard. You've got USB 2.0 right there. Reset power uh hard drive LED as
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well as a power LED. Then you've got front panel audio. No FireWire. FireWire
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is I mean, does anyone use FireWire anyway? I think I said that once and
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then I had a bunch of comments on the video. Oh, I use FireWire. Yeah, I know
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someone does, but it's still not very popular. So, here we go. Let's have a
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look at what we've got in terms of uh random mounting accessories. So, it
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looks like I'll have to take out the power supply mount for that. All right,
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I pulled out the power supply mount, which as I mentioned before, you can move up to the top should you so desire.
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And then I've also got the box here, which I was surprised to find contained
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not motherboard mounting screws or anything else like that, but rather only
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more air mounts. So, they've gone and they've thrown in one air mount for you,
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just so you get the idea. But then there are enough air mounts here to mount up
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to an additional however many hard drives. I think it's eight, but I could
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be wrong. Here, let's count them. One, two, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Well, 8, nine. I
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guess you can mount as many as nine hard drives if you feel like it, but then
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you'd have no optical drives. So, it's
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completely up to you. It's modular. And then it took me a little
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while here to figure out where are the mounting screws. Well, they're in a
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little tool box here at the front. So, I'm going to go ahead and uh Oh, no,
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wait. You have to unscrew it. Oh, okay. Well, I don't know how to get the
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toolbox out now. But yeah. Okay. Here.
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There's a tool box in the front of the case. And that little box is going to
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hold all of your extra mounting hardware for whatever it is you could possibly
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need to mount in the Lanboy Air. And you could never lose it because it'll always
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be there. And I think that's getting
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pretty close to everything there is to talk about here. Why don't you just get
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some more internal shots of the case? Overall, the fit and finish of it is uh
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much better than the mockup that I had seen before. It feels quite solid
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despite the fact that it's almost like a framework construction here. Like you
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can you can see there's holes in the case. like there's not a whole lot to
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it, but because they're using these solid metal square bars, it has a lot of
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rigidity to it. And then they've got mostly things like metal mesh or uh uh
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other like connecting materials that are just giving it overall a pretty good
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pretty good strength to it. So, I think that's pretty much all there
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is to say, but no, no, come have a look at the front. Come have a look at the front. We haven't looked at the front
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enough here. Okay, so at the front we find a bunch
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more interesting stuff. We find a great Anttech shiny logo there, which I think
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looks terrific. And then we also find buttons. So there's our reset switch,
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our power switch, USB 2.0, front audio, as well as USB 3.0. We just haven't had
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enough of a look at the 5 and 1/4 in bays. It really is a unique design. Like
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I almost wish Anttech had like a uh like
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a stealth five and a quarter inch bay cover that looks like this because it's
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really kind of cool looking. It stands out. Fits with the aesthetic of the
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whole case. Like I said before, these can be moved around. So you see these
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extra mounting holes here at the front. You can What the cameraman? Don't get
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Don't get distracted. You can see these extra
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mounting holes here at the front. So you can move these up, move these three down, move them around however you want.
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And these at the front are stepless adjustable tririccool fans. So you can
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change the RPM in infinite increments
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however you desire. And then there's that uh yeah that screws in. So that's
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that toolbox at the front. Let me just see if I missed any points. Yes, it
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supports video cards up to 16 in without
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uh hard drives installed across from them or up to 12 in without or with hard
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drives installed there. You can air mount the hard drives three different ways. USB 3.0 know built-in handles,
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infinite cooling up to 15 fans, plus a
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top mount for water cooling. And I think we've pretty much covered it. Thank you
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for having a look at the Anttech Lanboy
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Air with us. And I hope you have enjoyed
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it. Ah, cable management. Here on the back of the motherboard tray, you will
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find little hoops for routing cables. You will also find adequate space
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between the side panel over here and the motherboard tray to mount even thick 24
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pin cables. And now I'm done. Cameraman
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wants me to do something else. He wants to see the bottom. Who looks at the
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bottom of a case? This Mac