 Welcome to my unboxing of the Shinobi with a twist. This is the Shinobi XL, which stands for extra large. Actually, I don't know that it does. It might stand for XLATX because while that does mean that the case is probably extra large, whoa, it's really big. Huh. And that's what, yeah, I said? Wait, no. Okay, backing it up, XLATX is a longer than standard form factor, so that is to say that it is about two inches longer than you're probably used to and sometimes wider. Here we have a manual and let's go ahead and you know what, let's look at the box before we open this up. Here we go. Soft touch surface treatment, we're used to seeing that on Bitfenix cases. It feels nice, looks nice. Four super speed USB 3.0 ports, including or in addition to, we'll figure that out later, their supercharged port, which is cool, delivers up to 2.5 amps of power on the front USB, which means you can charge anything you want quickly. Tool free design, flex cage hard disk rack, which means you can go this way, that way or remove the whole thing entirely. XLATX compatibility and superior water cooling support. So this case supports up to two triple 120 or 360 millimeter, as the kids call them today, radiators natively. I am glad to see a manufacturer taking or actually a lot of manufacturers these days taking water cooling so seriously because while it's all fine and good to be able to put one 360 millimeter radiator, water cooling guys are like the kings of more is better. So two 360 mil radiators must be better. Uses a closed cell phone, nice soft phone, happy to see this. Previous Bitfenix cases I've seen packed in a hard foam, which I do not prefer. I definitely like to see closed cell phone because in Canada, our country is really big and cases and systems often have to travel very far, about an inch of padding by the way, often have to travel very far before they reach their intended destination. So what that means is if you've got a hard phone, you might be in trouble because it'll survive the first drop for sure and it might survive the second drop. But I can tell you now, it's probably not going to survive the third drop because once it breaks, the structural integrity is not as good as it was before it was broken, which stands to reason. So let's have a look at the aesthetic of the case. One two three four five, five and a quarter inch base, beautiful brushed metal Bitfenix logo here on the front. It has what they're calling a classic Shinobi look and I would agree that the Shinobi look is very classic with clean lines, nice square overall design, although I don't know if you can call the Shinobi a classic case just yet because it hasn't been on the market very long, although it's probably on its way. Here on the front, we've got our charging port. So there it's marked with a battery and it's color coded yellow. We've got four super speed USB three ports, headphones, microphone, power and reset. That's a nice recessed reset. So it's not that easy to hit by accident. I wonder how to get this off. It's got to be a way to do it. All right, let's move around to, well, I guess the sides are pretty similar. You're not going to need to see the other side because it pretty much looks a little something like this. So you've got your top piece. This is using the soft touch. The front bezel is using soft touch. This is just a powder coated metal finish, although it's not bad. And then on the back, see, this is what used to pass for water cooling ready. Now the manufacturers, including Bitfenix for this particular case, are actually building in mounting space for radiators. It used to be they were like, yeah, you can run to a radiator outside of your case because someone actually does that. No, they don't. So this is not water cooling ready, but it's there in case you actually do want to use it and you could even run two separate loops. So I guess that's kind of convenient. If you're one of those guys who does run chilled liquid, for example, I have done it, so I shouldn't say nobody does it, but it's just more rare. This is actually very solid. This is a big side panel, so you have to use a fairly thick grade of metal in order to have it have very, very little flex like that. You guys see that? Not bad at all. I mean, this is a slightly more expensive case than I've typically looked at in the past from Bitfenix. So I guess it stands to reason that the overall build quality and the features are a little bit sort of higher grade. But yeah, I'm really impressed so far to be completely blunt with you guys. Why don't we start with this side? Okay, so we have our cables. We have... Okay, at least it uses a nice soft rubber so it's easy to fix. There we go. We have our cables right here, so there is your power, two front USB 3s, your front audio as well as your front panel connectors and your front USB 2 and other more different front USB 2. So that's how you have additional power, presumably, for that charging port. All right, we've got lots of cable management grommets, so regardless of what kind of a motherboard you want to put in here, you can see we've actually got EATX mounting holes way over here. We've got standard mounting, ATX mounting holes right here and then up to EATX with three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine PCI slots all the way down to here. It supports a standard power supply with four... Oh, these are really nice. These are nice high quality rubber. Nice rubber mounting points that hold it a little bit off the bottom of the case, filtered intake and it can go up to pretty much as long as you want before bumping into anything and not fitting anymore. In the back, we have a 120 or 140 millimeter fan, whichever you prefer, although it comes with a Bitfenix Spectre 120 mil. Up in the top, we have what is... Hold on, can't remember. It includes two 230. Yeah, so we have a 230 millimeter cooling fan, although you can see, if I tip it even more, the mounting holes are available here for that triple radiator. So that's where that's going to go and there's actually a fair amount of space between this and the top of the motherboard, which is a bit of a rarity these days, even though by the time you put a radiator and fans on it, you're going to need that space. So it's good to see that Bitfenix has gone ahead and included that. I don't see yet how to take off this top piece, although I really would... Oh, there we go. Okay, that was easy. Did I break it? Oh, okay. So basically, we've got the 230 mil fan here. We've got the 360 mil here. You've got... Oh, look at this. You've got access to the front panel here. So if you wanted to, I don't know, rewire something or something, then you could do that. So let's go ahead and put that back on. And line it up and force it. There we go. Okay. Hard drive mounting. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. These are compatible with three and a half as well as two and a half inch drives. They have some flex to them, although my experience leads me to believe that they're probably a lot more sturdy once you actually put a drive in them. The other 230 mil fan is here on the front. This is a Spectre fan, but guys, bear in mind, these are reasonably high quality fans. Sorry, so that one's in the front. You can actually take this whole cage and you can... I'm doing the screws in the bottom. I think, yes. I'm doing the screws in the bottom. You can actually turn the whole thing 90 degrees if you want, if you don't need the additional space over here. So the benefit of that is you're going to get slightly better airflow through and between the drives versus if you have it, see this way, see how it kind of blocks a lot of the airflow. So that way it'll only be blocked where you actually have drives installed. However, this has a nicer aesthetic in my opinion because you have more options in terms of routing the wires to your drives. So I personally would leave it the way it is, but it's nice to have the option and it's nice to be able to take it out entirely. I mean, if you decide you want to turn this case into a modding project of some sort, you've actually got a lot of flexibility in here because it's basically a fairly plain, fairly clean looking box with a lot of space inside it. You can contrast that with something like the Cosmos 2 where it's a very large case, but because of the way they've compartmentalized it, it's mostly useful for a very specific type of user, a very specific type of build, whereas this was more flexible, but maybe fewer features off the hop. Okay, so here's your tool-less mounts. These are tool-less. That's pretty much it. Let's go ahead and turn it around. Let's see what we got in terms of room for cable routing because yeah, it's fine and good to design a case that can hold all this hardware, but if you can't reach anything with the cables, look at all that space. So that is, look at that. We've got like, looks like over an inch of space behind the motherboard tray for routing cables. That is outstanding. And you can also see that by the time you install a drive here, you're still going to have like a very, very reasonable amount of room behind your drives to route your SATA cables, to route your power cables down to where they need to go, which is to the power supply or over to your motherboard without any hassle. So I'm glad to see that. Reasonably big CPU cutout. I wouldn't have minded seeing something a touch bigger. It could have come over here, but in its place, BitFenix has included securing points for routing cables behind the motherboard tray. Cannot emphasize enough how important these are because these, a lack of these is half of the reason that you'll often end up in a situation where you are trying to close your other side panel and you can't because the cables are all crossing each other every time you let go of them. So if you can tie everything down, you can often have a much tidier build because of it. So let's see what we've got in terms of included accessories. Here is a, this is kind of neat. So it's a five and a quarter to three and a half inch bay. And then it also includes a fan mount, I'm assuming. Includes a two and a half inch drive mount, that's for sure. As well as three and a half inch drive mount. That looks an awful lot like a fan mount, so I guess you guys can let me know if I'm wrong or right about that one. Okay. So inside here we've got, hey look at this. More like cable management stuff with little double sided tapes and these are actually relatively long zip ties which may seem trivial but it really does seem like a lot of case manufacturers cheap out on the zip ties. They give you ones that are like this long and you're like okay so I can like wrap that around one cable, one ATX cable. Speaker as well as all of the mounting screws and general whatnots you will need. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look or overview or whatever you want to call it of the BitFenix Shinobi XL. So far I would say that given the price point it's coming in at and guys don't ask me the price I almost always put a link in the description of the video so you can click and you can see the price in either Canadian dollars or US dollars. So there you go. But given the price point I'd say it's very very competitive feature wise with a lot of the other stuff out there. So don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos.