 Welcome to my belated unboxing of the Half XM case from Cooler Master featuring apparently with a sticker. See? It's a good thing I did this late because otherwise this sticker wouldn't have even been here. High speed USB 3 and 2.5 inch SSD support. This is an enthusiast mid-tower with easy access latch design and 3-way SLI and crossfire support. The Half series is so popular. It stands for high air flow, which is good for gaming and generally parts that need air flow, which is computer stuff, which goes in there. It's a computer case. Rich I.O. with two USB 3.0 ports supports two X-Dock. So those are external quick, easy, hot-swappy bays that actually work really, really well. I've seen these before on previous Cooler Master cases. In terms of other features, they list on the front supports up to EATX. And I haven't seen how many PCI slots are supported. But I suspect, based on what I know about previous Half cases, it's got more than seven. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yes, so it supports XL EATX as well. Sliding PSU cable cover for improved cable management. Front 200 millimeter red LED fan. Six tool-free hard drive SSD bays. Top compartment with rubber pad so you can throw your keys in there and not worry about scratching it up. Supports two and a half inch SSD times one behind the motherboard tray. Smart. I'm gonna turn out my SSDs on my case. Eight plus one expansion slots. And you know what? Let's just open this bad boy up. And have a look. Case unboxings are fun. Because basically, ow, it shocked me. Okay, that part wasn't fun. Oh, that hurt. It got me really good. Stupid packaging. That's what the problem is. It's the styrofoam rubbing against the cardboard and the plastic doesn't help the problem. And this isn't the kind of styrofoam I like anyway. I like soft foam. This is hard foam. But hopefully it'll survive and make it to you anyway. Our sure did. So there's your corners. Your corners are one of the most important parts. So as long as you've got lots of padding in the corners, it might make it there okay. Get rid of that. Get rid of that. Okay. Anger fading. I'm feeling good now. All right, so let's start with the outside. There's the manual. Three five and a quarter inch bays. Two of those quick swaps so you can throw a three and a half inch from the sides just by throwing. Actually, here, let me go get a hard drive. Hold on a second. So hard drive installation is easy peasy. You just throw it in there and it kind of locks into place. It's actually like the smartest thing ever. I love Cooler Master's hard drive mounting thing. Once it's in there, it's not going anywhere. Very smart. And then to install it, you just slide it back into place and lock it in just like that. It's also compatible with two and a half inch drives, if I didn't say that before, I can't remember because we cut the footage and I don't know what I said anymore. So in terms of front I know there's your two front USB 2 ports, front audio, two front USB 3 ports. There is your fan control and an indicator LED for it. Your power button, nice and big in case you have trouble finding that. And a reset button, which I'd say is too big because you might accidentally press that. There's that rubber pad thing if you wanted to, I don't know, store your keys in the top of your case for whatever reason. Yes, that is a Hello Kitty key and yes, I like it, so get over it. I've had people question this before and I am totally into the Hello Kitty key. It's actually a gift from Cameraman. We were at the... Slick screwdriver. No, just throw it. Whoa, okay, yeah, we're good, we're cool. Everything's fine. Didn't cut my arm open too bad. Okay, let's go ahead and loosen these at the back here. I'm going to turn this so that you can get better lighting on it anyway. We're going to get this case opened up because I can't quite figure out some of the external features without having a look at the inside. Four thumb screws, which are just a little tight from the factory. Otherwise, I would have been able to remove those just fine. Since you won't put them on machine tight, you won't have to worry about having to pull out a screwdriver every time you open the case because they are tool-less, they are thumb screws. Let's go ahead and open up this guy right here. I have a feeling this is going to be something big. Ah, yes, okay. There are your filtered, meshed, vented, that's the high airflow style. There is your 200 millimeter cooling fan that apparently has room for another one, which is awesome. You can put up to two 200 mil fans in the top or you can do a triple 120 and it looks like there should be room to actually water cool that stuff. That's incredible. So yeah, look how much room there is. I mean, there's all this space here and then you've got a little bit of space on the other side. So yeah, triple rad ready with no problems whatsoever. Let's go ahead and throw that in there. Maybe put that thumb screw back into place. I mean, you won't access this often so I don't mind this being based on a thumb screw and not on some kind of tool-less latch mechanism. Speaking of tool-less latch mechanisms, on the side, you've got more cooling fan spots. You know what? I'm just going to have to check what those are. They look like 140 mil to sec. And we figured it out. It's dual 140 or single 200 mil, which means so far you've got a 200 mil in the front, two 200 mil compatibility in the top, and 200 mil compatibility on the side, giving you massive, well, high airflow. So there's your handle on the side for opening up the case and there's your more mesh and whatnot. You can clean that off if you want to. Otherwise, you can just be gross and not clean it. That's fine too. Bit of a bulge here. It gives you more room for graphics cards or CPU coolers. See where that's positioned? That are tall and take up space. All right, moving inside to the case. We're going to actually flip this around first so we can take off the other side panel. We can figure out how to do that. There you go. So they give you more space for cable management in much the same way as they do on the other side. Keeps things symmetrical and makes it so you're going to be able to do a really nice job of managing the cables inside this case because there's lots of space here. More space from the side panel, which means you run like 24 pin cable. You're going to be able to cross stuff over that. No problem. Lots of room here for all the cables that are going to come out of your power supply. And then a couple of spots here. So there's your eight pin. There's your opticals as well as that front hard drive hot swap. There's your VGA cables. And this is for your front panel audio because motherboard manufacturers insist on putting that connector over there. Why do they do this? I don't know. This one you can probably use for your front panel connectors like your power switch and all that good stuff. From the other side we can also see a few interesting things. So there's our six three and a half inch sliders which use that same mechanism I showed you in the front where it's really easy to install a three and a half inch drive. There's that 200 millimeter red LED fan in the front. It's going to look pretty sweet in the dark. And there's an adapter for a fan which apparently fell off something. Okay. That seems like it's not supposed to be there. Very large CPU cut out so you're going to be able to install your CPU cooler even if your motherboard is already installed in the case. And there is that two and a half inch SSD mounting point on the back here. So that's not going to be in anybody's way. If you wanted to have a system where you basically couldn't even see any of the drives that would be the way to do it. You wrap your SATA cables right around here and then they can go right into that drive at the back. Very, very cool stuff. All right. In terms of accessories, let's have a look at what we got here. That's right. I can unbox things one handed and then unbag them and then pour them out. Who needs two hands anyway? So there's screws, standoffs, cable, ooh, lots of cable ties. I don't think I've seen anyone include this many cable ties before. Very good stuff, Cooler Master. Way to go. There's a lot of cable ties too. That's the best time. More screws, speaker. Okay then. Moving right along, this guy right here can be repositioned which is nice. You just undo these screws. And a one and two. You can slide it so that it'll allow you to bring up the cables where you want and hide the cables where you don't want to see them. Glad to see this is modular. I've seen this kind of stuff attempted in the past but it usually ends up looking kind of cheesy. Cooler Master has the right idea with this one though. You can actually hide the cables if you have a non-modular power supply and it'll actually look really, really clean. Love it. Power supply is mounted on two rubber standoffs right here as well as with the filtered intake on the bottom so you're not going to have any dust accumulating in your power supply. We've got those eight PCI slots that I mentioned here as well as that auxiliary one for things like, I don't know, an extra fan controller or whatever else you want to mount in there. I already covered all of the, yes, the rubber cable management holes such as this one, this one and this one. Very soft rubber in here which is really nice. It means you're not going to accidentally warp them out of place and then have them stick there like we saw with the original Fractal Design Define R2 which had a very hard rubber that was not very good. And then we've got, ha-ha, one power in and two SATA data for those front slideable drive mounting cages. Here's our tool-less 5.25 inch base and I think that pretty much wraps it up. Oh, hold on. There's a screw here. Oh, cool. Look at that. You can actually remove this top 3.5 inch cage so you could install video cards that are like 2.5 feet long if you really wanted to. And of course the included 140 millimeter fan in the back. All the cooling options are included. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the HalfXM from Cooler Master. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.