 Welcome to my unboxing of the BitFenix Prodigy. This is a completely unique case from BitFenix that they believe is going to turn the ITX gaming system segment completely upside down. Not upside, like the motherboard is not upside down or anything like that. Basic point is that they are expecting this to just change the way the game is played when it comes to small form factor yet very powerful, very capable machines. So the first thing we're going to see when we open it up is a quick installation guide. Actually, oh sorry, sorry, external packaging. So there's not a whole lot going on out here other than some shipping labels and like Canada rule free design, BitFenix FooberFlex? Uber? What does that say? FiberFlex. It's like, does it say Führer? I wasn't sure what it said. No, look at it. What am I supposed to think that says? Right? Anyway, I was a little taken aback by that but it looks like it's all good. FiberFlex soft touch surface treatment, supports long graphics cards and up to 240 millimeter water cooling radiators which we happen to have. What did I do with it? Which we happen to have one of right here so we can take a look at how that's going to fit inside. Flex cage hard disk rack, tool free design and nothing there. That looks like just a line to help you figure out where to put the stick. All right. So, right. So we found a little manual inside. Then we find the case itself. Got a BitFenix logo going on here. Let's flip her upside down and get her out. I'm actually really, really excited to see this case because they've done a lot of things with it that are incredibly unique. It's just one of those things. I actually built myself in a Silverstone SGO1VW a long time ago. I built myself a triple radiator water cooled system in one of those just because I've got a bit of a thing for small systems. I think they're adorable and I think they're awesome. So figuring out creative ways to put more hardware in less space definitely floats my boat. So I really want to see this in person. All right. So let's have a look at the general aesthetic. I mean the first thing that there is to kind of notice about it is it's kind of like a Mac Pro with the whole handle thing going on on the top and the bottom. Also I specifically asked to check out the white version because I thought that that would be sort of more Mac like. I'm thinking we might do a Hackintosh guide at some point on NCIX Tech Tips. Although we might just do an extreme gaming build within a small form factor case. Not really sure what route we're going to go with all of that. But I figured this would be more appropriate for that particular project. So the front is this is wow this is really nice. OK. So the soft touch finish is on these parts here. So this plastic trim piece here which has a bit of flex to it. OK. You can actually observe a fair bit of shock but doesn't look bowed actually even the even the bottom right now. It's got a little bit of bow to it but not much. It looks pretty sleek. And the soft touch finish is also here on the front. So on the front piece here as well as the five and a quarter inch bay cover the five and a quarter inch bay cover I think is important to have that same finish and that same color because a lot of people for an ITX system aren't even going to bother with actually a lot of people in general don't bother with optical drives anymore anyway. You've also got a pretty nice looking Bitfenix logo here on the front. I really like their logo with the shield and the wings. I think it looks pretty sleek. A lot of the time you get a company logo right in the middle of a product and it just looks like stupid. Like remember the old Adele circle logo that they put in on the side of the panel like this big and you're just looking at it going well it's horrible. Why would you do that? So yeah I don't mind when it's a nice cool looking logo like that. On the side we find power reset, microphone, headphone and two USB 3.0 ports. On the back we find wow look at that 120 mil or 140 millimeter cooling fan. We've also got oh this oh I like this system. I've seen this before. So you loosen this. It's a little bit tight from the factory but I'll have to grab a screwdriver. But you loosen this piece, lift it up and then it moves the plate that holds down the two expansion cards. So remember guys this is ITX so you only are actually going to be installing one expansion card. The reason that they have two slots there is because a lot of high performance graphics cards are dual slots so you will need the additional slot for cooling. You can see that the motherboard is mounted horizontally based on where the IO shield is going to go and it accepts a standard ATX power supply once again using thumb screws. And I've seen this before as well. So you take this plate off, you mount the power supply to it and then you slide the whole thing in from the back. In fact that's not even just a characteristic of smaller cases. Even my TJ07 mounts the power supply like that. On the top here we've got a switch which oh allows us to remove this. There you go. Look at that. Easily cleanable filtered mesh and it just snaps in place with a snap. Cool. Oh and that's where we find the place where we would potentially be mounting a dual radiator. So it looks like that probably goes in from the inside. They don't expect you to just kind of like put it right here. Although you know what that wouldn't have been a bad approach either. If they left a little bit more, you know you could probably even mod this to go like this if you painted a radiator like you know like a nice white for example and then put like you know pretty slick looking white fangirls on it. Shave that down a little bit and throw this on here. That could actually look really really good and then you'd save yourself even a bit more room inside. You might even be able to go like push pull if you wanted to be pretty ridiculous about it. So that's kind of a cool interesting development here. Alright so moving right along. You know what? Give me a second here guys because it looks like I'm going to need a screwdriver to open this thing up completely. Yeah it's stuck. Alright so we've loosened all the screws and we are now ready to go ahead and open up the back of the case. So here we go. We can take off things like the power supply bracket. Like I said you just mount that to your power supply. You can clearly see the power supply mounting has nice little rubber mounts there. Go ahead and do that. Okay let's take off the side panels. Let's take off the back side panel first because that's the one I'm a little bit more curious about how exactly they've executed it because you can see these buttons are all sort of part of it. Oh okay that's going to be a bit of a wiring trickiness. Although I don't think it's that big of a deal because what you should really be doing is doing all of your wiring, putting on your back side panel, then you wire these up and then you put on your other side panel. I mean I can't think of any really good reason why you'd need to take off this side panel looking at the interior of the case right now here. So okay fascinating. Sorry, I'm not letting you guys see what I'm looking at. Oh another cool thing, I'll check this out guys. We've got SSD mounts on the inside of this panel. There's just a plastic piece right here. 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 SSDs in here. I'm a huge fan of mounting SSDs on like the back of your motherboard tray or on your side panel because I think in my mind that's the whole point of SSDs being small is so that you don't actually have to have a huge case and you can have all these SSDs and stuff. So that definitely gets a big check mark plus from me. So yeah the whole thing is very solid actually. You can see how thick. Oh I don't have my iPhone in my pocket. Okay whatever. So the, yeah it's okay. No one cares about your HTC phone. So anyway thick metal, thick steel, moving right along. Let's flip it around to the other side so we can get it all stripped down before we try to analyze it too much. So here we've got more ventilation. I am fully expecting this case to be very very ventilation friendly so you can see that right next to the graphics card, they're not just doing it willy nilly. Right next to the graphics card is where they've put additional ventilation holes. So what that will allow you to do is install a, hold on I'm trying to find a video card just sort of bear with me for a second here guys. You can install graphics cards that use a blower design cooler. Okay I found one that doesn't use a blower design. I found a blower design cooler that isn't mounted to a card. Okay this will have to do. Here we go. So it's either mounted video card that uses like an after market style design that doesn't blow all the air out of the case because you've got pretty good ventilation with the vents here as well as the vents in the top. But what I'd really recommend with a case like this is a cooler that uses an external blower design so it's pulling air in from here and then it's exhausting it right out the back of the case so you can actually isolate the cooling of many of the components of your system into zones. So you've got your power supply isolated into, you know what let's just sort of hold on to these for now just in case I need to do it again. You've got your power supply isolated into a zone because it's pulling air directly from under the case through a filter. So you can see the filter is easily removable here. You can just clean that, throw it back in. Through a filter and then right out of the case. You've got your video card pulling air in through the perforations and then blowing it right out of the back of the case. And then the only thing that's going to rely on the general case airflow is going to be your CPU and you know your RAM and other trivial things like that. So it makes for a very sound, a very efficient cooling system. Now of note is the fact that unlike many cases that use this bottom intake air thing for the power supply, BitFenix has actually given enough space under the case for it to get an adequate airflow supply. You see a lot of cases that just have little feet, you know about this big and then if you put them on carpet that power supply is going to be completely starved for airflow unless you flip it over and then you're pulling in warm air from the video card or whatever else is nearby and you're not cooling your power supplies efficiently. And since your power supply is one of the fans that you have the least control of in your system, if you feed hot air into it your system is just automatically going to be louder. So they have thought of that and they have given you ways of combating that. You can see the ITX motherboard trays right here. Again, very solid. I'm really impressed with the rigidity and how solid this case is. No, no, don't worry. That wasn't it not being solid. This whole hard drive sled comes right out. So that's really cool. You can mount up to three 3.5 inch drives or three 2.5 inch drives with the 2.5 inch mounting holes right here. That also gives you additional room for graphics cards. So you know what, I am going to go, hold on, let's pause it. I'm going to go find another graphics card. So yeah, we found out that we can actually install a pretty darn big graphics card in there if we remove the hard drive cage. So the 6990 is the largest graphics card that I have on hand and I think almost anyone has on hand and that fits in there just fine once you remove the other 3.5 inch base. So that doesn't mean that you can't install any drives anymore because check this out guys. It's very efficiently laid out. You can actually put an additional two 3.5 inch drives or 2.5 inch drives right over there. They've also got more SSD mounting holes right there in the bottom. So you can mount another SSD in the bottom. So you can do two SSDs on that side panel and SSD bolted to the bottom of the case. You can do then up to five 3.5 inch or additional 2.5 inch drives. So natively I could actually mount, here check this out. Natively I could mount my ridiculous eight SSDs that I use in my personal system into the BitFenix Prodigy. However, I wouldn't have anywhere to put the RAID card unless I wanted to run onboard video. But you know, whatever. The point is just it accepts a lot of drives given the form factor. You can mount a 5.25 inch drive and they haven't limited you to a slim one. Again, the mounting is very solid. You saw this from the top already I think. So that's pretty self explanatory. And now I think the next thing to get... Oh, oh check this out. Okay, you know what, we'll be back in a moment. So we figured out the front fan situation. You can do dual 120 millimeter fans. You can do 140, a 180, a 200 or a 230 if you don't decide to do dual 120. So it comes with all the various mounting holes you need. And you can fully remove the 5.25 inch cage if you don't need it. So if you wanted to put a front radiator, you'd need to get that out of your way. All you gotta do is undo a couple screws here and then you pop off the front panel, which incidentally is also how you mount fans. If I can... Okay, we did this off camera so it shouldn't be that hard. At least it slicked at it. Oh, okay, yeah, I was pressing against the front while I was trying to unclip it. So the front panel comes off like that. You can see all the ventilation holes that are providing actual airflow to those front fans so that they don't just starve and slip it around. So here's the sizing. So if you were to put a dual 120 mil radiator there, it would take out pretty much the whole front of the case. I mean, most of that would be airflow up here would be where the barbs go and there wouldn't really be any mesh there, but that is how that would work. Now what Slick and I are gonna have to figure out is if we do my idea where we put the radiator actually on the top of the case and make the cuts that we need to, could we actually mount two dual radiators in this case? Which would be actually, you know what? We could probably do two duals and a single in the back. So we could do up to five 120 mil radiators in this case with a little bit of creativity, which would obviously be the ultimate overclocked hack and tosh editing PC. So honestly, this case just gets our DIY juices flowing because there's a lot of different stuff you can do with it. You can remove this, you can remove this if you want to, you just gotta undo a few screws on the bottom and you still have the option to mount your three SSDs. So you can make yourself like, SSDs are getting so much less expensive. You can make yourself like a raid five of three 256 gig SSDs, which is gonna be 500 gigs of storage space, which is more than enough for whatever you need to do sort of day to day and you have a separate, you know, a drobo or something to store it for your mass storage. And yeah, let's just say Slick and I are really excited about what kind of projects we can get going on this case. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the now gutted and completely unrecognizable BitFenix Prodigy. And I hope you guys are as excited about this case as I am. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.